Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 6

Writing a history of English building is fraught with problems, many of which have been inadvertently caused by architectural historians. Architectural history is still too often divorced from mainstream historical research and, with some notable exceptions, has concentrated either on general popular accounts or on a series of questions interesting only to a small circle of people concerned with stylistic analysis.

This latter approach ultimately derives from the work of the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who became Professor of Art History at Berlin University and then at Munich in the first decades of the 20th century. His achievement was to establish a more empirical way of judging art and architecture, and his Principles of Art History set out how each artist’s personal style existed both within a national style and a period style. The job of the art historian, he suggested, was to disentangle and explain these stylistic strata. From this time onwards the identification of personal, national and period styles in architecture – and naming them – has been among the primary activities of architectural historians. With most types of buildings thus categorised, architectural history turned in on itself, spending half a century arguing whether the stylistic categories were correct and whether various architects had been allotted to the most appropriate category.³

My late friend Giles Worsley, writing in his excellent book Classical Architecture in Britain, opens a chapter with two questions: ‘Was Sir William Chambers a neo-Classical architect? Was Robert Adam a neo-Palladian architect? Convention,’ he writes, ‘would give a positive answer to the first question and a negative one to the second.’⁴ This present book does not set out to address such questions. The problem, as I see it, is that almost every art-historical term has ended up being more of a subject for debate than what it attempts to describe. So, for instance, there is much disagreement about whether ‘Norman architecture’ or ‘Palladian architecture’ can really be said to exist.⁵

A closely related problem concerns the assumptions that flow from the identification of a particular style. After deciding when a style begins – an art-historical industry in itself – historians see it growing, maturing and then waning. This view of style has both Darwinian and moralistic overtones. But styles do not have a life cycle and so there is nothing particularly degenerate, late or waning about late Gothic architecture, any more than there is anything immature about early Gothic. Nor is there any reason to assume that things evolve from the simple to the complex or from the small to the large.

These ideas about stylistic development lead to a series of assumptions that have distorted much writing on English architecture. At its root is the problem of determinism; in other words, the temptation to tell the story of English building as if everything that happened was inevitably going to bring about the outcome we see. There are many examples that illustrate this, but here I present just two. The first concerns the search for the origins of the more faithful rendition of classical buildings seen increasingly in England after 1720 and commonly called Palladianism. Knowing how the story ends, historians have given huge weight to a small number of classically correct buildings built by Inigo Jones nearly a hundred years earlier. As a result, everything that was built between 1630 and 1720 is seen in the light of Jones’s work. Compared with Jones’s buildings, nearly a century of English architecture has been regarded as somehow backward or at least not living up to a standard set by him. The reality is different. Jones’s buildings, at the time, were regarded as oddities outside the mainstream and had little impact on building in his lifetime. He did have his day as an influential architect, but only a century after he was dead.⁶

The search for the origins of English buildings designed in a style known as Modern has been even more distorting. Knowing that, after the Second World War, the Modern movement had a significant impact on English building, elements in buildings as early as the 1870s are seized upon as precursors. Although a very small number of mainly foreign architects built Modern buildings in England from the 1920s, these buildings have come to form part of the main narrative of English architecture, and the overwhelming mass of other fine and important buildings from the inter-war period is either ignored or deprecated.⁷

Somerset House, London. Neo-palladian or neo-Classical? A nicety or a fundamental question?

The sensible solution is therefore to put to one side stylistic labels, most of which are relatively recent inventions and few of which would have been recognised by those contemporary to what is being labelled, and start again. But as historians need to label things, because that is how they communicate and make sense of the past, an alternative strategy is needed. An answer may lie in a different approach: periodisation.

This is, however, another minefield. Historical periods are, of course, an alternative way of characterising what happened in order to make sense of the past. At one level they are self-explanatory, so people will have an idea about the Iron Age, the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans simply on account of the name (although not everyone can remember in which order they came). British scholars, uniquely in Europe, use royal dynasties to describe periods in their history. Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian reflect changes in dynasty but they tell us very little else in historical terms. The fact is that dynastic changes rarely represented moments of meaningful architectural change. Even the most famous and apparently absolute dynastic division in English history, the Norman Conquest of 1066, did not represent an architectural break. It would also be hard to argue that anything architecturally decisive took place in either 1485 or in 1603, two of the most frequently used dynastic-break dates in English history. This, of course, is not to say that changes of monarch might not run parallel to architectural changes. The death of the military-minded Conqueror and the accession of William Rufus; the Restoration of Charles II after the Commonwealth; the accession of Edward VII after the long late Victorian years – all of these led, to a lesser or greater extent, to an outbreak of architectural exuberance.

For the same reason that we have to reject dynastic change as a basis for periodising English building we must also reject a rigid calendrical method. Although the unit of a numbered century is easily comprehended, it makes even less sense as a basis for explaining things than the period of rule of a family of kings or queens. Nothing particularly significant happened in 1500, 1600 or 1700 – there is no reason why it should have. The challenge is to try and divide up the story of building in England in such a way that each chunk makes better sense of what was happening. Readers will decide whether my divisions have made understanding English building easier or whether they only confuse it. Obviously, I hope that my divisions help to shed light on why things happened.

Castle Howard, the breathtaking Yorkshire country house chosen as both the television and film setting of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Nostalgia, fiction and aesthetics combine to give undue architectural influence to such buildings.

But, alas, there is another pitfall. Architectural change does not take place evenly across time, geography or building type, so chronological divisions will only ever be a rough guide to what took place. This is particularly problematic in this book, which considers a much broader spectrum of building types than is usual. The study of buildings has long been divided up into the separate analysis of churches, castles, industrial archaeology, engineering, country houses, urban studies and vernacular architecture. Archaeology, of fundamental importance for understanding the built world, exists in an even more discrete enclave. Studying individual building types – or even sub-sets of them – as separate disciplines necessarily limits a discussion on the cross-currents between them; more seriously, it fragments the visual and spatial world in which our ancestors actually lived. Distinct disciplines are certainly important – we need people who have a deep understanding of lap joints in 12th-century timber buildings as much as we need those who can spot the derivation of a particular type of Corinthian capital. But we also need synthesis; someone who tries to link up James Wyatt and James Watt.

Much architectural history of the last thirty years has been preoccupied with the study of the country house, to the exclusion of other building types. The country house has sometimes been portrayed as a national driver of innovation, and more pages of English architectural history have been devoted to the development of this single building type than to any other – indeed, it has sometimes been claimed as Britain’s unique cultural contribution to European art. There are reasons for this, of course, not least the enormous success of the National Trust with, at the time of writing, its four million members. But it must be doubted whether the country house really deserves such lopsided attention. Most of the key developments, in fact, took place in an urban context, as this book will argue.

Another area to gain disproportionate attention is the careers of famous architects. Architectural history has too often been about the study of architects, while the role of patrons has consistently been underestimated. This is, in part, perhaps because architectural history was at first written by architects. Indeed, it was not until very recently – and only in specific cases – that the design and construction of a building were handed over to a design supremo who would relieve the patron of almost all input into the structure. Patrons from Benedict Biscop in the 7th century, through Archbishop Lanfranc in the 11th, Lord Burghley in the 16th to William Beckford in the 18th all exercised decisive design influence over their buildings. Innovation might be laid at the feet of a designer but it is just as likely to have originated from a patron who was better read, more widely travelled, and who had seen and experienced many more different types and styles of building.

Designers of buildings before the 1750s had either risen up through the building and craft trades or had come to design through gentlemanly curiosity. But into the 19th century the size and complexity of building construction demanded a spectrum of skills that these traditional routes did not permit. Three branches emerged – architect, engineer and contractor – and, of these, architects have dominated the history books.⁸ Yet builders, engineers and, indeed, manufacturers can all claim credit for having formed the built environment of England after 1800. In fact, architects have rarely been the sole force in the design of a building; perhaps their only period of absolute ascendency was between the mid 1950s and the late 1970s, a period outside the scope of this book.⁹

Excessive interest in famous architects and their oeuvres prevents us from acquiring a rounded picture of what was built and what was important. A good instance of this is the way in which Sir Christopher Wren has come completely to eclipse his contemporaries by having designed palaces, public buildings, churches and cathedrals – the traditional diet of the art historian. Most people have never heard of Wren’s brilliant and distinguished contemporaries Edmund Dummer and Michael Richards, both of whom were very considerable designers responsible for works of equal skill and novelty; unfortunately for their posthumous reputations, they built in naval dockyards and military enclaves, and most of their buildings do not survive.¹⁰

Essentially, no matter how hard we try, architectural history is determined by the accidents of survival; extant buildings will always have a primary claim over the historian’s understanding. Archaeology can fill in the gaps and topographical sources can show what things once looked like, but there is no substitute for a surviving structure. In this book I have deliberately chosen as examples buildings that survive. This is to encourage people to go out and see places they perhaps would never otherwise have thought of visiting. But I have not shirked from mentioning, sometimes in depth, important buildings that are now lost. This is because, without them, we cannot understand what happened.

So the task I have set myself is a difficult one and I suspect I have not entirely succeeded. The fact is that writing architectural history, avoiding the pitfalls I have just set out, is complex and raises issues that do not arise in the evaluation of music, painting or literature.¹¹ The most important and obvious of these is the utility of architecture. A building cannot be understood in isolation from its function and it is not possible to separate its aesthetic effect – or its historical significance – from the function that it fulfils. Similarly, the location of a building cannot be separated from its effect and significance. Most art forms are mobile. Architecture is not, and it can only be comprehended in the context of its surroundings. Third, although new inventions are made in other art forms, such as acrylic paint in fine art or the electric guitar in music, architecture is fundamentally fashioned by developing technology. The invention of the sash window, of plate glass, structural cast iron or reinforced concrete all opened new chapters in architectural aesthetics, performance and functionality. For these reasons, function, locality and technology play a very large role in this book.