LETTERS Façadism
Sir: John Bryson's tirade (Letters, Septem- ber) against preserving façades only of buildings expresses a fashionable but naïve attitude. Innumerable buildings are of composite dates, and are different inside from what their outsides suggest. Miche- langelo added a classical façade to the mediaeval Campidoglio building in Rome, and the same was done, in lesser ways, to countless Tudor timber-framed houses in English country towns. Conversely, Nash in London and his counterparts in Bath and Brighton often designed façades and party walls only, leaving lessees or pur- chasers to construct the interiors.
Most of the Victorian and early 20th- century commercial buildings in the City of London (there are a few exceptions) are, and always were, notable for their façades only; internally they contained utilitarian offices, constructed to the standards of the time. Naturally, these are unacceptable and usually unadaptable today, but is there any sensible reason why good, well- designed façades, often in materials not easily obtainable today and with details which could never be reproduced, should not sometimes be retained while the build- ings behind are reconstructed to meet modern needs? The City, and other parts of London, would by now be far less interesting, and would have lost even more of their distinctive character than they have already, if this had not been done exten- sively over the last 20 years.
David W. Lloyd
17 Fore Street, Old Harlow, Essex
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