Maison Carrée, Nîmes, c. AD 130
Joseph Hansom, Town Hall, Birmingham, 1832
Thus large parts of the man-made world in the early-modern period would not, in their outward appearance at least, have shaken many of the architectural assumptions of a magically resurrected contemporary of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.
3.
When it came to simpler, cheaper houses, there was again a consensus about the most fitting way to build, though here the canon was the result not of any common cultural vision but of a host of limitations.
Foremost among these was climate, which, in the absence of affordable technology to resist it, usually dictated an austere menu of options for how most sensibly to put up a wall, pitch a roof or render a façade. The expense of transporting materials over any significant distance likewise limited stylistic choice, forcing the majority of householders to settle uncomplainingly for available stone, wood or mud. The difficulties of travel also hindered the spread of knowledge about alternative building methods. Printing costs meant that few ever saw so much as a picture of how houses looked in other parts of the world (which explains why, in so much of early northern religious art, Jesus is born in what appears to be a chalet).
Limitations bred strong local architectural identities. Within a certain radius, houses would uniformly be constructed of a particular native material, which would cede its ubiquity to another on the opposite side of a river or a mountain range. An ordinary Kentish house could thus be distinguished at a glance from a Cornish one, or a farm in the Jura from one in the Engadine. In most areas, houses continued to be built as they had always been built, using whatever was around, with an absence of aesthetic self-consciousness, with their owners’ modest pride at being able to afford shelter in the first place.
4.
Then, in the spring of 1747, an effeminate young man with a taste for luxury, lace collars and gossip bought a former coachman’s cottage on forty acres of land in Twickenham on the River Thames – and set about building himself a villa which gravely complicated the prevailing sense of what a beautiful house might look like.
Any number of architects could have furnished Horace Walpole, the youngest son of the British prime minister, Sir Robert, with something conventional for his new estate, a Palladian mansion, perhaps a little like his father’s home, Houghton Hall, on the north Norfolk coast. But in architecture, as in dress, conversation and choice of career, Walpole prided himself on being different. In spite of his Classical education, his real interest lay in the medieval period, which thrilled him with its iconography of ruined abbeys, moonlit nights, graveyards and (especially) crusaders in armour. Walpole therefore decided to build himself the world’s first Gothic house.
Because no one before him had ever attempted to apply the ecclesiastical idiom of the Middle Ages to a domestic setting, Walpole had to be resourceful. He modelled his fireplace on the tomb of Archbishop Bouchier in Canterbury Cathedral, copied the design of his library shelves from the tomb of Aymer de Valence in Westminster Abbey, and derived the ceiling of his main hall from the quatrefoil compartments and rosettes of the Abbey’s Chapel of Henry VII.
Few ever saw so much as a picture of how houses looked in other parts of the world:
Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent, early sixteenth century
A new understanding of domestic beauty:
Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 1750–92
When he was done, being temperamentally disinclined to keep any of his achievements quiet, Walpole invited for a tour everyone he knew, which included most of the opinion-formers and gentry of the land. For good measure, he issued tickets to the general public as well.
The Long Gallery, Strawberry Hill
After a viewing, many of Walpole’s astonished guests began to wonder if they, too, might not dare to abandon the Classical mode in favour of the Gothic. The fashion started modestly enough, with the construction of the occasional seaside or suburban villa, but, within a few decades, a revolution in taste was under way which would shake to the core the assumptions on which the Classical consensus had formerly rested. Gothic buildings began to appear in Britain, then across Europe and North America. Transcending its origins as the fancy of a dilettante, the style acquired architectural seriousness and prestige, to the extent that, just fifty or so years after Walpole broke ground at Strawberry Hill, defenders of Gothic could claim – much in the way that the Classicists had done before them – that theirs was the most noble and appropriate architecture of all, the natural choice for both domestic buildings and the parliaments and universities of the great nations.
The most noble and appropriate architecture of alclass="underline"
Imre Steindl, Houses of Parliament, Budapest, 1904
5.
The factors which fostered the Gothic revival – greater historical awareness, improved transport links, a new clientele impatient for variety – soon enough generated curiosity about the architectural styles of other eras and lands. By the early nineteenth century, in most Western countries, anyone contemplating putting up a house was faced with an unprecedented array of choices regarding its appearance.
Architects boasted of their ability to turn out houses in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Tyrolean or Jacobean styles, or in any combination of these. Among the most versatile of the new polymaths was an Englishman named Humphry Repton, who earned a reputation for presenting hesitant clients with detailed drawings of the many stylistic options available to them.
For those of more modest means, new pattern books were created, the most popular of which, John Loudon’s The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1833), presented self-builders with plans enabling them to construct houses from any part of the world, an initiative which rapidly wiped out regional types of architecture.
Options for your next home:
Humphry Repton, Characters of Houses, 1816
Left to right: Swiss style cottage and Old English style cottage From John Loudon, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1833
Changes in the way property was developed served to promote further opportunities for eclecticism. In the eighteenth century, London, like most cities in Europe, had expanded primarily through the efforts of aristocratic landowners, who gave their names to the squares which they carved across their old farms and fields: Lord Southampton, the Earl of Bedford, Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Duke of Portland. These were men of shared taste: comfortable in Latin and Greek, students of Cicero and Tacitus, and unambivalent proponents of the Classical style. When the Earl of Bedford issued contracts for the building of his eponymous square in 1776, his stipulations revealed an almost maniacal obsession with Classical harmony, setting down as they did rules to govern the exact height of each storey, the depth of every window frame, the colour of the bricks and the specific kind of wood to be used in the floorboards (‘the best Memel or Riga timber without a trace of sap’). So concerned was the earl with Classical proportion and precision that he regularly rose at dawn and went out with a pair of garden scissors to ensure that the bushes at the centre of his square were trained to grow symmetrically.