Great Britain in the 18Th Century

Architecture of the 19th century and the Turn of the century (handout) Ágnes Gyetvai Balogh PhD 2007 This educational material was prepared for the History of Architecture 5 course belonging to the Department of History of Architecture and Monument Preservation of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. It can be used exclusively for educational purposes. It is prohibited to copy, or store in any database, or convey to public in any means its whole corpus or even a part of it without an agreement with the owner of the copyrights. Other usage is not permitted. All rights reserved. 1 Different periodizations in different countries and eras The topic of this semester is the 19th century architecture. Actually it is a longer period in the history of architecture than a century that is why it is called the ‘long 19th century’. In this era the architecture and the art turned to the past, to the previous styles using them in a new approach. Our period began in the mid 18th century and ended in about the second decade of the twentieth century. The period was divided into different eras, but these periodizations were different in different countries and eras. The period 1750 to 1870 was an era of changes and architectural evolution on all fronts. Architects reflected the social ferment in both a return to the styles of past eras and a highly innovative search for means of expressing new ways of thinking and living. Archaeologist-architects like James Stuart and Nicholas Revett measured and drew the classical buildings of Rome and Greece and carried their findings home for reuse in every sort of structure, from church and house to garden ornament. Yet in the same era some architects like Étienne-Louis Boullée and E.-E. Viollet-le Duc turned away from the past toward an abstract architecture of the imagination and toward an architecture that would suggest to twentieth-century architects how they might abandon Historicism and evolve a new style for the future. These very different intellectual currents produced a wonderfully diverse body of architecture, ranging from town and country houses, palaces, and public buildings in series of styles – Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Gothic and Renaissance and so on. The successful architects were too busy with new trimmings for façades to notice that every new type of building required its own treatment. Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878), an honoured architect of the High Victorian era stated that the great principle of architecture is ‘to decorate construction’. Even John Ruskin, an English theorist said in 1853: ‘Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture’. The architects of the 19th century searched for their own style, but they searched for it between the previous styles. The great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel formulated this when he wrote in 1841: ‘Each period has its own architectural style, why haven’t we established our own?’ ‘The great question is: are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable nineteenth-century style?’, asked Thomas Leverton Donaldson, the first professor of architecture at University College, London, in 1847. What had happened was that nineteenth-century architects had discovered the history of art and artistic liberty at the same time. New experiences emerged throughout the century. The styles existed side by side instead of succeeding each other. The architecture as an activity is about 5000 years old, but the field of the History of Architecture is only 250 years old. The History of Architecture developed in the 19th century similarly to the science of History. The first important book in the History of Architecture was written by Joachim Winckelmann in 1764, its title was ‘The History of the Art of Ancient Times’. From this time onwards the period or the architectural style can be called Historicism. This book and the increased interest in the art of the historical periods took part at the start of the historicization. Historicization in architecture or to historicize means to revive and to use historical, architectural forms or details. Historicization has been present in the architecture continuously. The period, when it was used consciously and deliberately, is known as the period of Historicism. This period began in the middle of the 18th century and continued until the first decades of the 20th century. (It was about 1750 to 1920.) The claim for historicization arose, when the society in the Baroque period changed to a civilian one. The civilians came to power. They not only had economical but also political power. The citizens looked for their new architectural style opposite the Baroque style. The civilian society and arts of the Ancient classical civilizations became important. In this period not only did the Roman architecture became known and recognizable for the educated but Greek architecture did too. In Renaissance times the Turkish occupation of Greece made it impossible for Europeans to get to know and study Greek architecture. 2 The most important problem of Historicism was the continuous expansion of the scale of buildings. In the 19th century the buildings were becoming gradually bigger and bigger in size. In the course of the 19th century the architects tried to find newer and newer historical styles to form the façades of their buildings. The idea of eclecticism was that the façade of the building consisted of units. For example, the Houses of Parliament in London, which kept the old Gothic features, resembles a medieval city, including a medieval town hall, market place, cathedral, castle, etc. The façades were independent from the interior or from the function. A contradiction between the façade and the interior developed. The period from 1750 to 1910 is a very difficult period. What is common in this era that the architects used the architectural details and motifs of the earlier historical styles. In the 20th century famous art and architecture historians tried to divide the period into different eras. These periodizations are different and have changed not only in the course of the century, but they are different in different countries. This tabulation summarizes the changes in the aspect of the history of architecture and makes a comparison between them. The tabulation shows the complex development of our period and also the development of the changes of the aspects. Theory Theory Theory at the beginning of the 20th in the middle of the 20th century at the end of the 20th century (German) (French-English) century (Austrian) Until 1750 Baroque Baroque Baroque From 1750 to 1800 (Neo-)Classicism Romantic Classicism Ac- Naive Historicism (early; flowering) tive From 1780 to 1830 (Landscape gardening, Classicizing Romanticism Ro- Neo-Greek, Greek Revival) man- From 1770 to 1840 Romanticism Romanesque Romanticism ticism Pure-in-Style Historicism (Neo-Romanesque, Gothicizing Romanticism Neo-Gothic, Gothic Revival) From 1840 to 1890 Eclecticism Pas- (Neo-Renaissance, Historicism sive Style-mixing Historicism Neo-Baroque) Rom. From 1890 to 1910 Art Nouveau / Secession (European Art Nouveau Turn of the 20th century Turn of the 20th century movement) From 1910 (International) Modern (twentieth-century style) Pre-Modern Pre-Modern (today’s style) In the second column the oldest, the traditional, art history periodization can be seen, which was used at the beginning of the 20th century. It was used mostly in Central Europe, were the styles came sooner after each other, and not parallel to each other as in Western Europe. After Baroque, from about 1750 Neo-Classicism followed, when the architectural taste turned to the calmer architectural details of the Ancient Greece or Rome, to the classical vocabulary. The name of Classicism also originated from the Latin language and refers to the classical Ancient art and architecture. But only the English terminology uses the ‘Neo-‘ preposition before Classicism. In German or in Hungarian the books write only Classicism, or ‘Klassizismus’, opposite to Neo-Classicism used in England or in the U.S.A. The transition from Baroque to Neo-Classicism happened gradually. The architecture developed in an unnoticed way, step by step from the Baroque architecture. The geometry and the antique forms displaced gently the unbound, arched Baroque and Rococo forms. After the middle of the 18th century, there was also criticism of Rococo, whose undisciplined frivolity was contrasted with the ‘belle simplicité’ of Antiquity. The architectural details and motifs became gradually calmer and simpler to approach the classical ideas. The last phase of Baroque, the classicising late Baroque existed together with early Neo-Classicism. The buildings of the Late Baroque (or Rococo) were built in the same time with the buildings of the early Neo- Classicism. The only difference between them is given by their effect to the following architecture. 3 At about 1750 the archaeological revival (which was the discovery of ancient Greek art and a new feeling for the architecture of Imperial Rome) and the return to nature fostered the emergence of a new architectural idiom. In this idiom certain features recur constantly: clear-cut lines, monochrome surfaces, simple masses, antique archetypes (which are tholos, temple, peripteros, pantheon), elementary geometrical forms (which are cube, sphere, pyramid, cylinder), contrasts emphasized by light and shade, regular colonnades and porticos contrasting with great bare walls of simplicity, and finally cupolas and barrel-vaults. In these early times, in the mid 18th century the architects did not know precisely the ancient, classical forms, they could not use these forms properly as in ancient times. Instead of the knowledge of the ancient architecture, the Puritan view caused the changes in the Baroque architecture, which resulted in more simple façades. This style laid out the buildings together with their surroundings. Beside early Neo- Classicism landscape gardening, a new type of garden had architectural influence.

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