In civic architecture the clothes are the man. We can judge other people’s buildings only by their appearance. From the depth of the window jambs and door reveals we may gather something of the apparent thickness of the walls; and from the point of view of appearance it is the apparent thickness, in spite of Mr. Ruskin, which counts.
As citizens we are interested only in the exterior of the vast majority of buildings. We want them built of sound materials, which will last and weather pleasantly, because we do not want to see our towns look shoddy. These towns are the most self-revealing things we make, because they are to a very large extent the unconscious expression of ourselves in the mass. There is very little conscious direction in the matter, even since the passing of the Town Planning Acts. Each person within the limits of certain rules laid down for public safety and health builds as his fancy dictates. Only one town in England so far insists on the elevations of all new buildings on its streets being submitted beforehand for approval by the public authority, and in that town—Liverpool—the authority has not yet taken steps to secure that it is better advised in matters of taste than it was before it had these powers.
There is every reason, therefore, that the public should take as keen an interest in its new buildings as it does in its new books and plays—more reason, indeed, because the latter need not be seen, and the buildings must. No man builds to himself alone. His building is there, if in London, for some ninety years or more. It may even descend to our great-great-grandchildren to show them what sort of animals we were. The unveiling of a great building when the scaffold first comes down should be an important event, much more so than the unveiling of the ordinary statue.
For instance, very shortly Sir Edwin Lutyens’ great building in Finsbury-circus and Moorgate for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company will be exposed to view. Here is the first great modern block of offices being built by one of our leading architects. Will Sir Edwin, who has been so successful in giving suitable character and individuality to a vast number of country houses, be equally sucessful in imparting the impersonal dignity and reticence required for the due expression of a solid commercial undertaking? From the drawing in last year’s Royal Academy one is pretty sure that he will, and that by this building he will set a new standard for the city. But one may safely say it will be some time before the general public discovers the building, and perhaps a hundred years before it takes any genuine interest in it. We are apparently just waking up to the beauties of the Bank of England, built about 100 years ago, now that it is threatened.
Architecture, then, for some obscure reason, although she is the ancient mother of the plastic arts, and the one from whose embraces none of us can escape, herself escapes criticism. No one writes to the papers to say what a vulgar and pretentious building the new War Office is, or how badly Mr. Selfridge’s great block is behaving both to its neighbours and, indeed, to the whole town by its arrogant bearing. You would think from looking at its vast ornate colonnade that shopkeeping was really the height of our ideals, and that there was something after all in Napoleon’s gibe.
In these days, when in the Arts, at any rate, national feeling is dying down—have we not recently gone so far as to erect a monument inspired by German art to Nurse Cavell?—and when the ages of faith are past, and there is no great wave of enthusiasm for any particular form of expression, such as existed as late as the Gothic Revival of last century—a time, and one remembers it with gratitude at least for its seriousness, when architects’ offices were opened with morning prayer—it is all the more necessary to make sure that the character of our town buildings conforms to some standard of public decency.
In clothes we all feel the necessity of this. We have a code of urban manners in dress and a code of country ones. The town code unfortunately of late years shows some signs of weakening. Men in “plus fours” have been seen in our best streets, but buildings in similar garments are there always. A great insurance company has built itself a new building in the Strand, and roofed it with the split stones of a Gloucester farm house. Why not thatch our banks straightaway?
We often hear of the damage the town is doing to the country, but do we so often realise the far more serious damage the country is doing to the town? Think of its inroads in every direction, town houses masquerading as country ones and suburban ones as village ones. There was a time when suburbs were proud of their connection with the town, and showed it by their architecture, and even by the carefully selected trees in their gardens—the pendant acacias and laburnums, the rounded weeping ashes, which consorted well with the classical buildings. Now suburbs are only too anxious to turn their backs to the town, and pretend they belong to the country—a thoroughly snobbish and suburban proceeding, when but for the town they would not exist.
In the eighteenth century most people lived in terraces of houses, in which externally each individual house did not differ materially from its neighbours. This was a fine sign of urbanity, a tribute to the community, just as much as the black coats most people affect in London to-day. Any excessive expression of individuality or of personal importance in a building was considered bad manners, just as it is in dress, only with this important difference, that bad manners in dress soon disappear, while bad manners in architecture remain.
In the real country things are different. The spaces between buildings are wider, and there is little bond of corporate union to be expressed. In the depths of his own domain every Englishman feels he can do what he likes, though in other matters he is even there a sufficient stickler for good form. “Good form” in every sense of the term is what is needed more than anything else to-day in civic building. The old words, “civil architecture,” express exactly what is desirable. Our town buildings should pay a conscious tribute to our civilisation instead of being merely an unconscious revelation of it.