THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 487.-JANUARY, 1926.

Art. 1.-ARCHITECTURE, NEW AND OLD.

1. Laymen and the New Architecture. By Manning Robertson. Murray, 1925.

2. The Pleasures of Architecture. By C. and A. WilliamsEllis. Jonathan Cape, 1924.

3. Modern English Architecture. By Charles Marriott. Chapman & Hall, 1924.

4. The Architecture of Humanism. By Geoffrey Scott. Constable, 1924.

5. Southern Baroque Art. By Sacheverel Sitwell. Grant Richards, 1924.

6. Architecture: a Profession or an Art. Edited by R. Norman Shaw and Sir T. Graham Jackson. Murray, 1892.

ONE of the unhappy results of the war has been the loss of standards of value in literature and the arts. It is not merely that these standards are dismissed as out of date. The new generation seems to be unaware that they ever existed, that poetry is not prose, that sculpture has to deal with form, that painting has something more to do than pattern-making, and that architecture is an art with its own tradition which cannot be defied with impunity. Serious students know that art cannot really be understood without going far back into its history, and tracing its course downwards to our own time, and that it is only in this way that it is possible to grasp the line of its true development. The modern tendency to ignore this lesson of the past is the opposite extreme to the exaggerated worship of fifty years ago. Both are equally futile. We are not better men than Vol. 246.-No. 487.

our fathers, however much our bold young men may say that we are. On the other hand, we are not very much

worse.

Mr Manning Robertson has written a modest little book with the title of Laymen and the New Architecture,' and he evidently believes that there is such a thing as 'new architecture,' and that it is an advance on what for the purpose of his thesis he conceives to be old architecture. His essays, which have appeared in the 'Builder' and other technical papers, deal with a variety of subjects ranging from some sort of theory of æsthetic to advocacy of a method of central heating. Mr Robertson writes pleasantly, and much of what he says is sensible and to the point-the point, that is, of minor current practice. His illustrations are taken almost exclusively from post-war buildings, and though it is to be presumed that these buildings are efficient, with the exception of some half a dozen or so, they are exceedingly unattractive. The point that I have sought for in vain in Mr Robertson's book is what this new architecture' really is. Nobody ever heard of it before the war. One recollects the efforts of Art Nouveau, which were speedily dismissed with ignominy, and the boldest innovator, in England at any rate, never imagined that he was doing anything but advancing along a track that stretched far back into the past. As for the future, he was content with that short length ahead, still hidden from his fellows, which the power of his imagination enabled him dimly to foresee. Take, for example, two men to whom perhaps modern English architecture owes more than to any other architect since the middle of the last century, and whose work seems already half forgotten, Norman Shaw and Philip Webb. Both these men in their different ways broke away from the architectural conventions of their time, but neither of them imagined for an instant that he was introducing a new architecture. What they did was to use their brains on architecture as they found it instead of taking it for granted, and their aim was to develop and extend its application to modern problems without breaking the art to pieces in doing so. But our younger generation, trained exclusively in our architectural schools, are convinced that they are introducing a new era in architecture. Mr Robertson says

that the new architecture is essentially 'youthful; and strongly conscious of its origins '—I presume its origins in the schools, for it certainly originated nowhere else. And he gives as its essential qualities: (1) That it should be efficient and answer its purpose; (2) that it should aim at the sensational and dramatic rather than the emotional and intellectual,' the film and the cinematograph, let us say, rather than the triumph of Scipio and the ceiling of the Sistine; (3) that it should turn its back on all previous styles. It is recognised that there should at present only be one style, that of the present.'

In regard to the first of these qualities we are all agreed that architecture must answer its purpose, whatever it may be, and it was because it does not do so that Street's Law Courts, great work as it was in many ways, sounded the knell of Gothic architecture for civil and domestic buildings. Before the end of the 19th century all serious architects took this condition of efficiency for granted, and though foolish things were still done in our museums and public buildings, Norman Shaw showed in his New Scotland Yard what a really great designer could do in handling a public building, if he could let his intelligence play freely round his problem, and if he was allowed by the authorities to do so. Shaw's building remains the finest public building erected in London since Somerset House. It is on the old lines, and yet it is splendidly original, far more so than the newest of our new architecture. The new architecture claims to be essentially efficient—that is, I suppose, practical and exactly fitted for its purpose-but it has methods of being so peculiar to itself. The object of a projecting stone window-sill, for instance, is to protect the wall below from the dripping of water, but I note that in the latest effort of the new architecture the window-sill is omitted, and wide, shallow, vertical grooves are thoughtfully provided from the bottom of one window opening to the top of the window below, in order that none of the rain-water falling on the window above may be lost to the wall and window below.

The second quality of the new architecture is that it is to be 'sensational and dramatic,' and Mr Robertson, forgetful of his insistence on 'efficiency,' remarks, 'The architectural value of a building lies not in its practical

efficiency, although this is a contributing factor, but in the effect it produces on the beholder.' The use of the building seems to have been forgotten, a fallacy that we shall also meet in Mr Scott's essay. The architect is to be a purveyor of thrills for the onlooker; apparently he is to follow the notorious example of the cubists, the vorticists, and the non-representative painters-anything to startle. At first sight it might seem that the new architects are adopting the familiar old slogan, · Épater les bourgeois.' It is only fair to Mr Robertson to say that this is not his intention. Indeed, he loves his bourgeois, takes him into his confidence, and is anxious only to show him the right way, so that both he and his architect may work together for righteousness; but if the house is ill-planned and ill-built, no amount of startling originality on the outside or revolutionary decoration within will compensate the owner for the discomfort of living in it.

Mr Robertson bases his argument on a curious theory of æsthetic borrowed from Dr Walford Davies and relating to the effects of music. Music is supposed to make its appeal (1) to the sensations, a pleasant titivation so to say, resulting (2) in the stirring of emotion, which (3) is realised by the intellect, and (4) confirmed as 'real' by intuition. These are described as concentric circles; the appeal, for example, may get no further than circle (2), or it may skip circle (2) and reach circle (3), or it may stop at circle (3) and miss confirmation by circle (4). There seems to be some confusion between circles (1) and (4), and circle (4) seems to refer to some instinct for 'reality' in the Platonic sense-that is, to an apprehension of the absolute 'idea' of beauty, as it exists apart from its physical manifestation. Surely the 'sensational and dramatic' appeal, the shock motive, which seems to be a principal element of the new architecture, could make little or no appeal to the intuition of 'real' beauty. Mr Robertson's illustrations do not help us much. Gothic, we are told, being vertical suggests the driving force of the emotions and the 'transverse beam of classic, the restful tranquillity of the intellect.' But the intellect is neither restful nor tranquil; it is, on the contrary, exceedingly active, and there are other emotions besides those of a general upset. One does not see why the

restlessness and insistence on small details of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture should be regarded as the only possible source of appeal to the emotions. Emotions quite as powerful, quite as noble, may be roused by the restraint and simplicity of Greek Doric, by the evidence of purpose and overmastering will of the Roman baths and theatres and aqueducts. When Mr Robertson says 'Classical architecture is curiously ideal, since it gives the appearance of detachment from function,' I find myself absolutely at a loss to understand him, because this is exactly what classical architecture does not do. It is so obviously a version of the post and beam construction, whereas in a Gothic cathedral-the choir of Westminster Abbey, for example-I find myself wondering what it all means: those clusters of little shafts disappearing at some enormous height into the shadows of the vaulting; those narrow bays; those acutely pointed arches, when it could all have been done so much more simply than it is. The whole conception of it seems impossibly remote from the time we live in, and as a method of covering in a large floor space amazingly inefficient and wasteful. The comparison of classic to the palm tree as 'elegant but never emancipated' and of Gothic to the cedar with its muscular force, constructive strength, free and independent,' does not clear the air, even when reinforced by a further comparison with the silver birch. After all, the sober facts of history and of actual buildings, so far as they can be ascertained by critical study, are a safer guide to practice than all the rhetoric in the world, and we shall never get to the root of the matter in æsthetic till we prefer the dry light of the intellect to the vague aspirations of the sentimentalist.

The most formidable claim of our young lions in architecture is that they are starting a new manner of their own. They consider that the past has no meaning for them, and that all that they have to do is to look to the present. Instead of the assiduous study of the masterpieces of the past, to which most of us owe what little skill we possess in the art of design, the students in our architectural schools look to the master in charge and to contemporary work as illustrated in the technical papers for their inspiration, and armed with the time