Modern British Architecture

In December 2005, Time Out London ran a feature titled “North versus South.” Category by category, from best record shop to best “chippy,” each side of the Thames was judged. Final score: North London, 14. South London, 16. Just thirty years ago, the outcome of the contest would have been quite the opposite. The South Bank had been an important site of trade and commerce since the 18th century, serving as the main point of entry for food coming into London and earning itself the nickname of London’s Larder. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, a wave of dock closures ushered in an era of poverty and unemployment. The disparity between the two banks was striking; the city was divided.

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When the young William Morris commissioned his friend and colleague, architect Philip Webb, to design him a home, it was inevitable that it would reflect their shared architectural philosophy. Completed in 1859, the Red House is regarded as the first building of the then un-named Arts and Crafts Movement, from its carefully asymmetrical façade to its hand-painted ceilings. Dedicated to honesty in design and good craftsmanship, and eager to allude to a romantic ideal, Webb and Morris created a home that, in its deficiencies as well as its strengths, clearly displays their youthful energy and commitment to their vision.

Morris and Webb met while working under Gothic revivalist architect George Edmund Street, for whom Morris was an apprentice and Webb, a senior clerk. While studying at Oxford, Morris had fallen in with a group of painters called the Pre-Raphaelites and Webb fit right into this artistic circle. In 1858, two years after they first met, the newly married William and Jane Morris approached Webb with the idea of designing a family home. It was Webb’s first solo project.

Webb actively resisted being attached to a specific style, preferring to develop a personal philosophy that was to become the foundation of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was strongly influenced by John Ruskin, an art and social critic, who once wrote that “art is the expression of pleasure in labor.� To Webb, an architect was no mere designer: an ideal architect would understand all the elements of construction, a ‘master builder’ who led a community of tradesmen rather than a domineering, distant presence. However, he rejected Ruskin’s idea that “a building without ornament is not architecture,� believing instead that good materials, arranged in a straightforward fashion, would be beautiful enough in and of themselves. While most Victorian architects tended to design according to some existing architectural style, without considering the context and integrity of the site, Webb wanted to reestablish a sense of place and consistency with regional traditions and craft.

Morris deplored the transformation that rapid industrialization had brought upon traditional English life, so it is not surprising that he chose the picturesque town of Upton-at-Bexleyheath - removed from the smokestacks of London - for his country home. The location had the added attraction of proximity to the pilgrim route Chaucer immortalized in The Canterbury Tales. At one acre, the plot was large enough for both a sizeable house and garden. Part of Webb’s philosophy was to think in terms of the whole site, and so the garden was part of the original design as well. The sloping roof of the building reaches down to the meet the climbing flowering plants, linking house with garden. Red House, as it came to be called, was built in the shape of an L, and took its name from its distinctive red-brick walls. Webb envisioned a house that, far from being just another box with windows, would consist of a collection of parts that color and distinctive roofing would bring together into a unified whole. Ruskin believed that the roof was the “soul� of a house, an idea Webb took to heart, constructing one that makes full use of varying pitches, gables, dormer windows and hips. Windows of all different shapes, sizes and arrangements break up the simple walls. The liberal design of the windows may seem haphazard, but in fact they correspond to the size of room behind them.

Some find the façade plain, even austere, but Webb believed that the beauty of a building came not from tacked-on ornamentation, but from the honest textures and colors of the craftsman’s work. The interior structural elements shared this devotion to honesty. Exposed brick detailing is found throughout, the ceilings share the general form of the particular roof shape above, and the point or segmentation of the arch is dictated by structural necessity. The simple, practical designs display a fidelity to the craftsman’s hand and gave Morris a space to ornament the interior any way he pleased. True to the Arts and Crafts spirit, Morris insisted that every decorative element and piece of furniture be designed and built specifically for his “Palace of Art.� He enlisted his visiting artist friends to paint, carve, and sew decorations for both the house and its furniture. The hand painted murals and glass window details often incorporated allusions to literature and allegory, while the tapestries that Morris’ wife Jane embroidered were covered with floral patterns of her husband’s own design. The personal touch is everywhere, from the iron-bordered dining table meant to withstand Morris’ drunken slamming of his beer glass to the presence of his motto, “If I can,� written beneath a window.

Although the house was built and decorated with a fastidious attention to detail, many more practical matters were overlooked. The Red House contains no bathrooms, only water closets; there was no back entrance for deliveries, meaning that they had to be carried through the garden; and there was an almost medieval disregard for heating. Victorians worried about the affects of the sun on their pearly white skin and interior furnishings, so the fact that the house was built facing North was not unusual, but this did mean that the house was brutally cold, even in summer. The larder, which should have been the coolest room in the house, was actually the warmest, while the ornate fireplaces were not large enough to adequately heat the rest of the house. In fact, the fireplaces smoked, and a few years after the house was built the chimneys had to be extended to fix the problem. Overall, however, Webb and Morris reached their goal: to create an unpretentious home, built by collaborative effort, that reasserted the status of the craftsman in the midst of the industrial revolution. The more pragmatic Webb later had some regrets about the building, but nevertheless, despite its idiosyncrasies, the Red House was a launch pad for the Arts and Crafts movement and remains a landmark of British Architecture.

Works Cited:

Kirk, Sheila. Philip Webb: Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture. Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2005.

Marsh, Jan. William Morris & Red House. Great Britain: National Trust Books, 2005.

Hollamby, Edward. Red House: Philip Webb. London: Phaidon, 1993.

 

This photo was taken at Hill House and shows a detail of the front gate at the entrance. Though this design is certainly not vital to the function of the gate, it exemplifies architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s attitude that ornament should not be severed from structure. We see this in the use of the same wrought-iron material for both the standard bars of the gate and the decorative elements; rather than “stuck on,” the aesthetics come out of the already present and necessary parts. The Glasgow School of Art (images below) similarly takes the essential - a gate or a window bracket - and elaborates upon it rather than adds to it.

The specific shapes and style of the gate detail here are also typical of Mackintosh’s metalwork. There is a sort of organic geometry at work here, from the small teardrop cutouts in the band at the base to the clover-leaf-like loops to the circle at the top. He plays curve against line, clustering the verticals that are otherwise widely and regularly spaced below the swirling iron bends. Mackintosh seemed interested in such polarities throughout Hill House. Light and dark, courtesy of shadows off the furniture or simply room decor, are in constant tension. Perhaps the most striking of these is the distinction between the roughly-hewn exterior and the meticulous, even delicate, interior. Walking up to the house, one would never guess that the gravelly walls set in blunt right angles would house rooms stenciled with roses, awash in purple and pink. As the entrance to the site, the decorative gate serves as an interesting introduction and invitation to both sides of the home, as soft decorative motifs find expression in a distinctly cold material and forbidding structure.

Central Park is the heart of Manhattan, yet is seemingly antithetical to the aggressively urban landscape of the rest of the island. European parks, particularly English ones, greatly influenced co-designers American Frederick Law Olmstead and London-born Calvert Vaux in their development of the “Greenwald Plan.� Combining rambling walks with more formal gardens, they hoped to create a space that would assert America’s ability to match Europe’s natural culture. Though the park was designed in imitation of European landscapes, it preserves a certain regional quality by using local materials for the bridges scattered throughout. And though originally seen as a retreat for the wealthy upon its completion in 1873, Central Park today serves as one of the city’s most democratic locations, where New Yorkers of all walks spend time and find entertainment.

I think this photo captures one of the many successful aspects of Olmstead and Vaux’s design. The curving pathways create vistas and are carefully mapped so that at any point, you never see the end of the path you are on. The effect is striking: walking through the Park, you can become completely absorbed in the surroundings and forget you are in the city at all.

Though the decidedly pastoral quality of Central Park would immediately suggest that it is not modern, the construction and the context prove otherwise. The space was necessary because of the encroaching presence of industrialized life; the desire for an oasis was a direct reaction to the age of modernity. The physical construction of the park is also a testament to more advanced methods. The landscape is entirely man-made, down to the lakes. And the desire to implant alien materials, and the ability to execute that vision, are in themselves modern.