V Renaissance Architecture in England

Christopher Wren.

On the foundation laid by Jones, Sir Christopher Wren built the great masterpieces of English archi tecture. To the strength and sensitive feeling for proportion possessed by Jones, he added one of the most active and resource ful imaginations in the history of architecture. To a solid basis of Palladianism—that is to say, to correctness in academic design —Wren added the freedom and movement, the piquancy and drama, of the Baroque. He could unite in one ensemble the two currents into which architecture had divided in the 17th century, the academic and the ingenious, so that they flowed together into a reservoir of original and expressive motives that the 18th century was to find inexhaustible. Very characteristic of this compromise are the 51 parish churches that Wren built in Lon don after the great fire of 1666. Among his secular buildings are important additions to Hampton Court, the library of Trinity college, Cambridge, and the great hospital at Greenwich.

In the city churches Wren created a wholly new type. Built for congregational use, with galleries, shallow chancels and meagre provision for services, they occupy irregular congested sites in the midst of crowded streets. The exteriors had to be severely plain, since funds were scarce; red brick and plaster for the interior were the materials employed. Yet with all these discouragements Wren produced interiors oftentimes full of charm, and exteriors that play a commanding part in their civic environment. These exteriors, plain and even box-like, have slender towers so placed as to be most effective in the street-picture and modelled at the top into delicate spires or lanterns over which there is an encrusta tion of classic forms.

The secular buildings were more conventional in character, The additions made to Hampton Court (c. 169o) constitute a sober essay in brick-and-stone architecture, somewhat crowded in effect and lacking the repose that marks their Italian proto types. The Cambridge library (1678) follows the lines of the library at Venice, but is without the piquant proportion and wealth of sculptured ornament that give the Venetian facades so much distinction and grace. Greenwich hospital is more imagi native, having a masterly plan in which four palatial masses are grouped on an axis about two courts. Two domed pavilions are introduced to give the design unity and add life to the facades.

All of these buildings, although exceedingly diverse and original, are of less importance than the great cathedral of London. The ruins of the Gothic cathedral having been cleared away after the Great Fire, Wren was commissioned in 1668 to construct a new St. Paul's in accordance with a Renaissance design that he sub mitted. During the period from 1675, when the first stone was laid, to 171o, when the work was completed, Wren made many departures from this accepted design, which grew steadily in imaginative power and monumental unity, but at no time did he abandon his central idea, a classic monument contrasted with forms taken from the Baroque. The greatness of St. Paul's is

derived, not from the perfection of detail, which is frequently open to criticism, but from the consistency and grandeur with which it realized this idea. The central dome, definite and geo metric in mass and in silhouette, imposing in scale, rises from a wide podium and is preceded, at the western end, by two spirited campaniles whose modelled surfaces, profuse shadow and broken silhouette contrast dramatically with the simpler forms with which they are associated.

Eighteenth Century.

After the death of Wren there re mained the academic basis which Jones had established for Eng lish architecture and the compromise which Wren had brought about between the Palladianism and the virile and free Baroque. These two traditions dominated English architecture and gave direction, in more or less equal degree, to its development during the 18th century. But gradually the academic triumphed. The largeness of conception, the grandiose effect, is forsaken towards the middle of the century in favour of purity and repose.

John Vanbrugh (1666-1726), who did not begin to practice architecture until after the age of 35, was the most robust and dar ing of Wren's successors and most resembled him in the power and breadth of his imagination. He was the builder of vast country houses, such as Blenheim (I710), 856 ft. long, and Castle Howard (1702), a private dwelling with a dome ioo ft. high. These are monstrous buildings, with innumerable faults of technique and propriety, but magnificent in conception, piling up huge geometric masses around the perimeters of immense courts in a kind of intoxication of architecture.

Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), a pupil of Wren and an assistant of Vanbrugh, found fewer opportunities than either. For his fine Christ church, Spitalfields, he combined the most original and spirited tower in England with an interior almost unrivalled in formal elegance and classic beauty. The facade that he built for Westminster Abbey is more successful than might have been expected from an age so out of tune with the mediaeval spirit. His rugged and simple work contrasts strangely with that of his more successful and versatile contemporary, James Gibbs (1682– 1754). Gibbs, like Hawksmoor, a builder of churches in the Wren tradition, shows great facility in adapting and developing motifs taken from Wren; but his care for correct detail and for elegance in technique oftentimes lessens the breadth and virility of his work. The church of St. Mary-le-Strand, in London, is a good example of his style. The Radcliffe library, Oxford, is a more monumental building, but executed with less address. St. Martins-in-the-Fields, London, has a magnificent spire thrust through the roof of a Roman portico; a conception worthy of the greatest Baroque designers, boldly carried out and combined with an interior full of dignity and feeling.