Exhibition

     It's now a month until my solo exhibition (20th-26th Oct) at Aberglasney Gardens in Carmarthenshire (just off the A40 between Carmarthen and Llandeilo).  If you're around pop-in!  Gardens open 10am and close at 6pm (last entry at 5pm).

 

Own work: West Walton

     The latest finished painting ahead of my exhibition in October: The Bell Tower, West Walton. 28 x 52.5 cms, mixed media on watercolour board.

     West Walton is one of architectural sights of Britain - a mighty detached bell tower, sophisticated Early English Gothic, except for the parapet and pinnacles. West Walton is in the extreme west of Norfolk on the silt fen, and is one of a number of excellent parish churches to be found between the rivers Nene and Great Ouse.

St Edmund, Crickhowell

     Back to the lovely Usk valley and a family celebration.  While the rest of the family were ascending Pen-y-Fan the bf and I made our first visit to the charming small town of Crickhowell, that lies between Brecon and Abergavenny.  There is some fine domestic architecture - early 19th century by the look of it and redolent of the rattle of the mail coach. It was very busy what with people and, less happily, traffic - the A40 passes through the town - too busy to take photographs. 

     However off the main street, and reached by a couple of narrow lanes, and much quieter, stands the parish church of St Edmund, built of New Red Sandstone. Rather Herefordshire in style.  Cruciform and with that rarity in Wales, a spire.  'The Buildings of Wales' volume on Powys suggests that this might be a post-Reformation addition. Work on the church however commenced soon after 1306 when the site for the church was donated by Lady Sibyl Pauncefoot. Her monument is on the n side of the chancel; to the s is the monument to Sir Grimbald Pauncefoot, who I presume is the good Lady Sibyl's husband. Otherwise, apart from the monument to Sir John & Lady Joan Herbert (also in the chancel) the interior is somewhat dull and barren. In the second half of the nineteenth century it underwent restoration at the hands of John Loughborough Pearson. (We've come across his work before at adjoining parishes of Burley-on-the-Hill and Exton in Rutland.)

Own work: Cirencester Park

      A new work to share with you: the Entrance to Cirencester Park, Cirencester, Gloucestershire. Mixed media, on 300gsm watercolour paper. The arch connects the house to the town; the great mass of greenery is the mightily impressive yew hedge, at some 40ft high and the tallest in the world. The arch may be the design of the 1st Earl Bathurst, who designed the house itself in a stripped down Baroque style. The arch is rather French in feel with those chainages, and none the worse for that. I think on the whole I prefer French classicism to the Italian variety.

Lichfield Cathedral III: The Furnishings

     In his book, 'English Cathedrals: The Forgotten Centuries' (1980, Thames & Hudson) Gerald Cobb sees the cathedral at Lichfield as having undergone two great disasters since the Reformation; the destruction during the English Civil War and the restoration undertaken by James Wyatt in 1788, when most of Bishop Hacket's work was undone. Some architectural historians, perhaps not so many now, would contend the mid nineteenth century restoration under Sir George Gilbert Scott, which was to sweep away the work of Wyatt and the last remains of Hacket's work, was a third disaster. I don't agree.

     Sadly the result of these repeated dislocations that the cathedral has undergone from the Reformation onwards is that there is now very little left in the way of furnishings from the Middle Ages or for that matter from either either the Hacket or Wyatt restorations. I can't help regret the loss of the Artisan Mannerist choir stalls installed by Bishop Hacket, and the great Corinthian reredos that may have been by Sir Christopher Wren, and stood behind the High Altar. 
     The overwhelming number of monuments and other furnishings date therefore from the early nineteenth century onwards; and the cathedral, (the transepts in particular), has a particularly rich collection of funerary monuments of that period (more than most English cathedrals, I think).  Wyatt's restoration, however much detested(!), may be a manifestation of a change in attitude to the cathedral that occurred at the end of the Long Eighteenth Century, for while there are a small number of memorials from the 17th & 18th century the number of memorials suddenly increased and continued through the 19th century filling the cathedral with good things. Perhaps Scott's work at the cathedral should also be viewed as part of that process. 

 

Lichfield Cathedral II: The Interior

      And so, to the interior. This is church as cave; the place of the Nativity or the Resurrection. It is filled with furnishings, mainly nineteenth century. A treasure hoard. There is some quite extraordinary work on display. So with all this richness where to begin? Perhaps with a little chronology. It always helps. (Images in the order in which they were taken.)

    There's barely a trace of either the Anglo-Saxon or Norman churches so the complicated construction history of the present cathedral essential begins c1200 with the rebuilding of the old Romanesque choir in the Early English style. Three bays of the arcade survive. The piers are complex, showing the influence of the school of West Country masons to be found, for instance at Wells and Glastonbury, (and much further afield in S Wales and in Dublin).  Short and very sturdy, these piers, far more than one would think structurally necessary. The aisles are correspondingly low, cave like. The two storey Chapel of St Chad's Head, attached to the s choir aisle was constructed at the same time.

     Then followed the s and n transepts in that order, both given a comprehensive working over in the late Middle Ages, and the chapterhouse & its long, dark richly decorated vestibule.  More cave.  The chapter house is a two storey structure, polygonal - octagonal or decagonal you decide!  It's been described as both. Either way it is rather domestic in scale with little of the monumentality one associates with the great polygonal chapterhouse of such places as York and Lincoln, and none the worse for that.  It currently functions as a sort of cathedral museum containing, amongst other things, two valuable Anglo-Saxon pieces of art: a fragment of sculpture - one of the scant remains of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral - and the manuscript folio The Lichfield Gospels aka The Llandeilo Gospel Book. Look for the Late Medieval painting over the entrance. Upstairs (not open to the public) currently holds the cathedral library and has done since the 18th century and the demolition of the old medieval library which stood to the north of the nave.

      In the later half of the 13th century the nave was rebuilt in the Geometric Decorated style reaching the w front c1270. Some writers have associated this work with the masons Thomas, and his son William Fitzthomas who are known to have worked at the cathedral at that time.

     The nave is the most architecturally significant part of the cathedral, certainly its most sophisticated work. The bays are on the narrow side, well portioned, richly detailed and perhaps a little solid. The arcade takes up half the elevation. The triforium and clerestory a quarter each. That makes the triforium larger than normal, larger certainly that at Lincoln which is the ultimate source for the design via Westminster Abbey.* The clerestory - those 'spherical triangles' - on the other hand, is under the direct influence of Westminster Abbey, where a similar design is used to light the rear of the triforium.  There is some influence of the Rayonnant Sainte Chapelle in Paris, but there the windows which are in the Lower Chapel there have horizontal sills, not curved as at Westminster and here. Those 'triangular' windows were already in the repertoire of French architects at the time and must be closed linked to the invention of bar tracery, for example they had been used as clerestory windows in the High Gothic Leibfraukirche in Trier built by French masons from Champagne. The form also occurs in the glazed tympanums of the w front of Rheims Cathedral and in the aisle clerestories of Le Mans and Beauvais cathedrals.

     The piers, though are under the influence of a source much close to home: the choir at Pershore abbey. They are on the sturdy side, and, tend to visually block the aisles from view. The spandrels are nicely decorated with the same cinquefoil motif that appears on the w front, except here it is pierced by the vaulting shafts which run all the way to the ground, unifying the design and accentuating the verticality of what is not, as I have said in the previous post on the cathedral, a particularly tall elevation (under 60ft). 

     The whole interior elevation (rather like the w front) is like some highly patterned screen that keeps the eye firmly within the main volume of the nave. High above there is more patterning with a tierceron vault based on that in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral. There is a general feeling of Lincoln about the whole design, but the nave at Lincoln is more spatially integrated and structurally daring. The design here takes relatively up to date ideas and happily uses them for their decorative value.

     The later nave at Worcester seems to be a variant on this design. The pier forms and the proportions are very similar.

     So far so straightforward, however  in the early 14th century a new apsidal Lady Chapel was constructed at a distance e of the cathedral, and, what is more, slightly out of alignment with existing e end. The difference in alignment between nave and e end can be seen in the first photograph.  It is not a 'weeping chancel'; its meaning is not symbolic but simply utilitarian - the builders were merely following a bed of sandstone on top of which to construct the cathedral foundations. The design of the Lady Chapel has its origins in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. The interior is quite good, the exterior less so. Though I haven't been able to understand why the mason varied the width of the bays of the chapel 'nave'. 

     Work then commenced to connect this new chapel to the rest of the cathedral. This involved destroying most of the EE choir and its ambulatory (it would have looked something like Southwark or Glasgow) and constructing a new choir and retrochoir. This was done in the Curvilinear Decorated style; the piers keep the proportions of the EE piers in the choir, the details alone being different; the repetition of the cinquefoil from the spandrels of the nave arcade is a nice touch. Above the arcade, the designer - possibly William of Eyton or William Ramsey - dispensed with the triforium altogether, reduced the inner and outer leaves of the 'mur epais'** to what amounts to a second arcade and introduced a new leaf midway between the two, pierced with vast clerestory windows, taller than the arcades below them.  I wonder if the choir at Great Malvern Priory is a descendant of this sort of design. 

     Most of the clerestory tracery apparently dates now from Restoration period and is in the Perpendicular Gothic. I'm not sure it qualifies as 'Survival' or 'Revival'. There are eight windows on each side: the first six from the west on each side have a rather smart tracery design, quite convincingly medieval looking; windows seven have  something much more mundane; windows eight are, on the s. Curvilinear (thought to be the original design), and one the N something completely idiosyncratic, which must date from the Restoration.

   

 

*  Interestingly two engravings of the south elevation of the cathedral, one by Wenceslas Hollar, show the triforium glazed.  If the engravings are accurate they change the whole nature of the design.

** The 'mur epais', the 'thick wall', is a building technique originating in Romanesque period Normandy. It was bought to England after the Norman Conquest and thence diffused to the rest of the British Isles. It can be likened to a sandwich: two leaves of masonry (the bread) with a core of rubble as the filling. It continued to be used right until the end of the Middle Ages, and was one of those factors that helped shape, or define, British architecture of the Medieval Period.

The Counter Project

     It is now over 24 hours since an acquaintance of mine, the Irish classical architect and fellow member of RIBA TAG, Conor K Lynch tweeted four images of a counter proposal by 'Apollodorus Architects' for the new rugby stadium in Bath.  In those 19 hours the response has extraordinary: 18,800 likes and counting; 1,948 retweets; 472 comments. The latter have been overwhelmingly positive.  It has certainly caught the public imagination, on Twitter at least.  Of course, there had to be the snarky comment about Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect from a practicing modernist(?) architect.  Ah yes, that go to criticism of modern classicism. It really is a tired-out old trope.  It's not even a criticism of the architecture as such, but guilt by association.  Not only is it such a bore, but says much about the intellectual vacuity of the mainstream architectural profession that they should trot some old garbage like that.

    Now for some specifics: the Apollodorus Architects Classical proposal (here) stands counter to the Modernist one designed by Grimshaw (here) for Bath Rugby, who are in need of permanent stadium.  Bath Rugby play on the Recreation Ground - the 'Rec' - just over the river Avon from Bath city centre - in Bathwick, that large and unfinished late Georgian development by Thomas Baldwin I wrote about here.  So a particularly sensitive site then when any building on the 'Rec' could be seen from outside the e end of Bath Abbey.  One can also understand the reluctance of the club to leave - they have, after all, played there for decades.  On their website Bath Rugby claims of the Grimshaw design (here): We have created an iconic, yet sensitive design that will deliver an incredible match day experience.  I mean, who writes this guff? 'iconic yet sensitive'?  I'm not even sure what that means. In any case 'iconic', that hideously over used term, is not for Bath Rugby to claim.  I could go on as the Bath Rugby website and in particular their Development Brief, and which has now been formally submitted to Bath & North East Somerset Council, is full of such management speak, but I'll spare you.

     However the use of management speak isn't really the argument here, regrettable though its dominance of the discourse is.  Neither are the merits or otherwise of either scheme my concern, though as an associate member of TAG my sympathies are with the Classical design, which is based on the Roman Amphitheatre at Arles in Provence. Whatever my reservations about the design, and there are some, we have to honest at this juncture and admit it is very unlikely ever to be built if only for the 'mundane' reason that Bath Rugby is nearly an unsustainable £40,000,000 in debt.
     For me the response to this proposal highlights two interconnected phenomena.  Firstly, the growing appeal of Classical/Traditional architecture on social media.  All ready there are any number of twitter streams dedicated to traditional architecture & urbanism, and the culture necessary to sustain them.  Secondly, the continuing gulf between the public and the profession - a gulf that has lasted so far for some sixty plus years. We have a profession that is arrogant and unresponsive to the public.  It has attempted to establish itself as a secular priesthood of true believers. How long must this continue?