III.
THE OFFICE BLOCK.
Business and busy-ness are not the same thing. One does not necessarily imply the other. The designers of our modern blocks of offices, especially in the City of London, do not seem as a class to have grasped this. Had they done so the City, where a greater amount of new building has been done in recent years than anywhere else, would not look so trifling and unconvincing as it does. The buildings have not the same serious air as have the lower portions of those in Wall Street and the end of Broadway—one takes no notice of the upper portions when close at hand.
No one from its recent architecture would realise that the city is still, in spite of the war and unheard-of debts, the centre of the world’s money market. The new buildings, for instance, which now line King William Street, compared to an old building, like the Sun Life building in Threadneedle Street, or to the modern American banks and Trust buildings, are skittish and flamboyant. In spite of the size and apparent wealth of these King William Street ones, you would expect exaggerations in any prospectuses issuing from them. They have that air—an unfortunate one—of over-emphasis.
In Lombard Street, which I suppose is more expensive still, so expensive indeed that only concerns of the highest financial standing in the world can afford to exist beside its narrow road-way, there are even worse examples. In so narrow a thoroughfare every canon of good taste would call for flat reserved façades, yet instead we have in the newer structures, buildings of the strongest modelling and the highest ornateness. In one case a great group of colossal half-naked women is leaning out over the street from the pediment of the main entrance, and in so commanding a way that you are tempted from it to make a guess at the purpose of the building. Is it a slave market, or something worse? No; it is only a highly respectable insurance company of the very finest status and credit.
Even in Kingsway, where a much higher standard of taste prevails than among the average city buildings, we find great new blocks of an extraordinarily complicated architecture. Pelion is not only piled on Ossa, but is interpenetrated with it. We find the buildings like this till we come suddenly to the great new American building which closes the vista—Bush House. Here is a clean-looking structure with regularly spaced windows, all of the same size, devoted to ordinary office purposes. Even in its present unfinished state, with only about one-fifth built, anyone can see that it is a strong and effective mass, with no fuss anywhere to interfere with its outlines. Riding down the Strand on an omnibus one carries away from it, in one’s mind, a definite impression which one certainly does not of its be-whiskered neighbours. One remembers its clear-cut appearance and the interesting detail about its arched entrances. It is an impression of dignity and character obtained without any obvious struggle. No complication of columns decks its façade in the false pretence that it is a palace or to be used for palatial purposes.
In this respect compare Bush House with the Assurance Office on the opposite side of the Strand, which combines a farmhouse roof of split stones with an order of giant columns, and below these a disorder of large ladies leaning out above the ground-floor windows in considerable déshabille to watch the traffic. Nevertheless, in spite of, or rather because of all the extra excitement, one forgets it. It leaves no image on the mind. By overdressing, in place of the simplicity of a good cut, the building has become ineffective.
The Bush building, by a good cut and little ornament sparingly used, is highly effective. Its great entrance on the Aldwych front must be judged in connection with the great plain wings yet to be built on either side and the tower to crown the group. This front is, of course, designed as a terminal feature to Kingsway, and a magnificent one it will make when complete. The building will have, I imagine, a very great effect on all subsequent office blocks. In such matters it introduces, not only American efficiency with its well-lit and easily divisible floor space, but American economy of expression. We have, in reality, always taken business seriously in this country. Perhaps, at last, we shall appear to do so.
I trace a good deal of the flamboyance which has spoilt our business buildings in recent years not only to the flamboyant and rather vulgar architectural period from which we are just emerging, but also to the narrow frontages on which so many of our business premises have in the past been built. The building owner is anxious that his new building shall be distinctive, shall possess what his estate agent calls “a good advertising front.” As the site is a narrow one something extraordinary has to be committed on the façade to mark it from its neighbours. The extraordinary things demanded have been forthcoming, and our streets have, in consequence, become the haphazard muddle, not unpicturesque in general effect, of which Fleet Street and New Bond Street are good examples. Economic reasons, however, are now bringing about bigger buildings. To develop economically one site, another is added to it. The same battery of lifts, for instance, which the greater number of stories calls for, can serve both. With this increase in size the composition of the buildings is an easier matter. They can have breadth, in both senses of the term. They often stretch now from side street to side street, or at any rate have one flank showing. The total mass, therefore, is not only big enough, but has an opportunity of telling, and the architect is no longer so tempted to strive for his effect with extravagant ornament and eccentric forms to his smaller features.
Sir John Burnet is building a fine stark structure, called Adelaide House, at the foot of London Bridge. It rises sheer from the water to a height of some 120 feet. It has little ornament, yet the building is going to be one of the most powerful in London. It will tell like the Bush building by its general shape and mass, and like it, too, its detail is free from all ostentation.