We may laugh at modern Italian painting or cry when we compare it with the old, we may sneer at the dexterity which produces endless alabaster figures of girls in tight-fitting bathing costumes or of sentimental cupids, though we should remember that they are mostly made for the English market; but we cannot afford to look down on ordinary modern Italian building, free as it is from all eccentricity and strong as it is in its traditional way. Noticing the same good shapes and proportions everywhere in town and country alike, we see it is a real vernacular form of expression. It must be the work of folk who do it largely, if not entirely, instinctively. I doubt whether in most cases architects are employed at all. If they are, they must be almost celestial architects who are willing for the public good to sink their personalities and eccentricities in a way unknown to us.
To my argument that it was the Gothic Revival that did the damage and set us all on the wrong track, some may reply that Italian towns like Siena are full of real Gothic palaces, and yet they compose perfectly and their streets provide more beautiful scenes than any others. To this I would answer that the Italian Gothic palaces may have been built during the Gothic period, and are indeed full of Gothic detail, but they are not Gothic in spirit. They are rectangular in shape without any excrescences, bay windows and pointed roofs which show, just as the Gothic Towers of St. Gemignano are all rectangular. Gothic in Italy was never more than skin deep and was never revived as a semi-religious, semi-sociological exercise. When Italy wanted to let off steam and be romantic and exciting, as all live folk do every now and then, she invented the baroque, and a very splendid invention it was for the purpose. How much better to swagger and pose a little with some invention of your own than to fiddle about with monkish ideas five centuries old and standing for a completely different outlook on life. Anyhow the baroque never interfered with the peasants’ or citizens’ dwellings, never turned the house of the clerk from a quietly beautiful cottage into the little suburban English villa as did our own revived Gothic.
XI.
ARCHITECTURE AND YOUTH.
The technique of building is too complicated to allow a young man of genius to plunge into it with success unless he is specially placed to receive expert assistance. When to the technique of mere building one adds, as one must, the technique of some form of architectural expression, Classic, Gothic, Renaissance, or whatever it may be as the formula on which to base his method of design, one realises that the young architect has a long way to go before he can find himself, apart altogether from the question of obtaining commissions. The period of five years’ training laid down in the recognized Schools of Architecture as a minimum, barely suffices to give him freedom from these technical difficulties. If he is an articled pupil, content to work in the manner of his master, he may no doubt achieve an imitation of that manner in a shorter time. The building and the architectural technique, however, which he will have learnt will be merely that of his master’s particular type of building and design. If he means so to limit his range that may suffice, though with changing materials and new conditions of building something wider is obviously desirable. In the days of a settled tradition or style, part of the problem was already solved for the young designer. In no way else can one explain how a young man like John Wood could have come down from the wilds of Yorkshire and at twenty-one have designed and carried out his first, yet thoroughly mature, terraces of houses at Bath. The orders of architecture were to his hand as well as a recognised method of planning and composition, and he, like most of the 18th century architects, appears to have had little or none of the modern desire for individual expression. His originality consisted in the breadth and boldness of his schemes for his adopted city rather than in a personal outlook on his art.
The great example of the apparently untrained architect, who immediately succeeded, is Sir John Vanbrugh who built Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, and a dozen other great mansions, and eventually almost rivalled Sir Christopher Wren himself in the extent of his practice. He appears at first sight to jump into the profession of architect from that of dramatist without any preparation at all. Here, too, was a man with a very distinct individuality, whose buildings show it at every turn. The conditions under which 18th century architects worked, however, were very different from those of to-day. Vanbrugh, in connection with his own plays, may have made rough drafts for the scenery. It was hardly more than such that he needed to make for his buildings in the first instance. The complicated and exact modern working drawings, sufficient to form the basis of a contract which will stand in law, were unknown in his days. Tradesmen were accustomed to tender on very slight indications on paper of what was required. The general style of the time would be known. A gentleman’s mansion was built in such and such a way, with such and such thicknesses of walls and finishings. However, this is not enough to explain Vanbrugh. The explanation in his case is the devoted assistant architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Wren’s scholar and friend not only carried out many of Wren’s own buildings for him, but was regularly employed by Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh was the man about town, who obtained the commissions and provided first schemes, and later on, no doubt, some of the detail drawings; but Hawksmoor was the man who surmounted the constructional difficulties and saw the work to completion, supplying a great many details himself.
So it is to-day. If a man of genius like Sir Giles Gilbert Scott wins at the age of twenty-one a competition for a great cathedral, as at Liverpool, it is because he has already at his command, through family atmosphere and association as well as through his apprenticeship to a Gothic architect, the technique of Gothic architecture. Being a man of genius he can, during the slow building of the cathedral, not only learn building technique but develop his own form of Gothic expression. How great a development Scott has made in this way during the twenty years Liverpool Cathedral has been in course of erection, everyone who has seen it knows. How little experience he had of actual building when he obtained the prize, we know from his own words. When asked by a Liverpool newspaper reporter what he had built, he says he could only think of a pipe rack for which he had made a drawing, and even that was carried out by his sister with a fretsaw. His competition drawings, however, show that, from his master and from his study of Gothic work, he had already a very fair idea of the size of piers and buttresses he should use both for appearance and for strength. The rest he must have learnt as he went along—a good deal no doubt on the construction side from his first five years’ collaboration with Mr. Bodley.
Scott, though, is an exceptional case. It would be very foolish for the aspiring young architect to feel he could do with as little training, even if he has been brought up in the atmosphere of a style as Scott was. Besides, to-day he would probably have but little desire to build in any exact tradition. He would rightly be ambitious, like Scott, to give a modern meaning to his work. To do this successfully, however, does not mean that the young architect need not know and study the old work. Rather he must study it all the more to see what is essential in it, and what merely transient and belonging to its own era. In any case he cannot do without an alphabet. Certain things he will have to use to gain any expression at all, that is, unless he desires to erect but a purely engineering structure. He is sure to wish that his building should make not only an emphatic appeal to the imagination, but should have certain delicacies and refinements, that it should conjure up in the beholder certain associated ideas. To obtain such things however in a non-copying, non-traditional way implies more knowledge of the past, not less. It means much measuring of old work, much studying of proportions, both in plan and section as well as in elevation.
If, however, the young architect, to equip himself, must go through many years of strenuous training, when that has been accomplished, a glorious field of effort faces him. He will have learnt the rudiments of an art in which any work, however small, is delightful labour. To design a cottage successfully is a very happy exercise. Every piece of work which comes to hand gives scope for thought and feeling. Thought alone is not enough. That is the great charm of architecture. By thought an engineer works, an architect by thought and feeling combined. An architect may not become a rich man—he very seldom does—but, if he has the roots of the matter in him, he can never become a dull one.
Then there is always the gamble of the great competition. In no other profession can youth jump so readily to the great opportunity if he cares to try. Admittedly it is a gamble, for assessors and judges are very imperfect human beings, especially when working singly with no opposing idiosyncrasies to cancel one another. Still the great gamble sometimes comes off. E. A. Rickards was only twenty when, working with his partners, his design won the great Town Hall and Law Courts buildings at Cardiff, which for twenty-five years or more have proved themselves good and beautiful buildings as well as a winning design—not by any means, or even generally, the same thing. At twenty-eight Mr. Ralph Knott won the competition for the great London County Hall. But I do not want to dwell on the winning of competitions as the end or beginning of an architect’s career. They are the spectacular successes, but it must be confessed that very few of them have fallen to the architects who are by consent the leading artists in their profession. No, the pleasures of architecture must be the end in themselves, and to the young man who, having the right equipment, seeks them earnestly as his life’s work, there is no limit to the pleasure and interest his life will afford him.