192. See Notice du Palais de Longchamps à Marseille, Marseilles, 1872.
193. See Daly, C., L’Architecture privée au XIXe siècle ... sous Napoléon III; nouvelles maisons de Paris et des environs, 3 vols, Paris, 1864; Calliat, V., Parallèle des nouvelles maisons de Paris, vol. II, Paris, 1864; Adam, Leveil, and LeBlanc, Recueil des maisons les plus remarquables, Paris, 1858; and Maisons les plus remarquables de Paris, Paris, 1870. César Daly, as editor of the Revue de l’architecture, also determined the character of the material that periodical offered in this period.
194. It is awkward that the long career of Viollet-le-Duc, like that of Semper, does not fall largely within any single chapter of this book. Active from the forties until the seventies, leading restorer of medieval monuments of his age in France, leading medieval archaeologist of Europe, controversial reformer of French architectural education (at least in posse), author of influential critical books, he was the inspirer—by his writings rather than his executed work—of a later generation of architectural innovators abroad perhaps even more notably than at home. His failure to conform to the normal pattern of architectural life that usually confines a particular man’s significant activity within some one phase of architectural development—such as, on the whole, each chapter of this book deals with—makes it necessary to present his career in piecemeal fashion. It is partly covered in Chapter 6, with a few further mentions in this chapter, and—more significantly—in Chapter 11 in this Part and Chapter 16 at the beginning of Part Three. It is worth noting that Viollet-le-Duc is the only architect who enters this book in each of its three parts, even though it is only as an influence, not an executant, that he comes into the last part.
195. And some contemporaries were ready to say Sicilian! It was started—or at least commissioned—some years before the first volume of the great treatise on Syrian architecture appeared: Vogüé, C.-J.-M. de, Syrie Centrale, 2 vols, Paris, 1865-77. But Vaudremer must have seen the drawings of Kalat Seman published by Duthuit in the Gazette des architectes et du bâtiment, 1864, No. 7, 79.
196. See Daumet, H., Notice sur M. Abadie, Paris, 1886. It is relevant that Abadie became Diocesan Architect of Périgueux in 1874, the same year he began the Sacré-Cœur, the competition for which he had won two years earlier.
197. For characteristic French prize projects that were admired and emulated abroad, see Les grands prix de Rome d’architecture de 1850-1900, Paris [n.d.]
198. For the Massachusetts institution, see Ware, W. R., An Outline of a Course of Architectural Instruction, Boston, 1866; for Columbia, see idem, ‘The Instruction in Architecture at the School of Mines’, School of Mines Quarterly, X (1888), 28-43.
199. Yet one of the boldest modern architects of Latin America, Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) of Venezuela, was educated at the École des Beaux-Arts itself; and most of the other modern architects in these countries—those over forty at least—were trained in the local Escuelas de Bellas Artes based on the Paris original.
200. The most conspicuous exception, dominating the whole city, is the Mole Antonelliana. This extraordinary edifice, begun by Alessandro Antonelli (1798-1880) in 1863, more than rivals his very tall earlier dome on San Gaudenzio in Novara, designed in 1840. Never really completed, the construction of the Mole continued intermittently down to Antonelli’s death. By its great height and in some of the technicalities of its construction it rivals the Eiffel Tower and the early American skyscrapers which are posterior to it by several decades. Yet Antonelli arrived at no coherent expression of his structural innovations and, to judge from the successive purposes for which the structure has been intended to serve or has served, no real capacity to provide a functionally viable building. On the whole, as its present name implies, this is a monument chiefly to its designer’s megalomania.
201. See Reed, H. H., ‘Rome: The Third Sack’, Architectural Review, CVII (1950), 91-110.
203. See Acciaresi, P., Giuseppe Sacconi e l’opera sua massima, Rome, 1911.
204. The best-maintained later equivalent in northern Europe is probably the Passage, as it is called, in The Hague. Built in 1882-5, this hardly rivals the Galleria Mazzini in Genoa in length and breadth, much less Mengoni’s. There are many other examples, some of them considerably later, but few are in good condition today, and none have the scale of the three principal Italian examples. For earlier French examples, see Chapter 3.
CHAPTER 9 - Notes
205. See Kreisel, H., The Castles of Ludwig II of Bavaria, Darmstadt [n.d.] and Schloss Linderhof, Munich, 1959.
206. The design derives from the results of a competition held in 1876. Of the nine architects involved in the execution of the building, Grotjan, Lamprecht, Robertson, and Martin Haller (1835-1925) had won prizes in the competition. The tower is attributed specifically to the last and sometimes, more loosely, the whole structure.
208. For that matter the London Ritz Hotel, built in 1905-6 by Mewès & Davis, is capped with a high mansard, although the vocabulary of their façades is a discreet and academic, if overscaled, style Louis XVI and the construction—reputedly—the first example of the use of a steel skeleton of the American skyscraper type in England.
209. Thomas Cundy II (1790-1867) died in this year; if provided by the Estate Architects’ office, the designs were either initiated before his death or else they were entirely by his assistants, perhaps directed by his surviving brother Joseph (1795-1875). A. T. Bolton believed that the responsibility for the design lay with the builder Trollope; the Grosvenor Estate office, however, names not Trollope but the Cubitt firm as the builders. As with the Place de l’Opéra, the credit—or discredit—for this most notable and conspicuous piece of Second Empire urbanism remains rather uncertain.
210. See, however, Castermans, A., Parallèle des maisons de Bruxelles, Paris, 1856, which illustrates much work that is not at all Parisian.
211. See Poelaert, J., Le Nouveau Palais de Justice de Bruxelles, Brussels, 1904.
212. Semper was in England for several years after he left Dresden as a result of the revolution that also led to Wagner’s expulsion in 1848. He did no building in England, but was closely associated with Cole and his Department of Practical Art. The catafalque of the Duke of Wellington, used at the State funeral in 1852, was of his design. His Swiss period was followed by a triumphant return to Dresden to rebuild the opera-house there and his final settlement in Vienna in 1871. Since this relatively important architect appears, like Viollet-le-Duc, in unrelated contexts in several different chapters of this book, it seems well to recall here the total range of his career from its beginnings in Hamburg in the forties to its conclusion in Vienna in the seventies, passing by Dresden, London, Zurich, and Dresden a second time.
213. See Burnham, A., ‘The New York Architecture of Richard M. Hunt’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XI (1952), 9-14.
214. Of course Daly’s Revue de l’architecture reached some American architects and also his Architecture privée (see Note [194], Chapter 8). See also Liénard, M., Specimens of the Decoration and Ornamentation of the XIXth Century, Boston, 1875, although by that date the vogue for such Second Empire detailing was all but over.
215. See Walter, T. U., Letter to the Committee on Public Buildings, in reference to an Enlargement of the Capitol [Washington, 1850], and Report of the Architect of the United States Capitol and the New Dome, Washington, 1864.
216. See McKenna, R. T., ‘James Renwick, Jr, and the Second Empire Style in the United States’, Magazine of Art, XLIV (1951), 97-101.
217. See Boston. Committee on Public Buildings, The City Hall, Boston, Boston, 1866. A considerably larger early project of 1861 emulates much more closely the new Louvre.
218. See Bunting, B., ‘The Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIII (1954), 19-24.
CHAPTER 10 - Notes
219. Despite the ‘correctness’ of Butterfield’s detailing, an idiosyncratic coarsening can be noted at St Augustine’s College in Canterbury and in other work by him done several years before All Saints’; yet, by contrast to other aspects of his mature style, his moulded detail remained conventional.
220. Since building Christ Church, Streatham, at the opening of the decade, Wild had been busy in Egypt. His curious St Mark’s, Alexandria, as Saracenic as his detractors accused the Streatham church of being, was unhappily never brought to completion. Designed in 1842, work was suspended for lack of funds in 1848 and Wild then returned to England.
221. Deane owed his knighthood to having been Mayor of Cork, not to his professional attainments. It would appear that Woodward did all the firm’s designing and, after his death in 1861, Deane’s son Thomas Newenham took over.
222. See Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E., Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, 10 vols., Paris, 1854-68.
223. See Mackail, J. W., The Life of William Morris, London, 1899.
224. Burges designed this in 1868 in his most archaeological and articulated French Gothic manner. Construction began only in 1893, long after Burges’s death, and the suave quality of the execution, so uncharacteristic of the still High Victorian date of the original design, is thereby explained; at best the design was singularly out of key with what Bodley had built.
225. Since this is a Catholic church, and by a man who knew French Gothic architecture well, it provides the fairest possible comparison with Viollet-le-Duc’s own new church of Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée at St-Denis designed at almost precisely the same time (Plate 98). Viollet-le-Duc is world-famous; Clutton is not generally considered even in England one of the leaders of his generation; yet the superiority of the Leamington church to the St-Denis church is very considerable indeed both inside and out.
226. See Harbron, D., ‘Thomas Harris’, Architectural Review, XCII (1942), 63-6, and Donner, P., ‘Harris Florilegium’, Architectural Review, XCIII (1943), 51-2.
227. This is spoilt externally by an unfortunate tower added by his son A. E. Street (1855-1938) in 1884-5.
228. See The National Memorial to H.R.H. the Prince Consort [London], 1873.
229. Scott’s aspirations for architecture, in general more sympathetic than what he built, will be found in his Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future, London, 1858.
230. Although Woodward’s death occurred in the same year 1861 that this club was begun, it is possible, even probable, that the original design was his.
231. See Nesfield, W. E., Specimens of Mediaeval Architecture ... in France and Italy, London, 1862.
232. The intentions of the church builders in this decade are well presented in Micklethwaite, J. T., Modern Parish Churches, their Plan, Design, and Furnishing, London, 1874.
233. An extraordinary example of the use of Victorian Gothic for a somewhat unexpected purpose was Columbia Market by H. A. Darbishire (1839-1908) set down in 1866-8 among the grim housing blocks that he built for the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. See Wilson, F. M., ‘Ypres at Bethnal Green’, Architectural Review, XCVI (1944), 131-4.
234. Godwin’s active and distinguished Victorian Gothic period concluded with the building of two castles in Ireland, Dromore at Pallaskenny for the Earl of Limerick in 1867-9 and Glenbegh in 1868-71. Burges was with him in Ireland when he designed Dromore, and its decorations and furnishings rival in elaboration and exceed in elegance what Burges did for Lord Bute at Cardiff and Castell Coch in these years. A row with the client for Glenbegh, who complained of drastic leakage, in which Godwin’s then partner Crisp deserted him, did Godwin much harm professionally. He was still a relatively important figure in the Late Victorian seventies, but more as a decorator than as an architect (see Chapter 12).
CHAPTER 11 - Notes
235. At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia the larger pavilions were all of iron and glass; and probably the most influential buildings were the British ones designed by Thomas Harris—no longer a wild ‘Victorian’—in a mode closely approaching Norman Shaw’s ‘Manorial’ mode (see Chapter 12). However, the exhibition stimulated the publication of several books on the Colonial architecture of Philadelphia which played their part in preparing the way for a ‘Colonial Revival’ (see Chapters 13 and 15).
236. Separate American editions of vols 2 and 3 did not appear promptly in 1853 in the way that of vol. 1 did in 1851. However, the three-volume American edition of 1861 was the first of the complete work.
237. See Tunnard, C., ‘Deviation by the Brothers Potter, Collegiate Gothic at Union College, Schenectady’, Architectural Review, CIII (1948), 67.
239. They had, after all, first met when they were both working for R. M. Hunt.
240. See Ware, W. R., The Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Boston, 1887.
241. In the 1936 edition of my book on Richardson a later Dorsheimer plan is incorrectly associated with this Buffalo house. The house is properly identified in Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Richardson’s American Express Building: A Note’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 25-30 and in the new 1961 edition.
242. This is also missing from my 1936 Richardson book, but will be found in the article cited above and in the 1961 edition of the book.
243. See Wight, P. B., ‘Reminiscences of Russell Sturgis’, Architectural Record, XXVI (1909), 123-31. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Farnam Hall, together with Sturgis’s contiguous Battell Chapel of 1876 and his Durfee Hall at right angles to it, although neither are of at all comparable excellence, give this corner of the Old Campus at Yale a consistent High Victorian Gothic character interesting to study both in relation to the earlier Romantic Gothic of Henry Austin’s library (now Dwight Chapel) of 1842-4 on the other side of the campus and the ‘traditional’ Collegiate Gothic of James Gamble Rogers’s twentieth-century Harkness Quadrangle across High Street.
244. See Schuyler, M., ‘The Work of William Appleton Potter’, Architectural Record, XXVI (1909), 176-96.
245. See Holly, H. H., Church Architecture Illustrated, Hartford, 1871. Much more extreme models can be found in general compendia of architectural design published in the late sixties and early seventies.
246. See Campbell, W., ‘Frank Furness, an American Pioneer’, Architectural Review, CX (1951), 310-15.
247. See ‘Another Furness Building: Provident Life and Trust Company Building, Philadelphia’, Architectural Review, CXII (1952), 196, ‘Provident Trust Company Banking Room, Philadelphia’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XI (1952), 31; and Massy, J. C., ‘The Provident Trust Buildings’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 79-80.
248. See Withers, F. C., Church Architecture, New York, 1871.
249. See Upjohn, R. M., The State Capitol, Hartford, Conn., Boston, 1886.
252. See Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E., Entretiens sur l’architecture, 2 vols, Paris, 1863, 1872; and translations, Discourses on Architecture, 2 vols, Boston, 1875, 1881, and Lectures on Architecture, 2 vols, London, 1877, 1881. Originally the Entretiens appeared in parts, those in the first volume beginning to come out about 1860 and those in the second some six years later.
253. The two most sumptuously illustrated publications concerning Viollet-le-Duc offer very few examples of new buildings designed by him; these must be sought in periodicals and other general contemporary sources. See Compositions et dessins de Viollet-le-Duc, Paris, 1884, and Baudot, A. de, and Roussel, J., Dessins inédits de Viollet-le-Duc, 3 vols, Paris [n.d.]
254. The most extravagant compilation of idiosyncratic detail in Viollet-le-Duc’s work is to be seen on the tomb of Napoleon III’s half-brother the Duc de Morny, erected in 1858 in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Hardly any element of the ornamentation is clearly referable to a particular stylistic source, and the whole effect is as ‘Victorian’ as anything the wildest High Victorians ever produced in England.
255. It should not be forgotten that Street’s Law Courts in London were completed only a year before Steindl began the Budapest Parliament House; but the Law Courts were, for England, extremely retardataire.
256. Burges won the competition for this in 1857, but in the end Street received the commission and built the church in 1864-9.
257. See Meeks, C. L. V., ‘Churches by Street on the Via Nazionale and the Via del Babuino’, Art Quarterly, XVI (1953), 215-27.
258. See Martinell, C., La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 1952, and Puig Boada, I., El Templo de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 1952. A phenomenal number of articles have appeared concerning this church, all listed up to his date of publication (1952) by Ráfols in the later edition of his monograph on Gaudí.
259. Mixing the elements of several styles in individual buildings provided the liveliest aspect of eclecticism at this time; the mere use of alternative modes had chiefly the effect of blurring the edges of all the styles of the past.
260. Compare, for example, Sigfried Giedion’s presentation of the period in Space, Time, and Architecture.
CHAPTER 12 - Notes
261. Many serious and conscientious English students of this period would precede such a list with the name of George Devey (1820-86). Of Devey, in whose office C. F. A. Voysey, the most original English architect of the next generation, chose to work after completing his apprenticeship with Seddon, Voysey later wrote: ‘Providentially an invitation came to enter the Office of the most extensive practitioner in homes for the Nobility and Gentry. No domestic practice has equalled his in extent before or since his death.’ As in the case of William Burn, whose aristocratic practice of the forties and fifties Devey’s more than rivalled in the sixties and seventies, neither he nor his clients cared for publicity, and so none of his work was published, even to the slight extent that the work of Nesfield and Webb was illustrated in the professional journals. Still today his houses are known to posterity chiefly through a few articles: Godfrey, Walter ‘The Work of George Devey’, Architectural Review, XXI (1907), 23-30, 83-8, 293-306; and ‘George Devey, F.R.I.B.A., a Biographical Essay’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XIII (1906), 501-25.
But just as the work of Nesfield and Webb was in actuality familiar from the first to their professional friends and rivals, as also to prospective country house clients, so was that of Devey. Many of the stylistic trends so vigorously exploited by Shaw in the seventies can be traced back to Devey’s houses of the preceding decade—or so such experts on the period as H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and John Brandon-Jones, who know Devey’s work intimately, always insist. Foreign students of this period, from Muthesius to the Editor of this series and this author, perhaps merely because of lack of direct or even adequate indirect knowledge of Devey’s houses, have never been ready to grant him so important a place in the story. Here particularly, where the story is told in an international context, the evident strength of the influence of Shaw’s work abroad even more than at home justifies giving his primacy and referring only incidentally to that of Devey.
262. Shaw did not immediately succeed Webb, since the latter stayed on in Street’s office until the middle of 1859. There must have been close contact between them over a period of up to a year, and they remained in touch from then on. Blomfield, Shaw’s biographer, being himself prejudiced against Webb, underestimates the reality and the importance of this relationship. It is only one of the many errors of fact or emphasis in his book.
To quote from a private communication from Brandon-Jones concerning Shaw and Webb: ‘Each must have had a good idea of the work the other was doing. Their two offices, in Gray’s Inn and Bloomsbury Square, were within a stone’s-throw of one another, and Lethaby while working for Shaw was in close touch with Webb and was in his spare time assisting him with the architectural work of Morris & Co. It is quite obvious from the dates of various executed works that Lethaby was carrying over Webb’s ideas and details and trying them out in work he was doing for Shaw. As for the mutual respect and friendship between Webb and Shaw, I [Brandon-Jones] have recently come across a letter written at the time of Shaw’s death in which he [Webb] pays a tribute to his “old friend”, and I have also seen a letter from Sydney Barnsley to Sydney Cockerell in which Barnsley says that he had called on Shaw only a few months before his death and that Shaw had been talking of Webb and saying that he still treasured some photographs given him by Webb nearly fifty years earlier.’
263. Devey’s incidental work at Penshurst Place in Kent, where that notable fourteenth-century manor house was restored by him, having been done more than a decade earlier, probably prepared the way for this. It is extremely likely that Nesfield was familiar with what Devey had done there; but the line forward leads, in the late sixties, from Nesfield to Shaw, not directly from Devey to Shaw.
264. See Pevsner, N., ‘Art Furniture of the Seventies’, Architectural Review, CXI (1952), 23-50.
265. The most famous instance of japonisme in decoration is Whistler’s ‘Peacock Room’, now in the Freer Gallery in Washington. See Ferriday, P., ‘Peacock Room’, Architectural Review, CXXV (1959), 407-14.
266. Once again Devey had prepared the way, in this case at Betteshanger, Kent, a house built precisely ten years earlier. This will doubtless have been known both to friends of Devey’s clients and to various young architects. But the Kew lodge was located where everyone could see it, even though it was not published until the nineties.
267. For this also there was precedent at Devey’s Betteshanger; but Betteshanger initiated no popular mode in the way that the conspicuous London schools by Robson and Stevenson’s highly touted house did at this point. For the schools, see Jones, D. G., ‘Towers of Learning’, Architectural Review, CXXIII (1958), 393-8.
268. See Harbron, D., ‘Queen Anne Taste and Aestheticism’, Architectural Review, XCLV (1943), 15-18.
269. See Shaw, R. N., Sketches for Cottages and Other Buildings ..., London, 1878.
270. See ‘The Ballad of Bedford Park’, St James’s Gazette, 17 December 1881 (reprinted by Blomfield, Shaw, 34-6). This is an amusing but not entirely accurate contemporary description in verse.
271. The handling of this building in section is particularly ingenious, the area of the service portions at the rear of the flats being much increased by the use of lower storey heights than in the reception rooms at the front. This device has been revived since, but its earlier invention by Shaw has rarely been noted Brandon-Jones pointed out to me.
272. At least they are now so painted; it is probable they were originally of ‘white’ Suffolk brick, actually a very pale yellow when newly laid and unbegrimed, but more likely to be black after a few decades of exposure to the air of London!
273. Hyde, H. M., ‘Wilde and his Architect’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 175-6.
274. It is characteristic of Shaw’s prestige in America and the rapidity with which architectural ideas crossed the ocean at this time that Shaw’s handsome perspective of the Alliance was published in America a few months earlier than in England.
275. White first approached Webb but, finding him too difficult to deal with, went to Shaw—a significant episode as regards both architects.