Cathays Park, Cardiff I: The Welsh National War Memorial.

REMEMBER IN PEACE THOSE WHO IN THE TUMULT OF WAR

 BY SEA, ON LAND OR IN AIR

FOR US AND OUR VICTORY

ENDURETH UNTO

DEATH

     To Cardiff the other week.  It was my first visit - and I was rather impressed.  There is some particularly fine architecture - the castle (obviously) and atmospheric, pragmatic Victorian architecture on display in the Market and in the arcades that thread through the City centre. Much therefore to delight in.

     And there is Cathays Park with its collection of governmental buildings. The urbanism is, it has to be admitted, very dull, if almost non-existent.  The Park is simply laid out as an orthogonal grid with the buildings placed around a large, rectangular central park, rarely do the buildings address one another but seem rather self-contained entities. It is also monofunctional, so that to walk around there even on a weekday is a slightly unreal experience. However the earlier buildings are really top-notch, and that saves it from banality. I've always loved Late Victorian and Edwardian Baroque and Cathays Park has two fine examples. It is an incredibly flexible, if not pragmatic style undertaken with a an excellent eye for detail and wonderful craftsmanship.  I'm only sad that Portland stone - not my favourite - was used instead of something more local to Cardiff, or even Bath Stone which is often used in South Wales for mouldings etc.

     The collection of buildings as whole reflecting too the change in taste in British 20th century architecture from ebullience to sobriety. Possibly, too, it is one of those moments in British architecture that comes closest to embodying, being commensurate with, the economic and military power the Empire, then at its zenith. Perhaps the only moment that happens again is the creation of the Imperial War Graves post WWI.
     Alas it was not the finest of days and there was only opportunity to photograph two buildings well; the Beaux Arts Glamorgan County Council Building (1912, Vincent Harris and Thomas Anderson Moodie) and the Welsh National War Memorial, by Sir Ninian Comper, 1928. More of the Glamorgan building in a future post
     I'm a great fan of the work of Comper (1864-1960), as regular readers may have realised. Trained under G F Bodley he was an architecture of great sensitivity and refinement. Unsurprisingly his work was overwhelmingly ecclesiastical. This is one of his few 'secular' works, and his most classical, and it is very successful. Monumental but not overpowering, rather humane in fact. It stands in the middle of the Cathays Park, and thankfully makes no attempt to deal with the scale of it.  That would have been folly. 

   The concept is simple: a circular colonnade of 15 Corinthian columns plus a further 3 pairs, each pair marking an entrance (Comper was very impressed by the Hadrianic architecture of the Roman cities of North Africa) contains a fountain in a sunken court.  It is a simplicity however that allows for sophisticated complexity and interplay of forms as the viewer moves around the outside. (The entrances have later bronze gates of most likely mid-century date. They are, in themselves, charming)  There are inscriptions in Welsh (outside) and English (inside, by Comper himself see above) carved into the deeper than usual frieze of the entablature.  The central pylon has bronze statuary sculpted by Henry Alfred Pegram - both the sculpture and architecture being in a more Italian Renaissance mood.

     I suppose that some would think that the Corinthian order too elaborate to be associated with such a solemn undertaking.  However if we look at the theory of order we see that the Corinthian is very suitable for this use; Vitruvius in his 'De Architectura' - the only architectural thesis/manual to have come down to us from Antiquity - gives a mythological origin for the order. He relates that is the invention of the Greek architect and sculptor Callimachus, moved by the sight of a funerary or votive basket, containing the possessions of the deceased, placed upon the grave of a young girl. The basket had a tile for a lid and there was an acanthus growing from under the basket and enshrouding it with leaves.  Francois Blondel (1618-1686) in his 'Cours d'Architecture' notes the funerary nature of the basket and suggests the Ancients reared votive columns topped with urns to hold the ashes of the dead. For him architecture's origins are to be found in the commemoration of the dead. For him, also, is the idea that in some way the classical temple is representative of the sacred grove. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in the National War Memorial a sort of Scared Grove - even a stone circle, a sacred space that contains within it the Christological symbol of the Fountain of Life, the whole rather like a set piece encountered in a Medieval or Renaissance romance. In all a worthy tribute, I think, to the Fallen.