But in the century that followed, royals and aristocrats withdrew from speculative construction even as demand for housing exploded. Those who came in their wake were not typically readers of Cicero and Tacitus. More often, they were entrepreneurs with a penchant for variety and whimsy. Instinctively scornful of the martial sobriety of the Classical tradition, they competed to attract clients through the playfulness and exuberance of their developments, as epitomised by a street in Plymouth which combined, within only a few hundred metres, a row of Roman Corinthian terraced houses, a Doric town hall, an Oriental chapel, a pair of private homes in the Ionic style and an Egyptian library.
A vanishing Classical consensus about beauty:
Bedford Square, London, 1783
New visions of beauty:
John Foulston, Kerr Street, Devonport, Plymouth, 1824
Front elevation, Castle Ward, Strangford Lough, 1767
6.
The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.
The danger inherent in such freedom first and famously broke through on the shores of a quiet lough in Northern Ireland, where, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a local aristocrat and his wife decided to build themselves a house. Both passionate about architecture, Viscount Bangor and Lady Anne Bligh nevertheless found that they couldn’t agree on an appropriate style. The viscount was a Classicist. He wanted something with three bays, engaged columns, Palladian proportions and windows topped with triangular consoled pediments. Anne, in contrast, was keener on the Gothic, preferring castellated roofs with pinnacles, centre-pointed windows and quatrefoils. She had heard about the ceilings at Strawberry Hill and longed to have a few of her own. The struggle grew stubborn and ill-natured, until the couple’s architect came up with a solution of Solomonic ingenuity: he would divide the house in two. The front half was built in the Classical style, the rear in the Gothic. The compromise continued inside, with the music room and stairwell being Classical in feeling, embellished with Doric friezes and columns, while the boudoir and private rooms had a Gothic air, complete with fan-vaulted ceilings and pointed-arched fireplaces.
Rear elevation, Castle Ward
The more sensitive critics were appalled and, with such buildings in mind, began an ardent search for a way to restore a measure of visual consensus. ‘We suffer from a carnival of architecture,’ complained Augustus Pugin in 1836. ‘Private judgement runs riot. Every architect has a theory of his own.’ In 1828 a young German practitioner named Heinrich Hübsch published a book whose title characterised the dilemma of an entire age: In What Style Shall We Build? There had to be a way for the defenders of the Gothic, Old English and Swiss styles to resolve their disputes; there had to be a way of knowing whether to furnish the dining room with Ancient Egyptian or Chinese chairs; a way of giving the upper hand to either Lady Anne or Viscount Bangor – and thus of ensuring that houses would never again be built facing in two different directions.
But where could such a principle be found? Just what style were architects to build in?
7.
The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.
A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominance in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution. Mastering the technologies of iron and steel, of plate glass and concrete, they drew interest and inspired awe with their bridges, railway hangars, aqueducts and docks. More novel even than their abilities, perhaps, was the fact that they seemed to complete these projects without ever directly asking themselves what style it was best to adopt. Charged with erecting a bridge, they tried to design the lightest possible frame that could stretch over the widest span at the lowest cost. When they built a railway station, they aimed for a hall that would allow steam to disperse safely, let in a large amount of natural light and accommodate a constant crowd of travellers. They demanded that factories be able to house unwieldy machinery and that steamships carry cargoes of impatient passengers punctually across heavy seas. But they did not appear to give much thought to whether there should be a Corinthian or a Doric set of capitals gracing the upper galleries of a ship, whether a Chinese dragon might look pleasing at the end of a locomotive or whether suburban gas works should be done up in a Tuscan or Islamic style.
Yet, despite this indifference, the new men of science seemed capable of building the most impressive and, in many cases, the most seductive structures of their confused age.
8.
The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott. If the Doge’s Palace deserved to be classified as great architecture, it was not because the roof was watertight or because it provided Venice’s civil servants with the necessary number of meeting rooms but rather, the architects defensively suggested, because it sported carvings on its roof, a delicate arrangement of white and pink bricks on its façades, and deliberately slender, tapering, pointed arches throughout – details that would have had no place in a design by a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris or the Engineering Academy of Dresden. The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.
The irrelevance of aesthetic discussion:
John Fowler, Benjamin Baker, Forth Railway Bridge, construction of the central girder, September 1889
‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty’:
Doge’s Palace (detail), Venice, 1340–1420
9.
The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation – for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was certainty. The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.
Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass of perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might henceforth be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.