Part 2

The modern American or Canadian bank consists of a great dignified hall, so large and lofty that the counters and such few screens as there are appear, in relative size, like the furniture in a ducal drawing-room. This hall is not generally of ornate architecture, neither are multi-coloured marbles used. It is usually a well-proportioned, lofty apartment of simple rectangular shape, free from intermediate columns, not unlike the best rooms in the British Museum. If a polished stone or marble is used it is generally Roman travertine, with its quiet, warm texture. It is difficult to generalise, but one might state with some degree of accuracy that the architectural scheme is mostly one of large flat pilasters, with a Roman coffered ceiling. That is to say, it is one of architecture reduced to very simple elements. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the great impression of dignity, even of solemnity, which awaits you directly you pass through the revolving doors. You are impressed almost in the same way and to the same degree as you are when you first pass into a cathedral. The service may be going on—it is all the while in the bank—but it is the building which holds you.

When you come to examine it in detail you see about the base of the big pilasters, and evenly spread over the floor of the larger part of the cella—one cannot get away from the temple feeling—a number of small human beings busily at work. These humans are protected by low stone enclosure walls, surmounted in some places by the most delicate and beautiful small bronze grills and screens, or marble ones with bronze in-filling.

I noticed with interest in the National City Bank, New York—the Bank, I was informed, of the Standard Oil magnates—that these screens were of delightful Early Christian detail. I did not complain of any inappropriateness. I admired them intensely. They provided a charming foil to the great Roman interior, with its detail derived from the Pantheon. They may have been at the same time some private tribute to early martyrs in the cause of oil, but that did not matter.

Across this expanse of heads you see, or think you see, the presidents and vice-presidents of the institution. There seems to be no concealment in private rooms. Everyone is there to be shot at when the hold-up comes, and not merely a few cashiers. Architecturally, the result is magnificent. The most insignificant depositor can walk up and down the great hall and either enjoy the architecture or watch the machine working, according to his taste. If he wants to talk to the head of a department he is not taken away to a small room, but to a low armchair placed beside that official’s desk. So great is the floor area that there is perfect privacy by the mere space between the desks.

Think what all this means to the architect designing the bank. Apart from vaults below, his work consists in giving dignified expression, externally and internally, to one great hall. The finest materials and workmanship are at his disposal. Was there any problem like it, at once so simple and so splendid, since the days of the Greek temples?

Instead, what do we do? Firstly, we very rarely consider a bank worthy of being an independent building. It generally has other offices over it. The only one I remember which expresses the banking hall as a single unit is the fine National Provincial Bank, in Bishopsgate, which was built some time in the ’seventies by John Gibson, and still remains externally our finest bank building. But one would not mind the offices over—they have sometimes to have them in America—if the banking hall itself were realised by the bankers and their architects as the splendid opportunity it is for noble architecture.

It is difficult to think that we really believe in banking, as the solid serious profession we talk about, when our banks are not only nearly as numerous, but very like our public-houses. Both are more often than not glorified corner shops. There is the public bar and the private bar in each. The public bar is of any shape so long as there is sufficient counter space, and the private bar or manager’s room has the same mahogany and frosted glass. Externally, each shows, too, a nice taste in pink, polished granite.

In the smaller country towns, however, there is a good deal to be said for the more domestic character of our banks, though, as the greatest builders in the country at the present time, the five big banks have not a very distinguished record even there for good and suitable work. One does not want in a Cotswold village the Ionic temple of Main Street. In the Metropolis or the big provincial cities, however, it is clear to anyone who has crossed the Atlantic that our banks have not yet risen to their architectural opportunities. It is not that they have not spent enough money. It is that their buildings have not been fine and austere enough. They have, in short, not treated their banking business sufficiently seriously.

V.

THE SMALL SUBURBAN HOUSE.

NOT only at election times, but always under modern conditions, the very small house is the most important unit in our towns. As long as the mechanic, the small tradesman, and the black-coated poor prefer to live in separate dwellings under separate roofs, each thinking of his little box of bricks as an Englishman’s castle, their little houses will occupy a larger space than any other type of building. Even the escaping motorist, leaving his responsibilities and his smell behind him, cannot be entirely unaware of the miles of dreary side streets down which he glances for an oncoming bicycle or milk cart before he reaches the open country. Those who travel by train, omnibus, or tram car, are even more conscious of them, the former seeing not only their little grinning faces, as alike as a row of Mr. Studdy’s puppies, but also their untidy Mary Ann backs, with their strips of desolate garden or yard, each decorated with a pole for wireless or for washing.

What stale, vulgar mind or minds brought about this desert of mean streets, all potential if not actual slums, which is one of the most distinctively English features of our towns? As far as I can see, the minds which were ultimately responsible for them were minds replete with the very best intentions engaged in drawing up model by-laws in Whitehall.

Beauty and by-laws do not at any time live very happily side by side. The few towns like Chester which have none, may have slums, though not very many, but they still retain some of the beauty which a good building tradition alone can give. Model by-laws destroy tradition, destroy independent design, and for all small town property put architects out of work. Let us see how this comes about.

Following the Public Health Acts of 1875, which at any rate gave us water-tight or approximately water-tight drains, most municipalities, instigated by Whitehall, thought they could apply to buildings with equal success the same sort of rules they had applied to drains. They began, therefore, to lay down the minimum thickness of all walls, the minimum strength of all floors, indeed, the minimum size of practically everything. We were not to be allowed to fall through our bedroom floors even if we wanted to.

So far so good. But what was the result? At once the minimum became a maximum, but that alone would not have mattered very much. More happened. Anyone could now build to satisfy the authority, because everyone was told how. Hence arose the standard minimum little house and the jerry builder who dealt in them as others dealt in peas or potatoes. Why go to an architect, why have any thoughtful design at all? Copy the model by-laws, and all will be well. Your plans are bound to be passed. They were, and the result is what we see—minimum roads, minimum houses, maximum repetition, and maximum vulgarity.

You may ask why the latter? The answer is because the jerry builder was not wholly a bad man. It would have been much better if he had been. He had just a little conscience, and that was represented by the decorated bay window, and the stained glass over the front door. I use the past tense, for he has practically gone, clever man that he was in many respects, and has retired probably to a multiple edition of his own residences, all gables and conceit, at Bournemouth, or some similar place. But before he went he left his indelible mark on all our towns where there is a belt of his work, one to six miles wide, as a permanent memorial to his pre-war faith in model by-laws.

The position has altered because the margin of profit on which the jerry builder worked does not now exist in the case of the smallest houses, and because the model by-laws have been remodelled. The speculative builder—we will no longer call him by his sobriquet, for we are all very anxious he should start work again, if not quite on the same lines—has now to confine himself to slightly larger houses which he can sell. There is a chance, therefore, that he will have to consider the external design a little more carefully, and perhaps even employ an architect, though the newest little houses in places like Bournemouth have all the same old flapper-like features, the same ostentation and desire to make an immediate impression, while at the same time turning a cold shoulder to the neighbouring house. These are the marks of an uncivil, unurbane, suburban mind, in the modern and worst sense of that term.

The hope is in the smaller houses, which are too expensive for the speculative builder at the rents that can be charged. These are therefore being erected everywhere, though not nearly fast enough, by the municipalities under the various Government schemes. Everyone must have been impressed by the general improvement in design which has come about. The loosening of the by-laws has meant the employment of competent architects both for the lay-out of the roads and for the houses themselves. Instead of long narrow roads of closely packed minimum houses we have now groups of three and four houses of simple shape, which being simple can combine into some sort of unity.

The fault in the present housing schemes, good as they in general are, is, I fancy, that the units are too dissociated. We have gone too far in the opposite direction. We want, I think, more terraces, of anything up to a dozen houses, lineable with the road. We want more of the effect of a village that has grown, rather than of a lot of little model houses squeezed out of the same mould and dotted about on the landscape. But the change has been wonderful, and the chief step towards that change has been the un-modelling of the model by-laws.

VI.

OUR BIG RAILWAY STATIONS.

ONE reads in the daily papers that one of our biggest railways has commissioned a set of posters from most of the painter-members of the Royal Academy. Whether the R.A.s are equal to this effort in design remains to be seen, but one may take the action of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway as a sign of grace—if not exactly a death-bed repentance. After the spirited and successful deeds of the London Underground in this respect, the bigger railways had to do something. Being big, they naturally thought of the Academy; from a great combine one cannot expect any very tiring effort in clear thinking.

But what has all this to do with the big railway stations? I think it lies very near their heart. It gives at any rate a clue to the strange mystery of their shapelessness. The big railway termini in America have no posters, but are in themselves fine architectural schemes. The big termini in this country, especially the recent ones, like Victoria, have no architectural scheme, but plenty of posters. One can imagine the English director saying, “It does not matter about the shape of our stations if we plaster them with these,” and then, more touchingly, “If we go to the Royal Academy for the plasters, all will indeed be well.”

This state of mind, of course, exhibits a fundamental error of the most primitive kind. Our railway companies to-day seem to have as little faith in their own enterprises as do our banks. If railway transport is the great and important thing a great many people, not even excluding all railway directors, think it to be, the thing in itself is worthy of fine expression.

The terminal station is the gateway of the town, but a gateway through which people are brought from the uttermost parts or through which they set out on illimitable journeys. What structure in the whole of our civilisation should make a finer appeal to the imagination? Yet if we think of our London termini, only King’s Cross and Euston express in any sense this gateway idea, and in the latter an hotel belonging to the railway has been allowed to impinge upon and spoil the great gateway symbol—the Doric Propylea—which Hardwick, the architect, invented for this very purpose.

For the rest, our main railway stations are big railway sheds, leaning up against hotels or blocks of railway offices, the details of which are necessarily entirely out of scale with the spans of the train-shed roof. Sometimes this roof, as at St. Pancras, is in itself a fine thing; sometimes, as at Waterloo, it is, in the words of Mr. Roger Fry, a series of hen-roosts. In no case in England in recent years has the real dignity and importance of the railway as a railway been allowed or given anything like full expression.

In New York the problem has been approached quite differently. There the town has seen in the first place that the railway tracks are below the ground level, and that no steam engine enters the town to befoul it with its smoke. At the Great Central Station there are two tiers of tracks, one for main line and one for suburban traffic, one above the other and both below the surface. With us, especially in the southern lines, the reverse seems to be the general rule. Our railway companies, regardless of all amenity, carry their tracks high in the air, thereby cutting off large districts by embankments and generally deforming the town.

With the sunk railway tracks in New York the structure above ground is left free, and the station problem resolves itself, on the practical side, into gathering together the passengers in the most comfortable way and sending them down to or up from the right railway track at the right time. On the architectural side, the American method has meant that an architect of repute has been called in to express above ground the majesty of the particular railway, while using, of course, the plan forms most convenient to passengers. When he has done that and has thereby made the finest possible advertisement of that particular railway, no other kind of advertisement, either of the railway itself or of anything else, is permitted within the station.

I remember well a New Yorker’s first view of one of our own termini. He turned to me and said “Say, man, it’s a vaudeville show.” And he was right. Compared with the great halls of the American stations, our Waterloos and Victorias are comic opera inside and out. Theirs are monumental structures, through which pour with ease vastly greater crowds than we deal with, for New York, with practically the same population as London has only two great terminal stations.

The fact is our stations take any shape left over by the engineers. No architect of the first rank has been employed since Hardwick at Euston, on any great terminal station, whereas Charles Follen McKim—the Christopher Wren of America—conceived and designed the Pennsylvania Station, and two slightly lesser men had almost more success with the Central Station. Our railway companies are generally content to give the engineer an architectural assistant or to keep in their employ a tame architect, who works for no one else, which is in itself but another confession that they consider the shape and form of their stations a question of very secondary importance.

Such a view is, of course, at once vastly unpatriotic, an insult to the intelligence of the community, but also a mistake, one would think, on purely commercial grounds. No American walks through the immense concourse hall, lined with Roman travertine, of the Great Central Station in New York or penetrates the series of halls, like some vaster Baths of Caracalla, of the Pennsylvania Station, without a sense of pride in the two great railway companies who have given the country such noble monuments. The average New Yorker feels to these two stations as the average English schoolboy does to express engines. He takes you to see them. Who takes anyone to see Waterloo or Victoria? Who is impressed by their combined red brick and stone cinema-architecture? But no one fails to be impressed by the vast, simple Roman architecture of the New York stations or the great triple arched façade of the Union Station at Washington.

The Americans believe in architecture; they know its value at its best as both the most abstract and at the same time the most powerful form of human expression, and their railway magnates have the sense to make use of it. Instead, ours go to the Royal Academy for pretty pictures with which to cover up their disgrace.

VII.

RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS OF TO-DAY.

NO one could call ours a temple building era. Yet more, and more truly, religious buildings seem to me to have been built during the last twenty or thirty years than in any equal space of time since the dissolution of the monasteries.

This may seem a strange statement when we look back on the fervours of the Tractarian movement and the endless Gothic churches it produced—and one might almost add the endless Gothic cathedrals it destroyed. Looking at that handiwork one begins to wonder whether the medieval movement of last century was after all really a religious movement based on any real feeling or just a sentimentally romantic one.

How is it that this so-called irreligious age in which we live, and this certainly a vulgar one if we are to judge it by its civic buildings, has produced ecclesiastical buildings which are living and vital things, while that Victorian age, in spite of its hymns and its prayer meetings, its battles of the styles and its religious arguments, produced mainly, if not entirely, dead copies, or rather travesties, of worn out past architecture?

It is a strange paradox and one which I think can be explained only by the fact that under the mass of neglect and indifference with which religion struggles to-day, a few enthusiastic artists are able to work with a freedom which was denied to their fellows in the second half of the nineteenth century, when every layman was an ecclesiologist and every parson had some half-baked theory of medieval art of his own, which he felt it his duty to run. What chance had the poor architect when his style was dictated to him and confined to some fifty years of a century itself five centuries old? Yet that was everywhere the common practice. Archæology reigned supreme, the only difficulty being that the exact fifty years for imitation and revival changed from time to time. It was a case of the dead not only burying the dead, but burying the living too.

To my thinking it was the interior of Bentley’s great Catholic Cathedral at Westminster which finally broke the idea that Gothic, in one of its many past manifestations, was the only religious style. That grave and vast interior proved indeed that the requisite conditions for solemn building lay really in the opposite direction. It showed that lofty plain wall surfaces, even of common stock brick, were more important in giving the idea of remoteness and seclusion from the world than the richest clustered Gothic columns. One felt after first seeing the Westminster Cathedral that even the Abbey nave, probably the most perfect piece of Gothic in England, if it were new to-day and fresh and unhallowed by endless associations, would not have the same power over the mind, the same humbling yet inspiring effect that this vast dimly lit hall of plain brickwork and concrete possessed. The very simplicity of its round arches, its sheer unbroken walls and piers, its plain sedate domes gave it a solemnity which richer and more articulate structures like correct Gothic ones could not from their nature possess. That it was, however, foreign and to a certain extent therefore esoteric in its appeal, while it made it no doubt very convenient to its particular purpose, rendered its style difficult if not unsuitable to general adaptation to ordinary and smaller churches.

The effect of Bentley’s work, however, was none the less pronounced. It showed the Gothic architects of our churches, or certain of them who were open to new inspiration, that there were very impressive qualities to be obtained in church building which a strict adherence to past forms of Gothic could not give.

Gothic is essentially a linear style in which the eye travels along the well-marked lines of deeply indented piers, arches, and vaulting ribs. The interior of the Westminster Cathedral, on the other hand, especially before its decoration was attempted, had all the Byzantine feeling for large and finely modulated surfaces. Of strongly drawn moulded lines there were few. The world, we know, was shut out by high walls and another world suggested by the broad arches and domes, and by the very blueing of the atmosphere which their great height enabled them to bring about. How to get some of the strength and solidity of those walls and domes into ordinary church building was the new problem.

The solution was found in a new and free Gothic in which walls and solid piers took the place of Gothic columns and plain vaulting that of ribbed, in which the coloured stone lantern to which the old Gothic church approximated gave way to some form of massive interior lit by an occasional rich window. The new churches which I have in mind are buildings which look in on themselves rather than out on to the world. To the outside world they present a plain and often uncompromising exterior. They are in the world, but not of it—perhaps that, too, is symbolical of our time.

If it was Sir Gilbert Scott to whom we owe so much of the harder and less pleasing Gothic of Victorian times, as well as much destructive restoration of our Cathedrals, it is to his grandson, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to whom we owe to-day some of the best of these new free Gothic churches as well as, at Liverpool, the one great new Gothic cathedral of our age. If anyone ever made good the sins of his grandfather, this architect certainly has. Though still a young man he has already built sufficient work to mark our era and to start a new renaissance in church building. It is a veritable renaissance in that the spirit of adventure necessary to a renaissance is there. His work, even the smallest, such as his church of the Annunciation at Bournemouth, has qualities of imagination and scale which place it in an entirely new category. While using Gothic detail for decoration he builds with the solid bigness of the Romans. It is too early yet to speak of his great cathedral, when but a third of a structure second only in size to St. Peter’s, Rome, among Christian structures, has yet been completed, but there is already enough to be seen (especially now that a portion of the building is enclosed) for us to feel that at last we are to have a building which in the grandeur of its scale and the daring of its design will represent a greater individual effort of the imagination than that called forth by any cathedral yet erected in these islands.

VIII.

THE USE OF THE COLUMN.