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Conservation of the Garden Monuments at Stowe

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Transactions on the Built Environment vol 4, © 1993 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509 Conservation of the garden monuments at Stowe: the Temple of Concord and Victory P. Inskip Peter Inskip & Peter Jenkins Architects Ltd, London, UK It is extremely important to recognise that the development of the Gardens at Stowe was parallel and integral to the evolution of Stowe House and as such one cannot be separated from the other; both result from processes of continual change throughout the eighteenth century. Whilst Stowe House was constantly being added to and remodelled, parallel developments in the Gardens entailed the redistribution of statues as well as the wholesale demolition and rebuilding of temples as new landscapes were formed to suit the tastes and ambitions of three generations of the Temple and Grenville families. Stowe House, built by Sir Richard Temple between 1677 and 1683, was remodelled for Lord Cobham by Sir John Vanbrugh after 1717 and subsequently extended by a succession of architects with the result that by the middle of the eighteenth century the South Front appeared as an incoherent sum of separate pavilions. It was no wonder, therefore, that Lord Temple should have remodelled the house in 1770s first replacing Kent's screen walls on the North Front with Pitt's colonnades and then extending and recasting the south elevation following the general schema of the proposals for which Robert Adam was paid 100 guineas in 1771. * Parallel developments were carried out in the Gardens. The simple enclosures supporting the original house continued as references in the Gardens developed under Vanbrugh and Bridgeman until the creation of the great South Vista towards Buckingham necessitated the final removal of Lord Cobham's Parterre as well as several garden monuments which sheltered in the enclosures either side. Whilst it is evident that the architects working on the garden buildings at any one time are those employed on the House, the building accounts for Stowe show that the work on the fifty or so garden buildings was carried out by deploying workmen from the house as and when labour was available and that the building materials used in the gardens Transactions on the Built Environment vol 4, © 1993 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509 562 Structural Repair and Maintenance of Historical Buildings Transactions on the Built Environment vol 4, © 1993 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509 Structural Repair and Maintenance of Historical Buildings 563 followed those being chosen for works on the mansion at any particular time. The dispersal of the Stowe Estate after the Great War resulted in the acquisition of the house and gardens for Stowe School in 1923; in 1990 the Gardens with some thirty five surviving monuments were given by the school to the National Trust. We are architects for the repair of both Stowe House for the Governors of Stowe School and the garden buildings for the Trust. The project for their repair is particularly remarkable, not only because of the quality of the buildings by the very best eighteenth century architects, Vanbrugh, Kent, Gibbs, Borra, Pitt, Adam, Valdre, and Soane, but also from the very comprehensive documentation that exists. Historical research at Stowe is primarily centred on the Building Accounts and family papers in the Huntington Library in California, the British Library, the Public Records Office, and Stowe School. The records of the first half of the eighteenth century are sporadic, but those from 1749 onwards remain virtually intact. Normally, we experience architectural history through the works of the architects. At Stowe, because of the building accounts we also read history through the materials, the tradesmen and, significantly, the repairs. References to architects are rare, and this implies their limited involvement in the implementation of the garden structures. The records from the various archives are being collected and indexed systematically into a centralised computer system. Physical evidence is obtained by thorough architectural observation, investigation and recording. In parallel with drawn and photographic surveys, scientific analyses have been developed for records of building materials. Archaeology is one of the basic tools of investigation but it is kept to a minimum as it does represent a form of loss of historic fabric. Parameters of investigation are established in the Analysis of Building Fabric which identifies areas requiring clarification resulting from the research and survey work. In parallel with the Analysis of the Building Fabric, colleagues from the National Trust and the Stowe Advisory Committee are researching the social history and the development of the landscape. George Clarke has identified the tremendous political importance of Stowe in the eighteenth century and how the iconographic programmes for much of the House and areas of the garden are related to the concept of Liberty, and Michael Calnan, the Trust's Garden Adviser, is developing a Management Plan for the Landscape based on the same archives on which we are working. Upon completion of the investigations, the analyses represent the initial step in the preparation of the Conservation Plan. With our own work, the Analysis of Building Fabric seeks to coordinate and analyse all documentary and physical evidence, it measures the extent of intactness of the fabric, past Transactions on the Built Environment vol 4, © 1993 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509 564 Structural Repair and Maintenance of Historical Buildings development of 'place' and the context of changes. It incorporates proposals and recommendations for clarification by further physical examination by other specialist practitioners. The Conservation Plan has the principal objective of setting out how the aim of retaining or recovering the cultural significance of the building, including its maintenance and future, may best be achieved. Work with historic buildings can be bounded within the parameters of preservation, conservation, consolidation, restoration, reconstruction, anastylosis, and re-creation. Each has specific meanings as defined by current conservation terminology in documents such as The Venice Charter (Italy, 1966) and The Burra Charter (Australia, 1977). At Stowe, we are finding that our work is principally concerned with conservation and consolidation. We have not found a case for the re-creation of any of the lost monuments, although Vanbrugh's Pyramid is frequently proposed for such treatment, but restoration is believed appropriate at times, usually to twentieth century alterations which have changed the intrinsic value of the building and detracted from their over-riding cultural significance. The methodology which I have described briefly can be illustrated by considering the Temple of Concord and Victory, one of the most important, and, probably, the first, large scale, neo-classical building in Europe. The Analysis of Fabric is complete, the Conservation Plan well advanced, and repairs should start next year. The construction of the Grecian Building, as it was first known, was started by Lord Cobham in 1747 and the shell was complete by 1751. The identification of its architect remains uncertain; It could have been Lord Cobham's nephew and heir, Earl Temple, or alternatively the design might be an adaptation by Lancelot Brown of a design of James Gibbs as had happened with the Cobham Pillar in 1747. 'Capability' Brown was Clerk of Works at Stowe (1741 - 1751) and was responsible for the layout of the Grecian Valley itself. The prostyle hexastyle building was certainly not Greek in its inspiration; it owed much to the Maison Carree at NTmes, but is peripteral, not pseudo-peripteral. Documentary and pictorial references have revealed a series of remodellings in the aesthetic development of the temple between 1751-55. In an attempt to make the building as pure as possible, the east wall was taken down and set back to allow the creation of the pronaos, the windows were blocked up, and statues were placed on the pediments. In 1762 it was reported that Earl Temple had dedicated 'a most /Md^Mz/zce/zf /?%/'/<#/%# o/f/zc /wmc <Wc/-, O)/2cr)/W/ac ef y/cfon'ac^... 'as a monument to the glories of the war terminated by the peace of Fontainebleau.' * The dedication involved the embellishment of the building. At the East Pediment, a carved bas-relief was installed in the tympanum, and a statue of Transactions on the Built Environment vol 4, © 1993 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509 Structural Repair and Maintenance of Historical Buildings 565 Victory was substituted on the apex. Symbolic medallions were introduced into the cella and pronaos in 1763, and the great doors were enriched with egg and dart mouldings around the panels a year later. Within the building, a niche below an inscription from Valerius Maximus was occupied by a statue of Liberty. After languishing in the 'cellar beneath the Chapel collonade', where they were recorded stored as late as 1839, 'six oriental granite columns without capital or base'* bought by the first Duke of Buckingham in Italy in 1828 were set up as a screen on a raised dais at the west end of the cella in 1845. This necessitated the removal of the aedicule and niche housing the statue of Liberty, thus destroying part of the iconography of the building. Domestic use of the building resulted in unimplemented proposals for the reintroduction of windows in the 1870s, but the panels in the doors had been glazed in 1845 in an attempt to light a building totally dependent for illumination on its door opening. The great dispersal of Stowe in 1921 included the sale of the four lead statues from the bases of the two pediments. The new School occupied Stowe House in 1923. Four years later two eminent architects reporting on the siting and the design of a new School Chapel recommended two acts of vandalism.
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