An Introduction to Victorian and Edwardian Architecture

today I'm talking about Victorian and Edwardian architecture and there were two main styles in this period classical and gothic and architects would use this depending on client requirements the same architects could do both styles this is by Nash he was a very good classical architecture at the Regency period but he also did Brighton pavilion which is done in a mogul style with gothic elements and chinoiserie and all sorts of things and there was a feeling that this was all a bit superficial it wasn't the architects away hungered for one style that was the rational style coming to the age of Queen Victoria the the style that became the style that was officially used was gothic people always talk about Victorian Gothic and that was the predominant style but classism continued nonetheless and when I think of Victorian architecture I feel that something like Tower Bridge is absolutely quintessentially Victorian it's baronial style which is a type of Gothic style using the latest modern engineering with steel and clever mechanisms and the baronial style was a very dominant style within the Victorian era this is Balmoral and also Windsor Castle most of all though Windsor Castle is a very ancient building most of what you see there was built during the Victorian era also you've got things like some Pancras station designed by Gilbert Scott in a design and a Gothic style and here like Tower Bridge the the architect is use things like steel or in for new forms of building which were never needed before and all over England you have these very large confident Victorian style buildings this one the Natural History Museum by Waterhouse has an interior like a church or Cathedral but using modern iron work and glass so that it's more there's more light the reason that gothic started to be the dominant style was partly because of pujan who very much pushed gothic and he was the architect for the houses of parliament and he wrote a book called contrasts where he contrasts medieval architecture with Georgian classical architecture and there are plates in the book which show the different styles together and he argues always that the medieval is better than the the Georgian and here is one plate from the book and it's contrasting the residences of the poor in the Georgian one the poor live in a completely unpoetic place it's when they die they get just chucked in the ground they get chucked in jail if they're bad and then he he has a kind of idealized view of how wonderful it was to live in medieval England and so he said the poor were looked after they were part of a part of a community who cared for them when they buried when they were buried it was a tragic event and they were generally cared for they had a better diet and so it goes on completely far-fetched but nonetheless and here's some some images of contrasting medieval real das here with a Georgian real dose the medieval one will all know mented more celebratory the georgian one very cold and unloved and likewise at church here you've got George's Chapel which is a gothic building with roof an vaulting and a lovely window at the end and then contrast this with this very dry preaching box of the Georgian era which was has no warnimont it's very cold and unloved and there's some gates same argument and this was classicism or or a simple version of classism was used for the factories of the time and in a way it was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution where they felt that the Industrial Revolution had kind of taken away all the joy of life and that that people were housed in these repetitive blocks of building all the same basically people become more like machines and he hungered for a time before that where people were sort of loved and taken seriously and seen as individuals there was also sort of rapid urbanization at that point before the Victorian era people lived in the country and they lived in a nice little cottage and his idea was everything was wonderful and beautiful in those times you'd have a little place where you'd grow your own crops and whatever else and then you come into the town and it's dirty and it's unpleasant and you're just a machine for producing wealth for the the oppressing whoever taking on these ideas as well was a theorist called John Ruskin and he went to Venice and did these really beautiful drawings of Byzantium --nt in in Venice and his idea was that the the person building the building should be part of the process it's not a case of some architect just builds it and then hands it to the Builder that the Builder should love what he does there should be enjoyment in the craft and and also that the building should sort of there are a kind of cultural thing where everyone's involved everyone likes being being involved I was very idealistic in his sketches and in the architecture of Venice the capitals are all slightly different and that's because each Mason would have their own take on a capital and each arch is different and you can see this in some marks Square where you've got different decoration here based on the stones that are available based on the particular taste of the of the person carving carving it or designing a deity and this was this is what he enjoyed and it was a contrast to something like Versailles where a architect one of the elite would decide what we're building and no one building it has any influence over what it looks like it's all so basically the Builder the craftsman just becomes a machine from producing what louis xiv wants with no influence over it concurrent with this and also taking these ideas into painting were the pre-raphaelites who were closely associated with John Ruskin and they as the name suggests they were anty anty Rafael and the Renaissance Rafael the great painter of the Renaissance period they felt sacrificed for beauty and in the work of Ruskin and also the pre-raphaelites truth in art became a really important issue and that actually transformed right the way through into modernism as well in that you have to if you'll use a piece of wood make sure it looks like a piece of wood and it's doing what wood should do which in a way contrast with classism where Colin could be made of add of anything it still if it's Corinthian it's ten times as high if it you know it's not that the forms and proportions of classism are from ancient Rome whilst the forms and proportions were of a gothic building so the argument goes are based on the performance of stone performance of wood and they're not seeking beauty they're seeking truth the materials all have to be truthful so in painting the pre-raphaelites were they'd like to represent truth real the real world as it was here we have a scene of road-building and so you see that you see the plight of the poor its but interestingly as well as this they they were pre-raphaelites in that they loved art before rafael the great painters of the early renaissance and so they also had a functional for painting scenes of medieval England and in Italy as well and which was in a way a bit of a bit of an enough matter that because that wasn't it's not really truth but they were nostalgic and they loved this era and I guess they had these two different aims at the same time one of the most famous pre-raphaelite paintings the the drowning of philia on the truth argument the the woman who sat for this had to sit in the bath for hours on end in order to be painted and all the flowers are very well represented and not idealized that's a big with them that things aren't idealized that although they are but they do idealize things constantly but they like the idea that they were painting reality and truth an example of this is how they represented Jesus this is Jesus as a boy and instead of a kind of baroque image of Jesus where there's angels floating around and there's all sorts of things like that they represent Jesus as he is as he would be in a real carpenter shop and with a real vise and tools they also loved symbolism so Jesus has cut his hand a little reference to the crucifixion there are nails there are the sheep outside being the flock there's there's a dove of the Holy Spirit it goes on and on there's probably it's tax more but it's this that on one hand kind of representing real-life events but overlaid with a lot of symbolism and also art having a purpose these aren't just beautiful objects that you'll say oh how lovely they will teach you and they will make you a better more moral person another big figure of this era was William Morris and he had an incredibly successful business which ran right into the 20th century making furniture stained-glass and wallpaper and the wallpapers are actually still are still available which is absolutely amazing and his sort of ethos behind his furniture was he was trying to get away from the overblown Victorian furniture and ornament which is really based on status more than anything else trying to show how rich you are by gilding everything and the contrast would be some sort of gilt chair which was actually quite uncomfortable to sit on and Morris wanted things for the everyday things that were just simple and beautiful and paired pared down he built himself a house helped by Philip Webb and it's this is one of the first Arts and Crafts buildings instead of what would have been done in a generation before him would be a classical building with their portico in the middle and it would be symmetrical he's made it asymmetrical which makes a more interesting plan which he can use more functionally the precedence he's looking at are the pre Renaissance precedence of early buildings and cottagey type buildings not wanting to kind of copy ancient Rome or and there is a certain element of the Gothic about it with the pointed arches and so on and inside is an interior which although it's got some nice paintings it's not over lavish it's fairly functional and materials are the materials they they are needed for for example a fireplace you use brick because bricks are good with fires because they don't catch fire and so it's a sort of moving towards functionalism and this is the sort of thing he's trying to get away from this sort of stated of status obsessed Victorian interior which was pompous and not very comfortable and and really just about show and intimidating people by how wealthy and tasteful you are with the building of red house there was a whole load of other but made of fashioned for building cottagey style houses or Villa style houses so asymmetry was very much approved you get these gable ends windows sort of all over the place and you can see in a lot of towns or historic towns all over England there's a sort of donut of Victorian buildings like this which are influenced by these movements of the Victorian era a very big figure of this period was Sir Edwin Lutyens who had a massive career going right up into the second world war but he started his career doing houses like this which is sort of cottagey in style but for the very rich and in this period a certain slice of rich people didn't want classical buildings they wanted something homely cottagey and he was the ideal architect for for that symbol taneous Lee the Queen Queen Victoria built a house for herself on the Isle of Wight called Osborne house and this was done in an Italianate style which is not like normal classism that the jaw that the Georgians had done it it's a very particular style which is based on buildings in Italy that aren't the great buildings of Rafael and Michelangelo and Palladio these builders are offering a symmetrical they often have towers and they have these very dominant cornices for me they look like buildings you might see around Lake Como or something like that this style permeated through into mass housing in London and you can see the same use of cornice and there are these classical elements that are kind of repeated that all have that Italianate look as well as classical gothic Italianate also this building here a highclere castle which was designed in what's known as the Jacobi thens style which is Jacobean and Elizabethan so there was a feeling that architecture should be more English was another thing and that was also within the argument to make the houses of parliament gothic rather than classical and for a whole load of other buildings because they felt that classical was Italian and why we always looking towards Italy were a great country we've got this huge Empire we should be looking at our own buildings and being influenced by them so there was that aspect too having said that another style that came into prominence during the Victorian era was Pond Street Dutch and this was influenced by Dutch architecture although probably looks nothing like Dutch buildings but has the distinctive Gables that you see in in Amsterdam with all these styles although there was a sort of academic or theoretical disdain for classism among certain people classism was still very dominant it's a very persistent styles and seem to go away and this building the Reform club was built during the return of the Victorian era and it's a very perfect classical building and in a way if you wanted to look for the biggest the most expensive the most prestigious classical buildings they were built in the Victorian era rather than the Georgian era because they have just built on a much bigger scale and because they're so big they actually look Roman unlike a lot of Georgian buildings that are a lot smaller as a general rule also painting there was a school of painting during the Victorian era which was very interested in classical subjects this is the Parthenon frieze being inspected as it's being constructed and flaming June by Lord Leighton is a classical nymph or goddess with a view of the Mediterranean behind and the Euston arch sadly gone but a highly classical building a Victorian era particularly for kind of art galleries and civic buildings classism was used and this was probably down to the taste of the patron this is the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge the Victorian building and inside it has what I feel is probably the most Roman interior if if one was to look at the interiors of the Hadrian's villa when it was built or the Palatine Hill or Nero's golden house they probably look more like this than anything Georgian with the colour use of marble or granite this is and so they're incredibly impressive large buildings some George's Hall in Liverpool a Victorian classical building on a colossal scale with a very sumptuous interior and Leeds Town Hall another massive Victorian building and the Albert Hall highly classical and that sort of very simple form which has references to two classical work as well as those previous ones I just showed you which are fairly straight classical buildings which take precedence from ancient Rome and reproduce them there were architects who would use classism as a springboard to design their own ornament and style and this is an example the Ashmolean where he uses very distinctive bases and pedestals and capitals which are loosely based on classical precedent but not completely and he's very much making the language his own classism on mainland Europe was hugely successful at this time and it's interesting to note that cities like Rome most of what you see in modern-day room is actually 19th century and a lot of Rome was rebuilt at that period same with hue same with virtually all major cities in Europe had a massive amount of development in the 19th century and what people often think is earlier is generally ninth century this is the Victor Emmanuel building in Rome colossal classical pile so there were these very ambitious classical projects going on likewise things like the opera house in Paris amazing 19th century building similar to the Ashmolean where the architect Gagne uses classical classical as a springing ball for his own style and he does a melange of all sorts of periods with this development of towns during the 19th century London was expanding massively and a lot of buildings have a lot of classical elements in them this is a terrace in London and all over the West End particularly you have these very high terraces all with a loosely classical quality to them you can see the trig live here funnily enough with a an ionic order and brass dication you've got cornices so classism despite the Gothic Revival was very alive and well but also you had things like this which was a more gothic take on mass housing during this period was the time of a massive redevelopment of Paris and Auslan and virtually all of Paris is 19th century with a few pockets that aren't and it's just sort of six seven stories throughout and like this very excellent form of urbanism as well as all these other movements within the Victorian era there was a taste for French architecture probably influenced by Osmonds Paris to a certain degree and the Rothschilds when they built was Manor used a French chateau style and it was called the gue Rothschild that the the Rothschild tastes and you can see here you've got the kind of the pinnacles of the shadows of the lawar and so on and and that became a very dominant style for short while this slipped into the Edwardian era and the Edwardian era right lower or wrongly is seen as a very confident very calamus period where partly because people see King Edward as this comfort and glamorous monarch who was a good fun character as opposed to his rather dour mother and there's a feeling that the art and the buildings reflect this if you look at the the paintings of John Singer Sargent they're always seen to epitomize Edwardian painting although most of them are literally are Victorian but there is this feeling is that the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the Edwardian era was this confident confident time and the GU Ross child the the taste for French architecture can continued to the Edwardian era became kind of stronger and things like the Ritz which looks very like a building in Paris with its steep roof was designed by muse and Davis Muse was a French architect and so he had direct knowledge of that period he also did the Automobile Club in Palma which is done in a very French classical style with a lot of influence from buildings like the Petit Trianon and you can see a bit of French Baroque with the Capitals with the swags and you got all of the West End theatres like the Coliseum here designed by machen where there are real celebrations and excite excitement about this fantastic style and confidence in the future the style was known as Edwardian baroque and this is an Edwardian building in Liverpool where you can see different types of pediment you've got cupola Xand it's very like the theaters in the West End very confident love of classical detail style of architecture this is called a town hall where you've got again different shapes pediments you've got capitals that are very quirky and oh something to borrow Meeny from the Baroque era and this is another building actually by the same architect as coach to Town Hall Belcher and it's a memorial to a woman who died and you can see how it's a it's a sort of theatrical form with a lot of details and architectural interest he also did belch also did this building in the city and you can see similar to the last two buildings the coupe euler's the strange capital's a lot of rustic ation another architect of this area Richard Norman Shaw did this building near the house of parliament and you can see elements of sort of gothic but also quite early kind of Queen Anne references in the classical architecture with the brick and stone combined Lutyens became very interested in this period and he had what he called his Renaissance spelt with a W with which was a reference to Sir Christopher Wren and he here away was saying I'm not going back to Palladio because we all got bored of that we are looking at the Stuart era before when Wren Hawksmoor vamper were all in ascendancy and so he had this style of architecture which was a kind of early early early English classicism and when he took to classical architecture he absolutely loved it and he he called it the big game and his architecture is full of very kind of witty uses of capitals and bases and capitals turning into in posts and it's all very cleverly done and this building here is one of his first examples summerhouse he designed and this one is he is actually very much Wren period classical architecture where you have a lot of use of brick you've got some ornament that looks a little bit like crinoline Gibbons it's some it doesn't have a pediment interestingly which probably came in more during the Palladian area of the Georgians as well as luncheons and his influence a lot of architects were were trying to do classical buildings for new functions and this is on Oxford Street the store for Selfridges and this was done by an American architect called Daniel Burnham from Chicago and he was using the latest modern technology of steel and glass to do a classical building and he famously did the Flatiron Building in New York and you can see with this that you build up your stealin you posted a lintel structure of the building and then you clad it in in stone and you can see how on this photo how that develops and this would be a complete in anathema to Ruskin and pujan who liked to see architectures generated from the materials that it's true to the materials someone like Burnham really that idea of truth to materials meant nothing to him this is nothing to do with the performance of stone he could have used terracotta he could have tried all sorts of things to consolidate in render and this is in a way a step back and for for things like the Gothic movement and it it would encourage this battle of styles which I talked about at the beginning of the lecture between Gothic classical and all the other styles that were available it's sort of saying architects do one thing and the buildings another and the the next movement to come the movement was generated but after the Edwardian era was modernism and they really did what they could to sort of kill the Battle of Stars once for all that the modernist argument was saying what does a building need to in terms of materials let's just make that and see what that looks like and there was the seeds of this in a Victorian work for example Crystal Palace by Paxton was a very functional glass and steel building which was the first precedent for all other glass and steel towers and buildings and also you have something like Clifton suspension bridge which is purely functional and architects were very jealous of the engineers ability to just do what is pure what is simple and as a sort of consequence in a way of the kind of battle of styles people like Daniel Burnham there was a real ATAR of reaction against it and and then the next movement was a much more simple style based on modern techniques you

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Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020