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.