Cathays Park II: Glamorgan County Building

     My second post in an ongoing occasional series on the remarkable collection of civic buildings that make up Cathays Park in the the Welsh capital Cardiff.  This time it's the turn of Glamorgan County Hall by Vincent Harris (1876-1971) and Thomas Andersen Moodie (1874-1948).  I had never heard of the later until researching this piece, but Harris's work has long been familiar to me; I know his work in London best, such as Kensington Library, a very late work by him and severe to the point of banality, and the extraordinary Gothic Revival building he designed for the corner of Bond St and Burlington Gardens for the perfumers Atkinsons in 1926.  He did a lot of municipal work across the country and perhaps his best work, the Town Hall Extension and Central Library in Manchester (1934-8), fits into this category.
     Opened in 1912 the Glamorgan Building is nominally six years younger than the nearby City Hall (opened 1906 but designed back in the 1890s) and a comparison of both buildings provides an interesting exploration of the direction of British architecture in the early twentieth century, paralleled in Harris's own career - the difference between the Kensington Library and the Glamorgan Building is startling. As I said in my previous post on Cathays Park this is a building under the influence of the American Beaux Art tradition; richly detailed but a contrast none the less to the Edwardian Baroque of the City Hall and the Crown Court building and both the work of Lanchester, Stewart and Rickards with their restless sky lines and the Baroque merging of sculpture and architecture. The skyline of the Glamorgan Building (as it is now known) is simply a cornice - no sculpture, no urns to break that long emphatic horizontal. Note also how the façade down plays the centre. There is no risalto as such, just a long portico of paired Corinthian columns  - a 'giant order' rising between two floors - between heavy pylons (derived from that long, long colonnade of paired columns on the east façade of the Louvre?). Unlike the Louvre, however, the columns sit not on a ground floor (a podium in effect), but on a stylobate as though it was a Greek temple. The detailing is indeed neo-classical at times, but generally eclectic in tone - touches of Neo-renaissance and Edwardian Baroque, for instance in the way the wall surface is rarely inert, but is quite heavily layered and restless. Everything, however is done, as one one expect from a building of this period, with consummate skill and the overall result is rather sophisticated, sculptural, urban and urbane.  A far more formal and austere composition than either the City Hall or Court. Interestingly the sculpture on the building is purely architectural - there is no blending of disciplines here, for the remarkable and lavish sculptural groups, by Albert Hodge, are placed firmly on the ground.