588
ARCHITECTURE
and in plain materials, in many cases shorn of its columnar features, and reflecting faithfully enough the prim rationalistic taste in literature and art of the England of the 18th century. Though not to be dignified as a style, it was, however, a recognizable and consistent manner in building; it made extensive use of brick, a material inexpensive and at the same time very well suited to the English climate and atmosphere; and it was generally carried out in very solid proportions, and with very good workmanship. To a generation tired of imitating a great style at second hand, this unpretending and simple model was a welcome relief, and led to the erection of a considerable number of modern buildings, dwelling-houses especially, the obvious aim of which was to look as like 18th-century buildings as possible. A typical example is the large London house by Mr Norman Shaw, at the corner of Queen’s Gate and Imperial Institute Road. The Chelsea Yestry Hall (Fig. 1), by Mr. Brydon, is a good example of a public building in the revived Queen Anne style. A change of front from copying a great style like the mediaeval, to copying what is at best a bastard one, if a style at all, might not seem to promise very much for the emancipation of modern architecture; yet there turned out to be one element of progress in it, resting on the fact that the comparatively simple detail of the 18th-century buildings formed a kind of vernacular of building workmanship, which could be comprehended and carried out by good artisans as a recognized tradition. Now, to reduce architecture to good sound building and good workmanship seemed to promise at any rate a better basis to work upon than the mere imitation of classic or mediaeval detail; it might conceivably furnish a new starting-point. This was the element of life in the Queen Anne revival, and it had, as we shall see, an influence beyond the circle of the special revivers of the style.. But almost concurrently with, or following hard upon,, the “ Queen Anne ” movement arose the idea of a modern architecture, founded on a free and unfettered treatment of the materials of our earlier Renaissance architecture, as illustrated in buildings of the Stuart period. This new ideal was styled “free classic,” and it gave “ Free the prevailing tone to English architecture for classic.' the last fifteen years of the century, though it had its commencement in certain characteristic buildings a good many years earlier than that. In 1873, for instance, there arose a comparatively small front in Leadenhall Street, under the name of “New Zealand Chambers” (Fig. 2), and designed by Mr Norman Shaw, R.A., which excited more attention, and had more influence on contemporary architecture than many a building of far greater size and importance. This represented the playful and picturesque possibilities of “free classic.” Its more restrained and refined achievements were early exemplified in Mr Bodley’s design for the front of the London School Board Offices on the Thames Embankment;1 a comparatively small building which also exercised a considerable influence. There were no details here, however, but what could be found in Stuart (or, as it is more often called, Jacobean) architecture, but the building, and the prominence of its architect’s name, helped to Fig. 1.—Chelsea Vestry Hall—Example of Modern “ Queen Anne.” (•/. M. Brydon.) draw attention to the possibilities of the any work illustrating the great architectural styles of the style, and it has been discovered that free classic is 1 world. It was, in fact, the last dying phase of the The western half of the present front ; the design was duplicated English Renaissance ; the architecture of the classic order afterwards, on the extension ot the huilding, hut 3Mr Bodhjj reduced to a threadbare condition, treated very simply originated it.
the spiritual and the architectural revival. At all events, donee templa refecinius was the motto of the day. The land was covered with modern mediaeval churches, and with Gothic town halls and residences and the business of restoring cathedrals was carried to an extent which deprived some of them of most of their value, and Avhich an after generation has had to regret when regret was unavailing. It was in 1869, just before the period we are here dealing with, that the great competition for the London Law Courts took place; and Street’s building, Gothic. completed a few years afterwards, was the last great national building erected in the revived Gothic style; as was observed shortly after its completion, it was “ the grave of modern Gothic architecture,” at least as regarded important secular buildings. Churches indeed, up to the close of the century, continued to be built, for the most part, in revived Gothic; but this was owing to special clerical influence, which saw in Gothic a style specially consecrated to church architecture, and would be satisfied, as a rule, with nothing else. Efforts have been made by architects to modify the mediaeval church plan into something more practically suited to modern congregational worship, by a system of reducing the side aisles to mere narrow passages for access to the seats, thus retaining the architectural effect of the arcade, while keeping it out of the way of the seated congregation; and there have been occasional reversions to the ancient Christian basilica type of plan, or sometimes, as in the church in Davies Street, London, attempts to treat a church in a manner entirely independent of architectural precedent; but in the main, Gothic has continued to rule for churches. Apart from this special class of building, however, revived Gothic began to droop during the ’seventies. All had been copied that could be copied, and the result, to the architectural mind, was not satisfaction but satiety. Gothic began to be regarded as “ played out.” The immediate result, however, was not an organized attempt to think for ourselves, and make our own style, but a recourse to another class of precedent, represented in the type of early 18th-century building which became known as “Queen Anne,” “Queen Anne.” and which, like Gothic before it, was now to be recommended as “essentially English,” as in fact it is. It can hardly, however, be called an architectural style; it would have no right to figure in
