The Royal Albert Hall, completed in 187r, is a sort of modern model Coliseum reduced and roofed. It is a florid Renaissance structure of red brick and buff terra-cotta, the latter of a dirty hue which does not har monize well with the former. Its dimensions are 200 feet in length, 18o in width, and 14o in height. It is the work of the younger Barry, who here, at Dulwich College, and in other buildings was largely instrumental in introducing terra-cotta.
The South Kensington ilinsennt was built to contain one of the world's finest art-collections, and also to serve as a school of design. Erected at various intervals before 1870, it is not a building, but a heterogeneous pile of courts and galleries which seem to have been thought of separately and each designed without reference to what preceded it or to what might succeed it. Nor this alone: it was designed, so far as any design is evi dent, in defiance of that cardinal rule of Architecture which declares that the leading members of the decoration must grow naturally out of the construction. The method here pursued was to throw together blank piles of brick, and then to apply terra-cotta columns and other decorative materials upon the exposed surfaces. Some of the surfaces have received their ornamental coating, others have not; and the result is a medley masked internally by the size of the separate parts and the prominence of their contents, but painfully visible externally. Most of this applied dec oration, whether external or internal, is in itself good, since it is prin cipally the work of young artists trained in the art-school. The excel lence of this applied work renders it the more deplorable that it should be lavished upon so deformed and inartistic an object. The science-schools, facing Exhibition Road, and part of the interior of the quadrangle are the only external portions which can be said to be architectural. The applied architecture of these portions was the work of the talented artist Godfrey Sykes, who was educated in the art-schools and died young. The same artist also decorated the fine interior of the south court, the upper portion of the walls of which has thirty-six mosaic full-length portraits of celebrated artists.
Although the mixture of Gothic forms with classic details is now in favor, "Italian," or English-Palladian, Renaissance is still employed in many monumental buildings. Thus the Birmingham Council-house and Art-galleries has its two lower storeys fashioned into a basement on which rests the Corinthian order of the two upper storeys. The regularity of
the façades is broken on one front by a tower, on another by an entrance portico bearing- above it a grand arch supported on each side by coupled columns.
Colonial Offices.—The immense mass of buildings including the Foreign, Indian, and Colonial Offices was the work of Scott. It can scarcely be called his fault that they do his fame no credit, for he, the Gothic architect, was bidden to make them Renaissance, and has done so in not conspicuously bad fashion, although, had he not been over-per suaded by his friends, lie would have preferred to be set aside rather than thus to abandon his cherished principles.
When the more strictly classic post-office of Sir Robert Smirke became too small for the business of the department, a Palladian structure finished in 1874 was built upon the opposite side of the street; the large edifice occupied by the Royal Academy in Piccadilly is Renaissance, and the accepted design for the new Admiralty and War-offices, the work of Leeming and Leeming, is in the same style, with broken entablatures and a profusion of dome-capped towers. The masses are well arranged, and the general outline, as well as the sky-line, is varied.
Other Renaissance structures are the new wing added by E. M. Barry to the National Gallery, the Farringdon Street Market, which is in the French manner, Leadenhall Street Market, etc. Many of the markets of London and other cities, as Billingsgate Fish-market and Smithfield Central Meat market, are spacious and fine buildings with iron roofs, and usually adhere to Renaissance forms.
the city-hall is in the United States the town-hall is in England, for in that country no town, however large, has a right to the title of " city " unless it is the seat of a bishop. Among the finer town-halls erected in modern years may be cited that of Halifax, the work of Sir Charles Barry, those of Wakefield and Sheffield, that of Leaming ton, an elegant somewhat Free Classic structure, and those of Manchester and Leicester, the last of which was the first public building of any note executed in the Oueen Anne style. Middleborough has a fine new Gothic town-hall. The new municipal offices at Nottingham, the work of F. H. Oldham, keep clear of Gothic details, but in the arrangement of the larger masses are full of reminders from various parts. The great square tower recalls at once the beffroi of Belgium and the cami5a/zile of Italy, while the manner in which the bells are hung in full view across arched openings is Spanish.