112 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



[Aprii., 



of the present day. Since the rebuilding of St. Paul's nothing so splendid 

 has been attempted in Britain, and indeed, since Versailles, scarce anything 

 on the Continent can compare with them. AVe have also the satisfaction of 

 knowing that the design is the best of our best architect, and that instead of 

 the grudging economy that is said to have spoiled so many of our undertak- 

 ings in art, the expenditure here has been not only liberal but lavish ; for 

 had we been content with a plain, honest brick building, with stone dressings, 

 such as would have satisfied our fathers or ourselves a few years ago, we 

 might have had all the accommodation the present one will afford, and better 

 arranged, for £150,000 or .£200,000, whereas the estimates for this one 

 already amount to .-£1,200,000, and it will not be finished under a million 

 and a half. Here then is at least a million of money spent on pure festhetic 

 ornament, a sum that would have restored to their pristine beauty (if we 

 ■wanted Gothic) every cathedral or church in the kingdom, or would have 

 established schools of art and design, with collections of art, in all the prin- 

 cipal cities in the kingdom ; this it has been determined to expend in realiz- 

 ing the design of one architect, and already the nation are beginning to tire 

 of their bauble before they have got it, and to think they have paid too 

 much for what they begin to find out will not be satisfactory when finished. 



" The river front is now nearly completed, and as Mr. Barry declares it to 

 he the best part of the design, we may safely assert that the new buildings, 

 tliough clad in the very prettiest and best selected Gothic detail, will, when 

 finished, be as much like the bold, meaning, purpose-like buildings of our 

 ancestors as the very pretty Swiss peasant girls and very polite brigands and 

 Albanians of our ball-rooms are like the rough originals. 



" Every building of our ancestors expressed in every part the purpose for 

 which it was erected, and with a degree of richness or simplicity suited to 

 its destination ; here, with the idea of producing a giand uniform whole, 

 every part has been made externally to look exactly alike. The speaker's 

 house is the counterpart of that of the usher of the black rod, and though 

 the latter is obliged to share his residence with a librarian, that is not to be 

 discovered from the exterior ; and equal magnificence is displayed in the 

 apartments allotted to the clerks of the House and all the inferior ofBces. 

 Indeed, whether it is the great conference hall or the public libraries or com- 

 mittee rooms, — whether it is the Queen's robing room or a librarian's bed 

 room, each is externally the same ; and whether the room is fifty feet by 

 thirty, or only fifteen feet square, the stories throughout are of the same 

 height, unless indeed, as has been suspected, some of these fine looking 

 windows are to be cut into two by concealed floors, a falsehood no Gothic 

 architect ever was guilty of, and a meanness which two honest windows 

 would never exhibit. 



" It is Heedless to point out at what an enormous sacrifice of expense and 

 convenience this has been effected ; but what is worse, it is not only not 

 Gothic, but is an attempt at the same silly pretension which induced Nash, 

 in the Regent's Park terraces, to group together a number of small houses 

 into one design, to make them look like a palace. The truth peeps out at 

 every corner there, and so it does here ; and if any one will take the trouble 

 of clothing any of them in Gothic detail, Chester Terrace for instance, he 

 will be surprised how nearly he has re-produced the river front of the Parlia- 

 meut Houses." 



Long as is the foregoing extracti we must immediately follow it up 

 by another still longer : — 



" It must always appear strange how an architect could have gone so 

 much out of his way to obtain this uniformity, and produce a prevalence of 

 the horizontal lines over the vertical, for not only is this utterly abhorrent 

 from Gothic in every case, but here, where he had a front about eight times 

 the length of its height to deal with, all his ingenuity should have been 

 exerted either to break the horizontal lines, or by bold projecting masses (as 

 at Versailles), to prevent the eye following them, and thus take oft" the low 

 street-like appearance the building now has; but, as if to make this still 

 more apparent, the towers, instead of being parts of the river front, so as to 

 give it height, are placed behind it, and disconnected, as if by contrast to 

 make it still lower. It is lucky for the architect's fame that the land front, 

 in spite of his worse judgment, will be broken and varied by the projections 

 of Westminster Hall and the law courts, and will thus much surpass the river 

 front; but it is painful to see the great tower placed so as by its mass to 

 depress and overpower the Abbey and Henry the Seventh's chapel. It would 

 have been diflicult to invent anything that could be more prejudicial to them 

 than this feature, which, if admissible at all, should have been placed where 

 the speaker's house is, at the angle next the bridge. Had this been done, 

 we should not have had the architect coolly asking for £120,000 to rebuild 

 the superstructui'e at great temporary inconvenience to the public, and per- 

 manent detriment to the navigation of the river, and this merely because he 

 forgot the existence of the bridge in making his design, or had not wit 

 enough to know how to counteract the effect of it on the building. It is 

 besides here, where there is a great thoroughfare and a fine open space (it is 

 understood that the houses in Bridge Street are to come down), where pro- 

 cessions and shows can be seen from the square, the bridge, and the river, 

 that the Queen's and Peers' state entrances, with the Peers' House, should 

 have been placed ; not as they now are, in a back street of Westminster ; 

 and had this been done, and the south end devoted to the Commons, there 

 would have been good grammar and good taste in building that part of a 

 plainer and less pretending style than the north, half devoted to royalty and 

 the peers. This would have been more appropriate to the confined situation, 

 and the saving of expense as great as the additioual convenience. 



" If, however, the exterior shows all these defects, and many more, which 

 it would be tedious to point out, the interior is far worse, which will be 

 easily understood when it is stated that one-fourth of the whole area is 

 occupied by eleven large and seven small courts ; and as these are all entirely 

 surrounded by high buildings, they will be at best but damp, ill-ventilated 

 well holes, whose floors the sun will seldom see. They increase the expense 

 of the building to an extent not easily calculated, not only by spreading it 

 over a quarter more space, but they actually present more lineal feet of stone- 

 faced wall than the whole exterior of the new building put together. 



" Had t'ne architect adopted one great court, with a glazed roof, running 

 behind the river front, and divided into four compartments by the two 

 houses and the central hall, these compartments forming four halls might 

 have been surrounded by three tiers of arcades, something similar to the 

 galleries of our old inn court yards, thus affording easy and cheerful access 

 to all the apartments, and doing away with the tunnel-like corridors which 

 at present occupy half the building. If, in addition to this, he had raised 

 the roof of his ground floor about ten feet, and lighted it with good honest 

 windows, instead of the loopholes which at present scarce admit light to 

 render it habitable, a much smaller building would have afforded far more 

 accommodation. 



" It is not easy to conceive anything that would, architecturally speaking, 

 have been more magnificent than this range of halls, extending at least 700 

 feet in length, and broken by the arcades supporting the houses and central 

 hall, so as to take off every appearance of narrowness ; and had something 

 like fan tracery been adopted for the roofs, but with the fairy lightness that 

 cast iron would have enabled the architect to introduce, and the interstices 

 glazed with coloured glass, we might fairly have challenged the world to 

 produce anything like it. In these halls, too, might have been placed the 

 memorials of our great men ; one court might have been devoted to our 

 literary men, another to our men of science, whilst the others would have 

 been occupied by our heroes and statesmen. Their statues might have 

 stood in the centre, and their illustrious deeds have been painted on the 

 walls. 



" By bringing the ground floor into use, it would not only have given the 

 building more height, which it much wants, but have provided space, in con- 

 junction with the halls, for coffee rooms, committee rooms, waiting rooms of 

 all sorts ; and by adopting four covered courts instead of the open ones, so 

 much space might have been attained that the building might have been set 

 back fifty feet from the present line of front, and a good broad terrace road 

 obtained, from which the river front might have been seen ; at present it is 

 entirely lost, and cannot be seen near enough to be examined from a boat ; 

 the present terrace, of thirty feet wide, is too narrow to admit of the building 

 being viewed from it, besides not being accessible to the public." 



The terrace is, in fact, not only too narrow, but much too low : it 

 ought to have been raised twelve or fifteen feet more, or tn about the 

 same level as the foot of the bridge ; that front of the building being 

 still of the same height as at present, consequently loftier than those 

 on the west side. Of course this would have caused material altera- 

 tion of the plan within, because the principal floor rooms towards the 

 river, must have been on a proportionably higher level than the rest ; 

 yet so far from being attended by inconvenience, that circumstance 

 might have been made to contribute not a little towards interior effect, 

 the ascent to those rooms being arranged somewhat after the same 

 manner as will now be that leading up from Westmin?ter Hall into St. 

 Stephen's Hall. 



Beyond the two last-mentioned portions of the future "Palace of 

 Westminster," we apprehend, the scheme for fresco-painting and 

 other decoration can hardly be carried out, — at least not so that the 

 public cau derive much advantage from it. No provision has been 

 made by the architect for what was not contemplated neilberby himself 

 nor any one else, when he first formed his plans. The fresco painting 

 scheme has been entirely an after-thought, and hardly practicable to 

 anything like the extent that has been talked of. Little less than 

 preposterous is it to suppose that decoration of the kind can be 

 adopted for corridors, which, great as will be their extent, will be 

 merely passages of communication — not at all too wide even for that 

 purpose, and with no more light than what is absolutely necessary; 

 yet, it is to be hoped that, come when they may, our English frescos 

 will endure to be seen to advantage without being shown in twilight. 



After Barrv, Pugin comes in for some share of the critic's notice 

 and animadversion, for while it is admitted that he not only under- 

 stands the style he follows, but enters into the spirit of it, he is charged 

 with wrong-headed enthusiasm, in endeavouring to dress us all up in 

 the costume of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. 



" It might please some enthusiastic persons," says the writer, " that we 

 should give up our science and civilization, and return to the barbarous igno- 

 rance and simplicity of those days; but it requires no great sagacity to fore- 

 see that, so far from retroceding, we cannot even stand still, but must 

 advance; and although, because we have no other art to admire, we are now 

 wild after correct copies of old churches, it is quite evident that neither the 

 symbolism nor the monkish superstition of the middle ages can have any 

 permanent hold on an enlightened people." 



So, too, think we: neither religious feeliog, nor feeling for art, is 



