1843.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECTS JOURNAL. 



433 



it, hut it is injurious to the public. Most persons upon whom the duty de- 

 volves of procuring designs for intended buildings ,vre imposed upon by a 

 notion that, in advertising for anonymous designs, they secure the advantage 

 of designs from men of character and matured judgment ; but as few such 

 ever respond to the call in ordinary cases, the great bulk of competition 

 business falls into the bands of the intriguing jobbers, and the public and the 

 profession are both cheated. 



•• Even in the case of the houses of Parliament, which has been thought by 

 many to afford the fullest justification of the system of general or public com- 

 petition, because of its apparent successful result, the public possibly suffered 

 irremediable injury. The principal public works of the preceding twenty 

 or thirty years bad been committed absolutely to a few practitioners, who 

 ought, therefore, to be supposed the most competent, or at least, among the 

 most competent, Architects the country afforded. It might be readily deter- 

 mined that such men would not enter into the sort of competition that was 

 established; and so it happened that they did not; and the nation lost the 

 application of the knowledge, experience, and taste of those who were, or 

 ■who ought to have been, the best qualified, when seeking designs for one of 

 the most important public worksthat a nation can have to devise. Either this 

 was a great advantage lost, or the nation had been greatly wronged for a long 

 series of years by the committal of its public works to men whose loss in 

 such a case was no disadvantage ? But it may be confidently assumed that, if 

 the successful candidate in the competition that took place for the Houses of 

 Parliament had been established in practice and reputation at the time of the 

 competition as be must find himself now, no design would have been 

 forthcoming from him. The successful competitor for the Houses of 

 Parliament sent no design for the Royal Exchange, and surely the talent 

 of the Architect, to whom pre- eminence had been so universally accorded in 

 the case of the Palace of the Legislature ought to have been secured in pro- 

 curing a choice of designs for the Forum of Commerce. 



•' It must be remembered, nevertheless, that the all-important limitation 

 of cost was not imposed upon the Houses of Parliament Designs — and the 

 source of much of the difficulty in ordinary cases did not therefore exist. 

 With the ISoyalExehange this difficulty presented itself, and, in an endeavour 

 to act justly, the grossest injustice was done; the viciousness of the system 

 prevailing against an apparently sincere desire to do well, until, at length, 

 the matter was decided in a contest of interest between two Architects, 

 neither of whom was understood to have taken part in the public Com- 

 petition, and if either had done so, his design had been passed over in the 

 original selection as of inferior merit ! * * 



•' The present writer has already pointed out in the foregoing Lecture the 

 only efficient remedy, as he believes, for the abuses of the existing system of 

 competition ; and it is in the hands of the profession to adopt it and leave 

 the public to seek its remedy. The " profession " cannot, of course, compel 

 but by the example of individual members of it acting upon all, and by 

 making it evident that every man must be himself the example who would 

 bear an honourable standing among his fellows. * 



•' The public ought to understand, however, that what is generally requi- 

 red in a competition cannot be fully and honestly complied with by either 

 p<.rty. It is one thing to make a design for a building of the kind and ca- 

 pacity required — it is another thing to arrange such design in detail, that the 

 co*t of executing it may be accurately estimated — it is still another thing to 

 specify particularly all the materials, and their various kinds, qualities, and 

 capacities, the operations to which the materials shall be subjected, and the 

 quantity and quality of the labour or workmanship that shall be bestowed 

 upon them respectively — and it is still a further operation to estimate from 

 the detailed drawings and particularized specifications what the cost of the 

 building must be. All these things should be done, nevertheless, and by 

 every competitor, when the cost is a condition; and, moreover, every design 

 so elaborated should be fully investigated in all its details, or the conditions 

 of the competition are nut fulfilled by the parties imposing them. Now, 

 conscientious men, having entered upon a competition, are compelled to limit 

 the extent and appearance of their design to the means set forth in the 

 " conditions," and to satisfy their own minds that it can he carried out as 

 the parties requiring it expect, within those means. The most conscientious, 

 however, cannot do all that ought to be done to make the conditions com- 

 plete — cannot, because of the immense disproportion between the labour 

 and expense which such fulfilment would involve, and the probability that 

 the labour and expense so applied will not be of the slightest value. But the 

 practice has been, and is, and it always will he, with bodies of men, be they 

 small or large, committees, or the public in general, to look at externals — at 

 the mere outside; and they are influenced by the effect produced in or by the 

 prettiness of the drawings or models in which the design presents itself; the 

 merits or demerits of the "plan," as architects understand the term — the 

 kinds and qualities of materials and workmanship — the extent of enrichment 

 in detail — and the thousand other things that go to affect the merit of a 

 design and its compliance or non-compliance with the "conditions," are 

 neither attended to nor understood ; the effect of the design as to its deco- 

 rative disposition is the utmost that they perceive, and the decision takes 

 place accordingly. Hence it is that the conscientious man must always be 

 an unsuccessful public competitor when cost is a condition. Even in the 

 notorious case of the Royal Exchange, which might appear to contradict 

 this, the reputedly successful conscientious competitor was still, for any value 

 attachable to success, unsuccessful. * * * 



" In truth, the public or their committees ask for too Much, having refer- 



ence to what they really want. Let the requirement be confined to a ge. 

 neral design of a building of the particular kind required — of certain capa- 

 city — and adapted to a particular site — and to be built of certain main con- 

 stituent materials. — Stipulate for a particular scale, ami that the designs 

 shall be presented in drawings — in outline, or tinted — and of what particular 

 tint or tints alone — and, if perspective views are desired — fix the point or 

 points of view. More will not then be required than mo^t Arc! itects would 

 be willing to engage themselves upon a comparatively small fee, giving the 

 public thereby the advantage of Competition, as far as it can he made of any 

 use, without involving the great expense that elaborated designs must occa- 

 sion. The one, two, and three hundred pound premiums, now held out to 

 gambling crowds, might then be divided into twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty 

 guinea fees, according to the circumstances of the case, anil offered to such 

 practitioners as might be known, or whose latent " talent," committees, or 

 individual members of committes, might desire to draw out or encourage j 

 and as no man educated to a liberal profession is without some connexions 

 to whom it will happen to be able to give a helping hand, by nominating 

 him, or procuring him to be nominated, upon one such Competition or other, 

 all " talent " connected with knowledge and supported by character might 

 emerge from the greatest obscurity in which it is to be found so associated. 

 The successful competitor under such circumstances might he trusted to 

 carry out his design in detail, adapting it to all the circumstances of the case 

 much better than be could have done in a general Competition. 



" In an endeavour to convince Architects, as a profession, in what their 

 true interest consists, it is, perhaps, but proper to have pointed out to the 

 public than the present system of Competition represses the honourable can- 

 didate for reputation and employment, by rendering it impossible for him to 

 compete on equal terms with the uncrupulous, and that, consequently, the 

 public are thrown into the hands of the latter ; and to have pointed out also, 

 that there is a reasonable course that may be pursued by which all the ad- 

 vantages of Competition are to be obtained, although Architects refuse any 

 longer to lend themselves to gambling speculations. 



The public will, nevertheless, go on as they have gone on until Architects, 

 as a profession, shall have declined any longer to degrade and beggar them- 

 selves. It is, therefore, not a question proposed to the public, — and it is 

 one indeed with which the public have nothing to do, beyond the interest 

 which the public have in raising the character of the profession of Archi- 

 tecture, but which they will never recognise while they think they benefit by- 

 its debasement. // is a matter to be determined by the Architects themselves ; 

 and it may, perhaps, be hoped that this exposition of the abuse the profes- 

 sion labour under will induce all who are not quite besotted with the vice 

 to consider the question in this, its true point of view ; and, having so con- 

 sidered it, there can be, it may be further hoped, no doubt that all those who 

 have any sense of honour and virtue, or, indeed any self-respect, re- 

 maining, will no longer lend themselves to the present degrading system, and 

 it will soon cease to exist among us. 



October, 1842. 



REVIEWS. 



Penny Cyclopedia. Art. " Window." 



The part of this excellent Cyclopaedia, which will be published on 

 the same dav as this number of our own Journal, is, we believe, the 

 final one, and thus a very arduous undertaking will have been suc- 

 cessfully accomplished, after being carried on for eleven years, not 

 only with the same diligence as at first, but, if anything, with an in- 

 creased degree of it. We have, indeed, seen querulous and even re- 

 proachful observations as to the extent to which the work was being 

 carried on; but we think all — even the most impatient, roust now re- 

 joice that it was not brought to a close within the number of volumes 

 originally contemplated, and which it has exceeded by three. Had 

 there been any kind of stoppages, or want of punctuality, there would 

 have been some grounds for complaint, and there might have been 

 great uncertainty as to when it would be finished, yet it has invariably 

 been brought out regularly from its first commencement, which is 

 much more than can be said for every other work of the kind. 

 Others, too, there are, which have been hurried on towards their close 

 that they may be said to have been finished without being completed, 

 the articles in the later letters of the alphabet bearing no sort of pro- 

 portion to those in the earlier ones; and such has been the case in re- 

 gard to two architectural dictionaries. 



Fortunately it is quite the reverse with this Cyclopedia, since the 

 two last volumes contain several articles which, interesting as they 

 arc in themselves, might have been omitted, as the omission could 

 have been neither detected nor complained of. Among them are 

 several additions to architectural biography, including the names of 

 VoronihUm., Weinbrenner, IVitbtkii'g, Wd'kins, and Wood of Bath, 

 the last of whom has found no place in any English biographical 



59* 



