HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
By Sir Charles Barry and Augustus W. N. Pugin. Victoria Tower, Left; Clock Tower, Right. In the Distance, Left, Westminster Abbey. [P. 450]
PLAN OF THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
more than the combination of architecture and sculpture in a Gothic cathedral, because more deliberately, as a result of reasoned logic as well as of feeling, Greek sculpture and architecture were constituent parts of one design. To divorce the architecture from its sculptural enrichments, is to reduce the temperature of feeling in a building, to make it cold and too severe in its refinement. Moreover, the exterior design of a Greek building was so calculated to its plan, which was usually that of a temple, that to attempt to adapt it to the different needs of modern planning is not only a violation of its logic but also an attenuation—a stretching out to thinness—of its expressiveness.
Adaptation Limited.—In fact, a Greek façade cannot be an integral part of a modern building. Instead of growing out of the interior conditions it is merely a screen, as arbitrary in its separation from what is behind it, as was the old painted act-drop of a theatre. The realisation of this has influenced architects to emulate or imitate, as the case may be, the Roman rather than the Greek style. And, so far as Roman architecture was an adaptation of Greek particulars to the new problems of the basilica, palace, public bath, triumphal arch, amphitheatre and so forth, the model may be judiciously followed. But, when the architect essays to adapt the colossal orders of a Roman temple to the front of a bank, library, museum, or railroad station he may display a feeling for impressiveness that gives little proof of intelligent comprehension of design. He commits the same error that he is fond of charging to the layman, who, he says, thinks of the design of a building only as an exterior effect and not also in relation to the plan and internal structure. For, to take but one point, that of the lighting. Windows are an essential of a modern building, while in a Roman temple they played only a subordinate part; so that the pedimented, columned porch at the entrance and the colonnades at the sides were not employed at any sacrifice to the internal requirements.