CHAPTER TWENTY: OTHER WRITINGS ON
ARCHITECTURE
After
the publication of the Treatise in
1850 there must have been every reason to foster great expectations for
Garbett's future. He was 26 years old, had brought a widely respected and
controversial publication into the world and was given every opportunity to
excel. He had been hailed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and because of him by many
other Americans; in England, Ruskin, the juggernaut of aesthetic-debate,
considered him to be an enemy of some stature which is perhaps the greatest
compliment anyone could have paid Garbett. What went wrong?
Polemics in The Builder
Part
of the problem must be due to an intrinsic perversity in the manner of
historical selection. After all, many people did read the book, even if only
few had to acknowledge its influence. In other words his contribution to
architecture is certainly larger than his historical neglect would seem to
suggest. Not only that but he used every opportunity to broadcast and defend
his ideas, often contributing lengthy and fulminative articles to The Builder.[1]
He was, for instance, quick to join a discussion about copyism versus
originality which was raging between Kerr, Pugin, Fergusson and
Scott.
[2]
It has to be said that despite his efforts to provoke, he was completely
cold-shouldered by all sides.
[3]
A closer look at Garbett's reactions to the articles by Fergusson and Kerr
reveals to what extent these two were far more sympathetic to new impulses than
Garbett, even though he had done so much to anticipate developments
theoretically. Fergusson, for example, approved wholeheartedly of the Crystal
Palace. Kerr,
like Garbett, had decided that the contemporary predilection for Gothic was no
more than a fashion. But Kerr went further by wanting to annihilate this blind
reverence for precedent and the authority of the past.
[4]
Kerr was a modern in the Swiftian
sense of the word; he had spent a year in America and confessed to admiring
their go-ahead-ism. He had returned wearing
a broad rimmed hat and a full skirted coat, he now kept his hands in his pockets and
had grown as much of a beard as he could muster, Kerr confessed to being full of
liberty and ideas about equality.
[5]
He had confidence in an unknowable future, and, theoretically at least, had the
courage to cut the umbilical cord holding the nineteenth-century architecture
to its sense of the past.
Garbett could not approve of such
sentiments, there was no necessity to reject ancient authority out of hand. The
freedom from tradition legendarily enjoyed by the Americans, was for him as
much a freedom as an enforced isolation, the two had cancelled each other out
leaving nothing. Taste was for him inextricably bound to absolute points of
reference and had to depart from a critical approach to tradition and not a sweeping
rejection of it.
During
these early years his efforts were of course largely concentrated on defending
and propagating the principles he had set down in the Treatise, making it his special mission to eradicate deception in
architecture exposing the use of sham
construction
where possible, propounding the belief he had inherited from Robison and
Bartholomew that the question of style in architecture should be reduced to that
of style in construction and trying to convince others of the importance and
implications of Samuel Ware's particular definition of Gothic.
[6]
In time, what could initially be
excused as a fiery spirit, quickly became increasingly offensive. Enthusiasm
turned into bitterness. Criticism could no longer transcend sarcasm. The
brilliant independence of thought he had exhibited in his book slowly underwent
a volte face, Garbett's ideas began
to congeal into a course more rigidly determined by Ruskin, whose views he
began to defend with increasing apostolic vehemence. Only much later, in 1868
when Viollet-le-Duc appeared on the scene with his completed Dictionnaire, did this change, but by
that time Garbett had departed from the battle-ground and had, as we shall see,
begun to concern himself with loftier issues than architecture. To bring this
shift of interest home, it is significant that his position with regard to
Viollet-le-Duc is contained not in a long article to The Builder, which one might have expected, but in a barely
noticeable, and unusually brief letter tucked away within the pages of The Athenaeum.
The
zeal with which he promoted his own truths in these earlier years, was
sometimes so radical and fierce that one is left uncertain as to how serious he
was being and in no doubt at all about how serious he was being taken. At one
point he even recommended that St. Stephen Walbrook be rebuilt in real instead of sham construction.[7] This would not only advance the cause of architecture, he argued, but
even reduce the fire hazard the building was posing. The idea didn't even
provoke the usual pedants into action, who were always glad of an opportunity to
air their shock and horror at his latest provocation.
But George Godwin, the editor of The Builder, was impressed with Garbett. He encouraged
the latter's religious drive to set standards and provoke reforms, allowing him
all the column-space he needed for his homilies and accepting his offensiveness
as an occupational hazard.[8] Everything, therefore, was set for a meteoric rise in Edward Lacy
Garbett's fortunes. He was preparing to become a heavy-weight within the very
exciting world of architectural polemics and he was given all the room he
needed.
Nomenclature of English Styles
His proposal for a new
system of Gothic nomenclature, for instance, was praised by a short and very
rare letter to The
Builder from Ruskin.[9]
The latter doubted whether the names themselves were the best ones that could
have been suggested, but the principles underlying their choice were surely
right. The system proposed by Garbett was based on the idea that descriptive
names, such as perpendicular cannot describe more than one, or at the most two
peculiarities unique to a particular style.[10] The use of such descriptive names, he writes, usually ends in needless
academic wrangling, as one side pedantically dismisses the importance of one
particular feature of the style, thereby snubbing the opposition who, on the
contrary, had considered it fundamental to a proper definition it. The result,
Garbett argued, was that one defeats the object of nomenclature by rendering it an
unstable thing, liable to continual improvement with every advance of our
knowledge of styles, their peculiarities and their deep-buried motives.[11]
Instead he suggests that we keep those names suggested by Rickman which
are not descriptive but nominal, such as, for example, Norman and Early English,
and that we substitute words such as Perpendicular and Decorated for names which
do not themselves single out any aspect of their own definition. He cites the
use of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian for the different classical orders as good
examples of what he means. What had hitherto been called Decorated could now be
named Edwardian, as the style it labels roughly coincides with the reigns of
three Edwards, and that Perpendicular be named Lancastrian for a similar reason.
The underlying motive being that in order for a name to be useful it must be
fixed permanently, the name must not be dependent on our continually increasing
knowledge of a thing, as it could then be altered progressively and render
discourse and scholarship a Babylonic nightmare.[12]
Crystal Palace
In an other article,
where he attacks Fergusson's praise for the Crystal Palace, the old division
between engineering and architecture is made the subject of further
name-wrangling.[13] Fergusson, very enthusiastic about Paxton's building, writes that
architects such as Barry, could not design a building like that because they
were forced, by the
charter of their profession to copy. Indeed Garbett does not deny this but
adds that engineers, glass-house builders and Paxton are just as much copyists
as the ancient architects, differing only in what they take for their model.
Fair enough. But then he goes on to say that the Crystal Palace was the result
of a demand to which no architect, in the proper sense of the word, could,
should, or would have stooped, lamenting the fact that it was allowed the name
architecture at all. The competition which was held for the Hyde Park
exhibition-building had allowed insufficient time for architecture proper.
Paxton had succeeded in meeting the demand for speedy results by answering the
material requirements with a structure containing least expenditure of thought.
The Crystal Palace might represent the greatest advance in
green-house-technology, but however much a sheep grows and develops it shall
never change into a goat. Architecture, being the greater thing, the matrix,
includes engineering, but engineering alone can never aspire to be called
architecture.
It is surprising that, despite his prophecy concerning an architecture
based on the principle of tension, Garbett did not recognise its prototype when
he saw it, or, if he did recognise it, he rejected with some vehemence. In this
light it is interesting to note the similarity between Garbett's criticism of
the Crystal Palace and that of Ruskin. Garbett's sermon was published in
February 1851. Ruskin's first attack was published a little later in the First
Volume of The Stones
of Venice in the 17th appendix entitled "Answer to Mr.
Garbett".[14] Ruskin also lays stress on the fact of it being an oversized greenhouse
(a common criticism at the time). But the resemblance gains in interest when he
accuses the building of lacking on the amount of thought contained
in it:
The quantity of thought
it [the Crystal Palace] expresses is, I suppose, a single and very admirable
thought of Sir Joseph Paxton's, probably not a bit brighter than thousands of
thoughts which pass through his active and intelligent brain every hour -that it
might be possible to build a greenhouse larger than ever greenhouse was built
before. This thought, and some very ordinary algebra, are as much as all that
glass can represent of human intellect.[15]
We need not go so far as
trying to establish a positive influence on Ruskin, it is enough to note the
steady and increased convergence of their thinking which would eventually result
in Garbett rejecting his own precepts and join the Gothic camp.[16]
Garbett concludes his article by reiterating his solemn belief in the
necessity to integrate the various disciplines that make up architecture in
order to achieve that which constitutes its definition. Architecture, he writes,
attempts the excellence of completeness, therefore if the name has been stolen
by engineers, packing-case makers and green-house builders, then it needs a new
name for itself, one that is unique to his concept of architecture as a
material, mechanical and spiritual entity; one that is reserved exclusively to
embody the idea of wholeness and completeness, he suggests:
Calotecture.[17]
St. Wren's
In the summer of
1852 Garbett wrote a series of articles offering a radical, dubious, but at the
same time highly imaginative plan for the decoration of St. Paul's. The first
article was to have been named St. Wren's, a sarcastic title which the editor
had changed, but which, as Garbett explained in the following instalment, he
chose in deference
to public opinion in that ...the end of [St. Paul's] existence must be the
glorification either of itself, its owners, or its author, whose monument it
literally is. St. Paul's church, is a misnomer. If it is to be a monument to
the author alone and if nothing he did is ever allowed to be altered because of
that we should call it St. Wren's and not a church.
Wren's memory, writes Garbett, ...will be more revered and honoured by treating his
monument as a living useful thing, a reality, and part of the live world, than
as a dead obstructive carcass,- (...) he meant it (as all real architects have
meant their works) to be (as all pieces of real architecture, church or barn,
exchange or shop, have been) living, alterable and adaptable to the changing
times; alterable immediately on its completion, had it failed to answer some
part of its immediate purpose. (...) ..alterations to preserve or extend the
life and reality of his work in better times than his own, and assimilate it
more to his thwarted intentions, would not annoy but please him; and I hope to
carry to his feet the news that such have been at least begun, and hear him
thank God that they have.
A building should be
alive and life consists in translating usefulness into form, so that the form
-the space in encloses- is properly used and not left to languish without
purpose.[18] This attractive proposition is, however, stretched to limits it would
never go of its own volition.
For Garbett it means that we should rebuild St. Paul's according to his
own deduction of Wren's true intentions and that we should not stoop to
decorating the entire great empty and largely useless shell. Wren, he reminds us
in a satirical reconstruction of events, had been forced to alter his original
plans as a result of his client's desire to build for fashion in an effort to
keep up with the Jones's -or, in Mr Bull's case, (the client) to keep up with
his French neighbours, the Crapauds. It was, of course, Mr. Bull's wife who
was the real culprit; it was she who had suggested to her husband that it looks so to be
without a cathedral..What would the Crapauds say? So I have ordered one of Mr.
Christopher, and what do you think that upstart had the insolence to suggest?
That we could do very well with a trumpery square thing....Now don't be
persuaded into this, dear. People will set it down at once that the fire has
ruined us. If Mr. Christopher can do the job well. We'll go to him for his work
-not his advice. Show yourself a man of taste and spirit, Mr. Bull, and soar
above his narrow utilitarian views. Of its various owners, referring to the
King's and Queen's of England, Garbett writes dismissively, one, James II meant it
for a Romanist church, and the rest for a show. Two purposes not quite
incompatible.
What it ultimate comes down to is that St. Paul's as a living monument to
England with whatever significance does not alter the fact that Wren had been
wronged. He was forced to build what he did not want to build: Let to himself, he
would have given us something like the most convenient and largest church that
Protestants could use. And on that note of surrogate altruism is based his
justification for going to the earlier Greek-cross design and starting all over
again.
His advice is simple and rigorous: ..knock off from the present, all its nave and choir except
the first compartment of each, and finish them like the transept arms, at the
same distance from the centre. The reason for this is not to reconstruct
Wren's original design however. Rather it has to do with Inwood's experiments
-which Wren had anticipated- and which define the distance at which the voice
can reach audibly. By laying a tracing of the figure which Inwood had come up
with and which describes the reach of the human voice, over the centre parts of
St. Paul's and by turning it round you will find two optimally placed points,
one for the speaker and one for the reader. By arranging the seats accordingly
you will not need to place a single seat out of sight or hearing of either. And
on this principle the rest of this plan will show you how easily and
conveniently the remaining furniture will fall into place and dovetails
together.
Thus St. Paul's, with the use of the latest acoustic technology is
converted into a great monument, not to Englishness but to Protestantism, the
preaching-barn which the Protestant truly desired and which Wren had truly
intended. Garbett would, on his own authority add a whole series of galleries quite essential to a
really noble church, (one can almost hear the Ecclesiologists grinding their
teeth in anger) while the choir is to be converted into an entrance from the
street by cutting the widows in the apse down to the ground! ..show that you can use
a cathedral, that you know what to do with one and it will soon be decorated.
Occupy it, claim it all as God's house...This is the key to its
decoration.
It is not necessary to
waste space on deliberating whether Garbett considered his own suggestions for
the complete rebuilding of St Paul's seriously. One Critic was hopeful that it
was all a ploy only meant to provoke discussion.[19] But he did. He meant every word. This was the time that Garbett was
becoming increasingly immersed in religion, a puritanical religion, in which
everything relative, everything worldly, all worldly authority had to give way
to his sense of absolute right, his conviction of an absolute truth before which
everything was glad to give way. Whether Garbett was surprised to find that few
others would share his conviction is not known, but it certainly made him harden
his views and make him increasingly bitter.
That is not to say, however, that a cathedral, any cathedral, had to be
whitewashed and made into a typical Wesleyan preaching barn. In fact Garbett,
accused them of pursuing a false sobriety in their chapels. If he did not like
the show of the papists, he had little sympathy for the affected simplicity of
the Quaker's and the Wesleyan's. In fact, as the rest of the scheme is revealed
it turns out that Garbett had quite a penchant for theatrical effect.
The next article
concentrates on the problems light and dark, especially with regard to the
central dome over the crossing. Garbett thought that if the dome be the
chief ornament, it must have the chief light. The problem was that the isles
and the nave in the present situation were relatively well-lit, while the
central dome was so dark that the paintings by Thornhill could not be properly
appreciated. There was no point in restoring these paintings, [which the dean
and chapter had recently recommended] if they could not even be seen. In other
words the situation had to be reversed, First let there be light and then the things to be
lighted. To this end he proposed an ingenious system of mirrors to reflect
the light coming down from the 24 windows in the drum up to the dome.[20] Secondly, Garbett observed that only a fraction of the light from the
windows above the dome's eye actually falls through the eye, while most is
wasted in the space between the cone and the ceiling of the inner dome. That
light could be better used if the space between the dome and the cone were
fitted with a
barrel-shaped light framing of wood or metal covered with silvered glass so
that the light coming from the said windows will be thrown through the eye and
fall evenly spread
down the concavity to the cornice and no lower.[21]
The windows in the nave and the isles would subsequently have to be
darkened by using coloured glass, so that there would be a solemn preparatory
gloom- a sort of night,-to divide day from day, -to obliterate the old and
introduce the new, the different, the uncommon, unworldly light of the lofty
middle oratory, shed from no visible windows, casting almost no shadows, so
equably showered down from the great illumined concave, that will seem to
phosphoresce with a mild splendour of its own, like the moon after sunset,
because the source of its light, as of hers, will be unseen, and the intervening
air be hardly crossed by a ray but from itself.[22]
The Next article
entitled "St. Paul's III, Mechanism of the Decoration," has some beautiful
passages and some very interesting ideas on ornament and decoration. It starts
off as a direct echo of Ruskin's Lamp of Sacrifice and some very quirky
reasoning. A Christian temple, he writes, is not simply a church or an oratory,
not simply a house of prayer and preaching, but also of praise: Praying and preaching
are not the whole of the service; in a Wesleyan barn or a Quaker chapel, how
should we stand up and sing, Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and
the place where thine honour dwelleth? This would clearly be unacceptable,
apparently ignoring the fact that one can love very simple habitations, which I
presume, was the point that God was making when he made his son come into the
world in a stable. But such finer points were lost on Garbett in the heat of his
obsession:
The end and scope of all
church ornament is simply to enable these passages to be sung without hypocrisy.
If these psalms are to be sung in a church, it must, to avoid mockery, have
beauty, splendour and refinement at least as great, at least as costly, and at
least as studied and cared for as that of the people's home. It seems that if,
besides an oratory and preaching-room, it is also to be a house of praise, it
must itself be a psalm, a standing hymn, a perpetuated chorus of
thanksgiving.[23]
As such in
producing building the abilities of everyone have to be harmonised
according to a
design for the designs. That, says Garbett, is the architect's task. The
architect should not do everything himself, it is his task to provide a matrix
in which the abilities of everyone can have a place. One of the uses of a
cathedral, he continues, its peculiar use, is to be decorated. While it is not being
decorated, it is not being used.. In other words part of the worship is to
provide an ambience in which to worship.
Then we get back
to the task in hand. The underlying principle of his proposed scheme is again
the acoustic demands of the church. If indirect sound-waves, bouncing off hard
surfaces have to travel more than 30 or 40 feet further than the direct
sound-waves connecting the speaker with his audience, the quality of the voice
no longer has that sonorousness which is so attractive in many churches, instead
the resulting echo would cause letters to be mixed up and the whole sermon to
become incomprehensible. Therefore, all hard surfaces which would cause the
indirect sound-waves to travel further than 30 or 40 feet extra will have to be
covered with textiles.
In olden times, that is when science was not as advanced as in Garbett's
day, they would have had to cover the whole church with textiles. As it is,
Garbett was able to work out just exactly which surfaces would have to be
treated in this way. One is the Dome from its eye down to the cornice, (i.e. the
paintings are to be covered up) The cloth may be embroidered while the only
other ornaments allowed are the flatteners holding the cloth to the dome. The result
would be much like a Crapaud chair. The distribution of these flatteners was
a matter of some concern:
Shall they form ribs or
bands, dividing the whole into panels? I think not, because I think the glory of
a dome is its entirety...If a ceiling have organism in its structure, as the
Greek lacunaria or Gothic Vaults, by all means show the organs and decorate
them...but if the work have no organism, then you have got what you spend so
much elsewhere to obtain, an unbroken surface. So instead of forthwith looking
for sham organs to stick on... beautify the whole as a whole, not with forms of
architecture but of nature. I would say, then, keep the surface entire; let not
the figures divide it, but it them. Put as many and as large as you like, but
let them be separate and distinct.[24]
There is one
further interesting remark which shows his continued independence from Ruskin
even though on many respects their ideas continued to converge irrevocably. That
is that he insisted that the material of the tapestries, the cloth itself, be
made by machines: machine-work should be done by machines: for hands to do
it, is returning to worse than the days of pyramid building. In other words
Garbett was far from convinced that the work of artisans was a form of
liberation.
Dobson's Editor
While these articles
were being serialised, George Godwin reviewed a book by E. Dobson called The Student's Guide to
the Practice of Designing, Measuring and Valuing Artificers' Works which had
been newly edited by Garbett, who had added his own notes on design.[25] The ideas propounded in the book need no in-depth treatment as they are
basically a restatement of much that was in the Treatise. Having
said that Garbett does come to a refinement of the ornament question, to which
he may well have been inspired by Ruskin's appendix:
By ornament, writes Garbett, in a passage that was also considered of
some interest to Godwin, is properly meant something extraneous to the work, added
for the sake of beauty; some thing added, observe, while decoration is only some
work added. Thus decoration includes all ornament but there is plenty of true
decoration which is not ornament. That only is ornament which involves either
the adding of unnecessary matter (as an ancient statue, a modern tower or
portico), or the leaving matter that would, with less labour and equal
structural efficiency, have been removed (as a crocket, a basrelief figure) To
confound, therefore (as an excellent critic has done), the terms beauty,
decoration and ornament, is as new and perplexing as if we should confound
blackness, blackening, and blacking.
He then starts off
again venting his old grudge against the engineers using much the same arguments
as those in the Crystal Palace sermon earlier. One aspect of his thought that
does come out much clearer in this book, when compared to the Treatise, is the
extent of his reliance on the thought of Alfred Bartholomew and John Robison. In
the Treatise
such a dependence had to be completely reconstructed from just a few casual
references, whereas now both of them are revealed as primary sources. In this
light the increasing vehemence against the engineerification of
architecture should be interpreted as continuation of his harangue against
the utilitarian spirit of a classic functionalism.
Garbett's reworking of Dobson's book started a discussion in The Builder about
the fenestration of the facades of buildings, where Garbett argued for more
window surface. However, the main thrust of the argument is somewhat weakened by
the web of sarcasm in which it becomes entangled. This article, incidentally,
gives us the only clue that Garbett was ever involved in designing a
building.[26]
A Fireproof Ceiling
In December 1852 while
Garbett was involved in a polemic about ventilation and the effects of breathing
Carbonic acid,[27] he published a curious design for the construction of a fire-proof
floor-ceiling. This
flooring will, I hope be Paxtonian enough, consisting as it does, of only three
invariable elements or types. The first of these elements is a wire-meshing
of interlocking metal triangles that had to be fastened to the wall-plates in
the same way as canvas to an embroidery frame.[28] On this web of triangles, to be exact on the points where the triangles
interlock, specially designed tiles in the shape of rhombi would be placed in
such a way that only the point of convergence between three rhomboids, that is
as the acute angle of each of the rhomboid, would be resting on the intersection
of the three triangles, so that each rhomboid would not lie flat on the meshing
but be slightly inclined. The angles, on which the rhomboids rest would be
truncated at the point of contact with the wire meshing so that the resulting
plane would be horizontal. The angle on the other side of the tile and on the
opposite side of the tile's shorter diameter, would be similarly truncated.
Because of the tiles being inclined rather than simply horizontal, their edges
would have to be cut in such a way that the join between two tiles is exactly
vertical.
A ceiling would emerge of a cubed pattern, criss-crossed by iron
triangles. On top of the ceiling, that is, on the floor side, flat tiles could
be laid with this advantage that hot-water pipes and ventilation systems could
be installed in the gaps which the cubed tile-pattern leaves open. Even though the ceiling
could, with a slight toning down of its claims of being able to span any size
surface, be made to work, it is evident that the use of iron, of whatever
thickness, to support it makes the whole thing far from
fire-proof.[29] But that is hardly the point. What it represents is a clear attempt on
the part of Garbett to come up with the desired goods, that is, a tensile system
of construction. That is its importance and that is where is represents a noble
failure.
The Preliminaries to Good Building
In 1856, Garbett
published his manifesto in Weale's Papers and Practical Illustrations of Public Works,
entitled: "Preliminaries to Good Building," in which he suggested rules for the
proper conduct of architect and patron, the process of selecting designs by
competition, the precise way an architect should be remunerated for his efforts
and some rules of thumb for beauty.[30] The style of its prose arouses a pathos similar to that of the rantings
of speakers on hyde-park-corner. His enthusiasm runs away with him into a
hopelessly dogmatic catechism of orders of Stability and degrees of Beauty
which because of their stringent classification make them immediately
unappealing and hopelessly impractical. It is not that Garbett is not motivated
by good intentions, nor that all of his ideas are bad. But because of his
awkward systematisation of principles and because of its un-business-like
proposals with regard to the relation between client and architect it becomes a
manifesto which, right from the start undermines its own aims as well as the
good ideas it contains.
However, it starts off with some promise. The projector, he argues, must,
before seeking any designer, be able to state clearly what he wants. That is,
how many apartments, for what purposes and of what capacity. So far so good.
Then he goes on to state that the projector must also be able to specify which of the Five
orders of Stability, should be attempted and consequently which of the Four
degrees of Beauty. The first have to do with what kind of building is
desired, while the last divide into whether the client wants structural beauty
alone; or should
add, besides this floral ornament; or besides both these, animal ornament; or
besides all these, historic art. If one looks back at the Treatise at this
point, one can only see a gross simplification of his earlier ideas. The
subtlety of his earlier conditions has been severely compromised by an
increasing devotion to system and the ideas of Ruskin, which, in Garbett's
hands, do not convey the same magic nor appear as compelling when compared to
their originals as stated in the Seven Lamps or in the Stones of Venice.
In fact they somehow show up Ruskin's crude philosophical tools when his
precepts are bereft of their lyrical presentation.
Ultimately Garbett comes up with three fundamental precepts to meet the
various aesthetic
obstacles to good building. They are: 1. No stucco features. In cities no
stucco externally at all; 2. No unnecessarily costly material except for a gain
either of durability or colour, or to receive carving. And 3. to imitate as
ornaments nothing but natural objects. There we have it, Garbett and Ruskin's
image have finally been welded into some improbable hybrid monster.
Another piece of advice concerns the procedures to be followed during the
competition: It is
absolutely necessary to have nothing to do with any designer who proposes, as a
part of his design, any ornament that he could not execute for himself. Here
is Ruskin floating through again, but then:
For public buildings, the designers must at first, for a
few years, be found by public and open competition, subject to the above
condition; so that every competitor must produce, along with his design of the
whole structure, a full-sized model [!] or specimen of the most important or
difficult ornament (whether it be a birth of Minerva or a brick
moulding).
By this time most
practically minded architects in an age which made a cult of practicality, must
have started smiling to themselves. But such fears did not disturb Garbett: no
drawings except plans, were to be allowed; all drawings are deceptive. All
architects had to explain themselves by way of a model. Drawings of elevations,
he wrote, were particularly evil as they are far too misleading, giving a
greater sense of depth than the budget would probably allow for. Once the
successful architect had been chosen for the undertaking, we get to the problem
of remuneration.
The most significant passage in the Preliminaries
discusses the way that architects should be paid. He believed that paying an
architect a percentage on outlay was evil, as it brought all sorts of
possibilities for corruption and deception in its wake. Instead he suggests that
the winner of the competitions should be paid for his design. Subsequently the
architect should receive a daily salary for superintendence of the building
project, and thirdly, he should receive a fee on the successful completion of
the project. This, to all intents and purposes, sounds like plain good sense. In
order to safeguard fairness at the competition, a huge and improbable
bureaucratic apparatus of certificates, officials and judges is rubbed from the
oil-lamp, which it is not necessary for us to go into.
For some reason this problem of remuneration became an obsession with
Garbett. Every article he published in The Builder, after 1856 is full of the most bitter
comments on Percentage Styles and percentage on
outlay-architects. Why? That is a difficult question. He never airs his own
experience even though he is quite happy to use every opportunity to spout
poison on the system. Because of his relentless condemnation of everything and
everyone who had anything to do with this system, most of those who felt
themselves under attack, were invariably and understandably affronted by the
strength of Garbett's words and responded accordingly. One offended competitor
wrote in reply to Garbett:
Vociferated logic kills me quite,-
A noisy man is always in the right;
I twirl my thumbs, fall back upon my chair,
Fix on the wainscot a distressful stare,
And when I hope his blunders are all out,
Reply discreetly, - to be sure - no doubt.[31]
The sad truth is that
Garbett had begun to make a habit of overstating his case, had used up other
people's patience, and as a result had become quite ineffectual. The slightest
contradiction to his ideas, whether it concerned the remuneration of architects
or the deceptive use of materials in building, was treated by him without any
sense of proportion, not as a misdemeanour but as a felony, a monstrosity, and
was viciously attacked with heaps of blunted sarcasm. The result of all this
wasted anger was that he could hardly be taken seriously. He frittered away his
standing as well as his good ideas in absurd totalitarian rantings, hitting out
at everybody and everything, being insulting and high-handed. But despite this,
one cannot quite understand why he became so obsessed with the problem of pay
unless he was himself a victim of this supposedly unfair and corrupt
system.[32]
The Whitehall Competition: The Percentage Style and
Gothic
As time went on
Garbett became an increasingly hardened adversary in any polemic, always
insisting on the last word. But this attitude had its consequences, his views,
though always of a peculiar honesty and often hitting a particularly vulnerable
soft-spot in his adversary's argument, nevertheless began to lose their
relevance. He was fighting his own battle it seemed, no-one else appeared
interested in his tirades any longer. The sparkles in his thinking became too
difficult to find amidst the tortuous sentences and the continual sarcasm.
In a lengthy but somewhat frameless review of the designs for the
Whitehall competition of 1856 for a new masterplan as well as the new government
buildings, Garbett finally renounced classicism and the
Renaissance.[33] They could, despite his provisional support for them in the Treatise, no longer
be seen as appropriate styles for the present. Why this public U-turn? Part of
the reason was his wish for architectural variety, so that each building housing
a specific function could somehow be distinguished from its neighbours. Garbett
was an early critic against architectural standardisation:
It is now known to most people, that these principles
[making the least amount of external design go as far as you can, round as much
and as many buildings as possible] are foreign to mediaeval art, but not to so
many that they are equally foreign to the ancient or the classical, which in
fact only differed from the Mediaeval in one point, and agreed with it in all
those that distinguish it from ours. Neither Ancients nor Mediaevals ever
dreamed of making two offices look like one, or making two things that had not
the same function alike, or one design to serve for both. All this is purely
modern, original, and unprecedented, in short, the invention of modern
architects, who are falsely accused of wanting invention.
It was this
standardised quality which made symmetry exact and French, where
buildings are placed exactly in line, where roads are unbearably straight and
where the facades of different offices became uniform, rather than natural where the
left side of the face is always slightly different to the right. This Frenchness
was the straw that finally made him renounce the renaissance or modern style:
But as "modern" is a word continually changing its meaning,
so that, by-and-by, what we call "modern" will be a past style, I prefer giving
it a chronological name, like the Norman, or Tudor, which, you will observe,
does not imply any connection between the style and the people or family after
which it is named, but merely a correspondence in time. Thus you see that any
historical fact which is found to synchronise with a particular style of art,
however unconnected, may be taken as a chronological mark to name it by. Now the
style we call "Modern" or "Renaissance," both in planning and decoration, cannot
as far as I can see, be found to synchronise with any dynastic accession, or
other great public event; but I have observed it to synchronise most remarkably
with a fact in the internal history of our profession, namely the custom of
architects or engineers being paid in proportion to the work of those under
them; or, as Sir Benjamin Hall's paper of instruction says, "a commission of
so-and-so per cent upon the outlay." Of course this is not so high-sounding an
event as the Conquest and the Reformation; but we must be content with what
synchronises, and so I will mark this as the "Per-centage-on-the-outlay Style,"
or briefly, "Perc. St."
This manner of
paying architects had by now become one of the most virulent cancers in his
thinking, even penetrating his pamphlets on religion, which must only have
served to weaken any argument he was putting forward. In fact it was to be the
theme of most of his subsequent contributions to The Builder, even
weaving itself through subjects which would appear totally unconnected. But we
shall return to this, having brought it up here specifically to provide the
context to his imminent conversion to the Gothic camp, which was to be announced
in the next article.
The deluge of bad Renaissance designs in this competition had,
according to Garbett, provided the effectual coup de grace to classicism. It
need hardly be said what the reason was for this conversion: apart from two
designs, (no. 35 and no. 106) one of which stood no chance of being taken
seriously, none of the 218 designs exhibited, had been up to Garbett's standards
of moral integrity. This connected with the fact that any designs submitted in
the Gothic style would not even be considered seriously, that classical and
Renaissance had been pre-selected as the desired style for the offices had so
irked Garbett that he was prepared to jump down from a fence he had initially
tried to deny the very existence of, and finally entering the Gothic camp.
Once he was completely converted to the belief that Gothic should be the
style in which to build until a new pure system of architecture was developed,
he lost no time to consolidate his conversion. He began attacking the architect
George Wightwick, a determined classicist, who had given his support to the
preference shown by the committee running the Whitehall competition for a
classic design.[34] Garbett was suddenly of the opinion that classic architecture was no
more than a stupendous delusion. He did meekly repeat that he did
not equate Gothic automatically with truth, but the statement was no more than
an empty echo. Tu quoque, Garbett had finally released his principles and had
opted for the easier alternative of style-apology.
But Garbett's conversion to Ruskin and to Gothic brought no new arguments
in its wake. His weapons became blunt and his style of fighting predictable,
repetitive and confusing, while that of George Wightwick was whipped into poetic
flights, two weeks after Garbett's barrage, Wightwick published a five
column-long poem in The Builder called "The Battle of the Styles, A
Hudibrastic Epic" which lightened and diffused Garbett's confused
criticisms.[35]
The Architect
In 1857 he had described
himself as a non-percentage architect, which may hint at his failure to succeed
in his practice.[36] Eight years later he described himself as a layman who had dealings with
architects and builders and was likely to have them in the future, but who
certainly had never touched a commission or a percentage. One is led to doubt
whether he was ever a practising architect. The only competition he is known to
have entered, the one held in 1859 for Mr Spurgeon's Newington Tabernacle was
given to another.[37] What was he though? The patent he took out in 1884 describes Garbett as
a draughtsman, but in a sense, even if it is accurate, it cannot be a complete
answer to the question. His intellectual range was too great, his personal
vendetta against the system of architectural pay and competition too bitter for
him to have been confined happily to the position of draughtsman. His will,
incidentally, mentions a collection of his drawings which was to be left to one
of his cousins.[38] Considering his range of interests and his continual urge to vent his
solutions to all manner of problems in public, it would seem acceptable that he
was a draughtsman only in so far as he needed a paid occupation. His knowledge
and use of mathematics, mechanics, theology, geology, optics, philosophy,
history and so forth, rather suggests that Garbett had wanted to set himself up
as a secular prophet, a philosopher and an inventor.
At his failure to be hailed as the new messiah in architectural
criticism, his ambition, perversely, took on ever greater forms. If the fools,
and he treated most of his fellow colleagues like fools, would not accept his
pearls of wisdom, he would cast them out with greater ferocity just to show them
what a mistake they had made. His defence of Ruskin's ideas, and his attempts to
equate them with his own, trying desperately to ameliorate earlier differences,
almost became an exercise in sycophancy. Ruskin, probably unaware of it himself,
was used as an intellectual backdrop, to boost Garbett's own authority. If
Ruskin had not been Garbett's 'master' when the Treatise was first
published, he had begun to occupy that position by the late fifties and sixties
in a very literal sense. Doubtless Garbett thought that he and Ruskin shared
some common cause. Ruskin became Garbett's model, as such it is neither ironic
nor curious that both Ruskin and Garbett suffered from similar delusions about
their ability to reform the whole of society rather than just its art and
architecture. As their aesthetics was so consciously bound up with ethical
considerations, with morality, it was only natural to extend those ethical
considerations to other areas of humanity.
The more Garbett's arguments were rejected, the more determined he became
in his belief of their implicit rightness, and the more ferocious became his
attacks on what he defined as mindlessness, but which included everything which
presumed to contradict or qualify what he said. Almost all his critics, or those
at least who bothered to retaliate to his denunciations, complained of his
rudeness. But he didn't listen, he was inundated by his own principles and the
subsequent need to propound their validity in the most unequivocal and rigorous
terms. Slowly his messianic ambitions spiralled upwards leaving architecture
behind, embracing cosmology, sciences, theology and finally the complete reform
of society. This aspect of his character provides us with the answer to
Garbett's failure to fulfil those earlier more modest architectural
expectations.
His career, so beautifully tended in the late forties and early fifties
turned out to be a non-starter. In a sense he could not but have failed, his
ideas for reform were too subtle in the early years and too brusque in the
following. Often his suggestions were so totalitarian as to be completely
impracticable and his unwillingness to compromise too great an obstacle to the
dispersal of his obstinate pride. When his prospects for a successful career in
architecture were disappointed he must have chosen a career in inventing.
1.
A list of his contributions to magazines can
be found in the chronologically ordered bibliography of his publications.
2.
For a full account of this discussion see
Pevsner (1972) p. 222-237. Garbett's contributions are entitled "A Principle or
a Principal.-Which?" The Builder, VIII, 379 (May 11, 1850) 219-220 which
reacted to a contribution by James Fergusson. And ""Natural Style" in Modern
England and America," The Builder, VIII, 408 (Nov. 30, 1850) 566-567.
3.
None of the contributions by the other
debaters condescended to mention Garbett or refer to his articles.
4.
Robert Kerr, "Copyism in Architecture," The Builder, VIII,
406 (Nov. 16, 1850) 541-543. The Reply from Garbett was entitled "'Natural
Style' in Modern England and America," The Builder, VIII, 408 (Nov. 30, 1850) 566-567.
6.
Much later, In The Athenaeum, 2126
(July 25, 1868) 123, a certain "H.M.W." quotes Garbett on Vaulting being: the all pervading
MOTIVE, the final CAUSE of Gothic Architecture, that to which all its members
subserve. And in a note,- This was first shown we believe by Ware, in his admirable
'Tract on Vaults.' Then H.M.W. goes on to say that this was first pointed
out by Barry the Painter: We quote the following passage from Vol. 1 of his works, p.
130 (1809) This is a letter to Edmund Burke dating 1768 which discusses the
problem of intersecting Barrel Vaults. Two issues later comes Garbett's reply
impatiently dismissing H.M.W.'s claims to Barry's priority by saying that the
mere illusory appearance of pointed ribs at the intersection of two barrel
vaults does not constitute a definition of Gothic as a system. The rest of the
passage is rather interesting as it shows his position relative to
Viollet-le-Duc, while suggesting another origin for Gothic: ..his [H.M.W.'s]
notion, still the vulgar one, that the use of pointed arches ever led to Gothic
Architecture, or had any tendency thereto, is, I maintain, inconsistent with
Ware's and mine, or a I may call it, the now accepted theory, since it is also
that of the first living architectural author, M. Viollet-le-Duc, and no other
remains in the field. [The publication of Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire had
been completed in 1868] "H.M.W." cannot have understood our position, which is,
that the exactly right or reasonable working out of vaulted buildings, (but
never of unvaulted) did, would, and must anywhere lead to the entire Gothic
system, and no other. So that in any world, with or without "works of the
ancients," the sole essentials to the rise of complete Gothic are these two, a
class of buildings designed to be vaulted and a true architect. from: The Athenaeum, 2128
(Aug. 8, 1868) 187. We notice that Garbett's determinism had, rather than
diminishing, grown stronger with the years. He continues with his passage which
I want to quote in full because of its distillation of social causes of
architectural style: ...what led men to build durably and nobly (as the
vaultings imply), and what drove designers to become, instead of mere
decorators, veritable architects, a sort of men then extinct, as far as we know,
since perhaps the Graeco-Persian wars? As I am not satisfied with M.
Viollet-le-Duc's, the only extant theory as to these deeper causes, I will state
my present one. The driving of designers to be architects I now attribute mainly
to the preaching of that great man St Bernard of Citeaux, against the fantastic
or wild adornments of the Romanesque cloisters and other buildings. The
Cistercians, after their reform by him, were the admitted originators of Gothic,
though their rules read like those of the early Quakers; and, however,
paradoxical this may look, I believe the very spirit that four centuries later
substituted the cheap and nasty Friend's meeting-house for the "steeple-house,"
did with different accompaniments lead the Cistercians (who also at first
interdicted steeples, oddly enough) to all the glories of the great Gothic
school. Designers were by St. Bernard's principles driven from "Norman cut-work
and crinkle-crankle" and grotesque sculpture, tot he perfecting of the building
itself, the genuine logical refining and thinking out of every member to its
best form; in short, to true architecture; as the Quakers might have been if
more logical. But the other part of the grand phenomenon, the reason they built
so nobly, for more than the extant generation, I can only trace to the Western
Church's retention of the ancient and biblical creed in monetary matters or
"Catallactics," that is to say, the condemnation of "usury" (as foenus had been
falsely translated) and Aristotelian denial of money begetting profits.
7.
E.L. Garbett, "Natural Style in Modern
England and America," The Builder, VIII, 408 (Nov. 30, 1850) 566-567: Suppose its [St
Stephen's Walbrook] beautiful arches, entablatures, coffers, vaults, and dome
were to be made in reality what they pretend to be. p. 567.
8.
At one point Godwin appended a note to one of
Garbett's articles in which he explained to four unsuccessful contributors to a
particular discussion, that the reason for not including their reactions was
contained in the above. In other words Garbett's arguments were well worth
paying attention to. The article concerned an explanation of a method on how to
foliate a circle. E.L.G. "The Foliation Problem," The Builder IX,
(Nov. 8, 1851) 702.
12. Unfortunately Garbett did not realise that
even when a name is not descriptive when it is first attached to a phenomenon,
there is an uncontrollable urge to make it so and fill it with meaning after the
event; the most glaring example being that of Victorianism.
13. Jas. Fergusson, "The Effect on Architecture
of the Building for the Great Exhibition," The Builder, IX
(Jan. 25, 1851) 52-53. The reply came two weeks later: E.L. Garbett,
"Architecture and the Exhibition," The Builder, IX (Feb. 8, 1851) 85-86.
14. The preface to The Stones of
Venice is dated February 1851, the same month in which Garbett's article
against the Crystal Palace was published.
16. Wihl (1983) 187-202. The question of
Garbett's possible influence is not discussed in this article, nor is the
coincidence that Ruskin's criticism of Crystal Palace should occur in an "answer
to Mr. Garbett."
17. An author contributing regularly to The Builder during
this period, and who writes articles which would have Garbett's approval signs
his name Calotect. cf. "Nature all Deception," The Builder, IX,
417 (Feb. 1, 1851) 71-72. and "Imitation versus Deception," The Builder, IX,
420 (Feb 22, 1851) 125. The dispute with James Ballantine concerned Ruskin's
concept of deception. As far as I know Calotect has not been identified. It is
not Garbett, event though their ideas do coincide on many issues.
18. E.L.G. "The Conversion of St. Paul's," The Builder, X, 496
(Aug. 7, 1852) 497-498; St. Wren's No. II," The Builder, X, 497
(Aug. 14, 1852) 512-514; "St. Paul's No. III," The Builder, X, 499
(Aug. 28, 1852) 544-546; "Fenestration-Competition, and St. Paul's," The Builder, X, 501
(Sept. 11, 1852) 576-577; "St. Paul's.-The Funeral and the Monument," The Builder, X, 507
(Oct. 23, 1852) 668-670. Reactions to the plans are Q.E.D., "In Re "E.L.G." and
St. Paul's," The
Builder, X, 497 (Aug. 14, 1852) 514; Q.E.D., "Wide and Narrow Fenestration,"
The Builder, X,
500 (Sept. 4, 1852) 564.
19. Q.E.D. "In Re 'E.L.G.' and St. Paul's," The Builder, X
(Aug. 14, 1852) 564: Hardly will a writer whose views tend to upset so much of
what has hitherto passed current as sound architectural doctrine and criticism,
feel otherwise than disappointed should his opinions now elicit none from
others..