18th and 19th Centuries Modern Architecture

england, houses, english, gothic, house, churches, windows and james

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Out of the ruck of revivalism the practice of Gothic art emerged into a clarified atmosphere. A new coterie consisting of James Brooks, G. Gilbert Scott, J. Oldrid Scott, G. F. Bodley, John Bently and Sir Arthur Blomfield, became responsible for a series of churches and college additions of great merit. Even towards the close of the 1 gth century revived Gothic had not lost caste. At the hands of J. D. Sedding, H. W. Wilin and Leonard Stokes, the tradition was continued with varying suc cess. The new Cathedral at Liverpool by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott is to be considered a fitting climax to the Gothic movement. This building, begun in 1903, is remarkable for its masterly plan and monumental character. The great double transepts, the mighty scale and the simple detail, contrasted with the beauty of the Lady Chapel, form an ensemble exactly suited to the mag nificent site.

Campbell, J. Woolfe and J. Gandon, ed

., Vitruvius Britannicus (1715-71) ; I. Jones, The Designs of Inigo Jones, (1727) ; J. Gibbs, Book of Architecture (1728) ; R. and J. Adam, Works in Architecture (1778-1822) ; G. H. Birch, London Churches of the XV1I.th and XVIII.th Centuries (1896) ; J. Belcher and M. E. Macartney, Later Renaissance Architecture in England (1897, 1901) ; R. Blomfield, A History of Renaissance Architecture in England (1897) ; A. E. Richardson and C. Lovett Gill, London Houses from 166o to 182o (191I) ; A E. Richardson, Monumental Classic Archi tecture in Great Britain and Ireland (1914) ; T. A. Gotch, The English Home from Charles I. to George IV.th (1918) ; A. Bolton, The Archi tecture of R. and J. Adam (1922) ; A. E. Richardson and H. D. Eberlen, The Smaller English House of the Later Renaissance, 166o 1830 (1925). (A. E. R.) On the founding of the British colonies in the wilderness of North America the first dwellings were like the "frail houses," made of wattle, clay and thatch, which still sheltered the farm labourers and copyholders in England. The first church at James town was "set upon cratchets"—forked sticks set in the ground —"covered with rafts, sedge and earth." Such primitive shelters were the "English wigwams" of early chroniclers, by no means like those of the Indians. At Plymouth and elsewhere, lines of stakes or hewn planks were driven into the ground to make "palisaded houses." The log-house, of horizontal logs notched together at the corners and chinked with clay, was unknown in England, and was brought in by the Swedes of the Delaware, to whom it had been the ordinary form of dwelling at home. Its

suitability to conditions in the densely forested new country soon led to its adoption by the English colonists, and it later became the typical form of frontier dwelling.

Meanwhile, soon after the first settlement, the building of frame houses had begun, few at first, for the leaders. The filling of the "half-timber" frames with wattle or cat-and-clay was soon found inadequate to withstand the severe climate, and was cov ered with weather boards, as used in Kent. Thirty years after the settlement the ordinary farmer or artisan had such a house of a single room below, a storey and a half in height ; the divine or magistrate, one of two storeys and a half, with two rooms to a floor, and often with a "lean-to" extension at the rear. Glass windows now became common, chimneys of masonry replaced those of clay, and shingle roofs rapidly took the place of thatch. The general dearth of lime made it difficult to build with brick or stone, and these were but gradually adopted, except in Penn sylvania, where lime and a fine ledge stone were both abundant.

The artistic character of the r 7th century buildings in America remained that of rural England at the time the colonists left, a simple Jacobean style in which mediaeval survivals predom inated. Steep gabled roofs, leaded casement windows, high, clustered chimney stacks and exposed construction are charac teristic elements of the effect. In the more elaborate wooden houses of New England, the upper storeys often overhung the lower, as in the old English houses of timber. Among the finest examples surviving are the House of the Seven Gables in Salem and the Parson Capen house (1684) in Topsfield, Mass. In the early plantation houses of Virginia there were more ambitious attempts at a Jacobean character: Bacon's Castle (before 1676) with cross-shaped plan and with curved and stepped gables., Fairfield (now destroyed) with the H plan traditional in Eng land under Elizabeth and James I.

In the South, loyal to the Established Church, the churches continued the type of late Gothic English parish church with a square tower at the west. The earliest of them, at Jamestown and Smithfield, still had projecting buttresses and traceried windows. In New England the Puritan meeting-house followed the scheme of the dissenting chapel, with pulpit on one of the long sides, galleries around the other three. They were of the utmost plain ness, strongly framed, with roof on curved braces, as we see in the "Old Ship" at Hingham, Massachusetts.

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