II.—ARCHITECTURE AT THE ACADEMY.
IT is a most ungrateful task to assail the respected practi- tioners and official representatives of an art ; but if the Academy is to be taken as pretending to represent English architecture, and if a critic is to say what he thinks of the show it makes, he will find it difficult to be pleasant to those gentlemen. The case here is the same as in painting, or rather it is aggravated ; for the appreciation of architecture and its more abstract beauty is a good deal rarer than the appreciation of painting. All the more need, then, for an Academy, if an Academy can be contrived that will check and guide vulgar taste ; but all the more disgrace to an Academy that fosters and stamps with approval the most vulgar ten- dencies among our architects. The need is indeed much greater, because the architect produces objects which one cannot avoid seeing, whereas the pictures of the year retire into a decent seclusion where their admirers can gloat over them secretly. Now, just as in the matter of
painting, what a vulgar taste lays hold of and can measure. is bigness of size and a profusion of work and detail and ornament—the appearance, in a word, of a great deal for the money—so in architecture it is imposed upon by the same order of effect ; and the battle in the one art, as in the other, is for unity, simplicity,—the quiet logic and untormented repose of large design. Just as the bad painter paints some thing that is all features and no face, so the bad architect builds something that is all features and no house. He is not even restrained, as the face-painter is, by the decent and undeniable arithmetic of fact, but may give his house's. face, so to speak, a dozen noses and twenty eyes. Every window besides must bulge and bicker, every chimney stand on tiptoe and gesticulate, every wall conceal the fact that it is a wan, and pretend to be a historical collection of freaks in decora- tion. The roof is not happy unless it collapses and shoots up in alternate fits, and power of design is measured by the• number of spires and domes and cornices and porticoes that can be crammed into a languid scrimmage with one another in one unhappy building. The very cottages keep making gables at you, smirk with windows, and giggle with all their- cheap graces like hysterical coquettes ; every little church has. swallowed several cathedrals, and the indigestion is written on its face; the public buildings are compendious collections of what to avoid in all the styles.
Mr. Alfred Waterhouse, who is one of the architects in the Academy, has had the most deplorable influence upon the art he represents. In London, the Natural History Museum,. the Technical College in the Exhibition Road, and St. Paul's School; in Oxford, Balliol and the Randolph Hotel ; in Man- chester, the Town Hall and Owens College ; and in Liverpool, the additions to University College,—these are a few examplos out of many of architecture as he understands it. Every.. where clumsy, hard design, and ill-considered or cheap detail. Two drawings in this Exhibition give warning of two more buildings of the same character, and his taste is written large on the style of work hung in the room around them. For Mrs Waterhouse, with what is doubtless a well-earned reputation for business aptitude and integrity, is very frequently ap- pointed referee in architectural competitions. The result is, on the part of many of the competitors, a playing-up to the well-known taste of the referee, and a very natural choice on his part of the designs that accord with his taste. With a. delightful innocence, he has hung this time examples of one such competition, for an Art Gallery at Glasgow, so that it is possible to compare an unsuccessful with the successful design. The comparison is only between the elevations, but in that respect the rejected design shows a grasp and sobriety, a dignified and scholarly style, a sense of proportion in the arrangement of wall-spaces and windows ; while of the other, one can only say that it is very much in Mr. Waterhouse's manner.
How vulgarity of style triumphs in competition for our public buildings, many examples on these walls illustrate. The design for the municipal buildings at Oxford is a fresh mis- fortune for that city ; so with the Guildhall for Cambridge, the St. Pancras Municipal Buildings, the New General Hos- pital, Birmingham, and the new police-offices in the same town. The firm responsible for the last, Messrs. Aston Webb and Bell, are a little chastened in their design for the United Service Institution by their neighbourhood to the Banqueting Hall ; but it is a very negative abashment. The design for the New British Gallery, Millbauk, makes one regret the big, simple architecture of the prison it is to replace. Will its inmates, one speculates, after some recent accounts of them, be an improvement on their predecessors P When one passes to names that may be expected to mean artistic work, the result this year is rather disappointing. Some of the first names are absent. There is nothing by Mr. Norman Shaw, Messrs. Bodley and Garner, Mr. Bentley, or Mr. Philip Webb, and the younger men of talent seem to fight shy of the place. Mr. T. G. Jackson and Mr. Basil Champneys put their names to designs which are not worthy of their reputation. Is the press of commissions too great for them to cope with P It is one of the results of the present system of remuneration among architects that an architect must accept many commissions to make a large income, because by the etiquette of the Institute the architect in demand gets no higher per-centage on his work than the beginner, and the beginner may
accept no
lower a rate than his senior. The result is that every one goes to the firm with a reputation, and the younger men are there employed in reproducing the ideas of the head of the firm,—ideas the extent of his business will not give him time to reconsider. If architects, like lawyers or doctors in demand, could limit their work by charging a higher fee, the result would be better for all concerned. The senior man could afford to expend that time and consideration on a few designs that now he must spread out thin over work in- teresting or uninteresting. The younger man could devote himself for a smaller fee, but with the incentive of responsi- bility and recognition, to commissions which now go to the big offices, and are there perfunctorily treated.
There is one design in the Exhibition which bears the evi- dence of artistic feeling and real consideration. That is the drawing of a. courtyard with a house and studio, for Mr. Gilbert, the work of Mr. Howard Ince. There are traces of assimilation from Venetian and other foreign sources in the archway and fountain, but the whole is thoroughly digested and made congruous with itself and with its place and purpose. The wall-spaces, the windows, the weight and shape of the simple chimneys, the pleasantness of the curves that the con- struction naturally introduces, the sparse enrichments in the right places,—all these are welcome and refreshing signs of an artist who has given thought to his design. Mr. H. Wilson also shares artistic feeling ; but like his master, Mr. Sodding, is somewhat wild in matters of scale and over-luxuriant in decoration. So with Mr. Begg's chapter-house design. Mr. Ponting, too, has ingenuity, but does not sufficiently control his sense of picturesque form in his design for a music-room at Marlborough College. Mr. Leonard Stokes' work is a curious mixture of big, solid forms, with flimsy accompaniments in other parts of the building, and extravagance or poverty of detail. The tower of his house is big, and sits well into the roof, but other parts of the design are disappointing. The church is in- genious in plan, with its window at an angle to the choir balanced by an organ-screen ; and the tower is massive and Simple. But the tracing of the window does not follow con- structive lines, and is lumpy in form, and the detail of other parts is perfunctory. Mr. Guy Dauber shows a drawing of Itton Court, Monmouthshire—a good drawing of a very beau- tiful building—but it is difficult to make out what part of it is his work ; his design for a new house shows badly beside it. Mr. Markham Skipworth shows a design, for iron grilles to fill the arches of St. Paul's. It is very fair design, but seems to need strengthening lines to pull it together. Last may be mentioned a very charming design for a frieze, of fishes and weed, Japanese in character, by Mr. Paton Wilson.
D. S. M.
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