Arts
Slaughterhouse
Gavin Stamp
Alfred Waterhouse 1830-1905 (Heinz Gallery) Alfred Waterhouse 1830-1905 (Heinz Gallery)
Afred Waterhouse continues to present Problems of interpretation to both historians and admirers of Victorian ar- chitecture. As the current exhibition of his drawings and furniture at the RIBA's Heinz Gallery (Portman Square, until 28 May) demonstrates, he was both an efficient, Often insensitive commercial architect and an excellent Romantic watercolourist. Waterhouse, the architect of that grim, remorselessly red-brick joke, Girton Col- lege, Cambridge, is difficult to reconcile With Waterhouse, the author of some of the finest architectural perspectives of the 19th century. Of course, architects, whose careers depend upon plausibility and Charm, and whose primary need is for jobs and fees, often present a disturbing discrepancy between intention and execu- tion; in Waterhouse we have a remarkable combination: he was immensely practical as well as 'artistic'. He was also very am- bitious and highly successful. Recognition of his achievement is long overdue. Waterhouse's talents emerged in the heady mid-Victorian decades, but he was an untypical hero in Eastlake's History of the Gothic Revival. Unlike Butterfield, Street, et al, he was not High Church but came from a Quaker background and designed Nonconformist churches with unusual auditorium plans — like the King's Weighhouse Chapel near Selfridge's. He did not, like Street, encourage a Ruskinian sensitivity to materials so that his pupils became heroes of the Arts & Crafts move- ment. Worst of all, he compromised his status among the avant garde of the 1860s by being very successful indeed. Water- house carried on regardless until the end of the century, entirely uninfluenced by changes in architectural fashion: the 'Queen Anne' and the revival of the English Renaissance. Instead he evolved a personal Style out of the Gothic which was practical and modern; indeed, Waterhouse is the on- ly architect whose work seems to approach Viollet-le-Duc's vision of a progressive, functional architecture. In his willingness to use hard modern materials, iron and glass, and in his effi- ciency as a planner, Waterhouse has been compared with modern 'High Tee' archi- tects. Perhaps he was more the Colonel Siefert of his day, for he was good at business and gave his clients what they wanted. Compared with extravagant Romantics like Burges, Waterhouse was conspicuous for his ability to keep within costs — not the least of an architect's ac-
complishments. In the great Law Courts competition of 1866, Waterhouse was the only entrant to submit a design which was estimated at anything near the price laid down. No wonder he was often in demand as a competition assessor — and, as such, he was remarkably fair and often rewarded emerging talent.
Not that Waterhouse's buildings are bland and functional, for he gave his clients the rich modelling, the colour and the pic- turesque skylines that they wanted. Characteristic are the hard red buildings he designed for Prudential Assurance — so unmistakable that he seems to have given the firm a 'corporate image'. And thanks to his fondness for washable red terra-cotta (so very practical in 19th-century London), he was soon nicknamed 'Slaughterhouse'. He used it again on University College Hospital, with its eminently hygienic cross- shaped plan. Best known and most loved is the Natural History Museum, where the South Kensington prejudice against Gothic necessitated the use of Romanesque. Waterhouse exploited the sculptural and decorative possibilities of the style, rend- ered in buff and blue-grey terra-cotta, and all over the building, inside and out, crawl delightful animals, fishes and other forms of life. At the same time, iron and glass roofs and fireproof vaulting are unasham- edly and logically employed — Waterhouse is the best counter to the old idea that Vic- torian architects were backward-looking, fearful of the new. If only modern ar- chitects could combine efficiency with so much pleasure in detail and colour.
Waterhouse was best at institutions. Manchester Town Hall, triumphing over a triangular site, shows his ability at planning and at powerful composition. He designed a few churches and a few houses, but these last always look like institutions — and none more so than Eaton Hall, that pro- digious Gothic palace for the Grosvenors which was demolished in the Fifties — at goodness knows what cost — to make way for a new Eaton Hall which looks like a British Embassy in Lagos or Jakarta (and which was not, I notice, referred to in John Martin Robinson's recent article, 'The latest in country houses' [30 April)).
I once had the pleasure of living in the château-like tower belonging to Caius that Waterhouse plonked in the very centre of Cambridge. I came to admire the impressive modelling and detail of the building, and, especially, its solid construction. The stone is laid in the Greek manner, with alternately
thick and thin courses. But then I looked at old photographs and realised that Waterhouse had replaced two fine Georgian houses that provided a more respectful foil to Gibbs's Senate House. Like all self-confident, efficient modern ar- chitects, Waterhouse was a terrible vandal. This is a side to his career that the authors of the excellent catalogue (£1.95) — Sally Maltby, Sally MacDonald and Colin Cunn- ingham — rapidly pass by. Nowhere was he more arrogant and, presumably, grasping for more fees than at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where, in the 1870s, at the behest of a progressive, modern-minded Master, he pulled down a whole range of mediaeval buildings and demolished the oldest surviving hall in the University — with the help of dynamite, it is always said. In the end such ruthlessness was too much even for Cambridge dons and Waterhouse was sacked and replaced by G. G. Scott Jr, a conservative scholar who saved both Wren's Chapel and the 17th-century Old Reader.
How could Waterhouse have been blind to the beauty, as well as to the antiquity, of such old buildings? For he had an eye, as the watercolours in the exhibition amply demonstrate. Not only did he colour in his own perspectives — unlike most architects — but he regularly executed somewhat luridly tinted Continental scenes as good as those by many RAs. As Richard Phene Spiers noted in 1885, Waterhouse's ar- chitectural drawings 'are done with an ar- tistic ability which many an artist who does nothing else must envy. To those who have seen his sketches at the Graphic soirees, they look as if they were done by a man who had nothing else to do but draw in watercolour.' That he had a great deal else to do is evident from the wealth of precise, efficient and elegant working drawings in this exhibition, which manages to suggest how a great Victorian architect's office ac- tually worked.
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