Own work: Lettering

     Influenced by both David Hockney and Peter Blake I have been playing with letter forms combining collage and pencil crayon, as part of a nascent alphabet project.

Cardiff Castle II

     There is always a moment, perhaps even longer, as the fingers are poised about to hit the keyboard when the thought is: how am I going to start this post? What's the hook?

     This post will begin with the moment after we had ascended the flight of stone steps up to the top of the battlements, and that sudden sense of calmness after the (let's be honest here) scruffiness and general noisiness of the castle grounds; the welcome cool shade of the covered walk way itself; the delight in the shear quality of the architecture; the expectation of the looking around somewhere that has been part of one's cultural landscape for a long time but not actually experienced.

   As the bell in the Clock Tower above us struck twelve in a small act of theatre, our guide appeared and unlocked the gate and let us in, and we stepped into another world. Is that too cliched a thing to say?  I know it's a device I use often enough but I really can't explain it any other way. Just lazy? Only that for me the best places are very often those where we leave the modern world behind and that, I believe, was the intention here of both client and architect.  Anyway we had stepped over the threshold in an entirely private world perched some 20 ft above the ground, which when you think about it almost entirely bizarre. Bizarre and beautiful. A place of enchantment. When we entered the Clock Tower and the Winter Smoking room I was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it. The room was small, vaulted and heavily decorated (on the theme of time) in a rather Pre-Raphaelite manner.  Intense, yes, but not oppressive. Light filled too. Which was a surprise.

     And so it went on, room to room, it all slightly incoherent, almost atomised; the rooms (nearly all in the towers) and with the exceptions of the Great Hall and the library directly below it, are on the smallish size and connected by narrow snaking corridors and spiral staircases. I'm still undecided whether it was intentional or accidental, the result, that is, of the castle being developed piecemeal. Perhaps a little of each, though I can imagine both client and architecture being quixotic. I think you could say the rooms also, when thought about, tend to be in conflict with one another such is the divergence of taste between each and which is probably not so obvious experientially. What unites them I have discussed in my previous post but to quickly recap is intensity (that word again) of vision that inspired remarkable craftsmanship and decoration, seclusion, and playfulness and fantasy. The fantastic is deeply important in a house like this, redundancy too.  How else could one really explain a room like the two storey Chaucer Room? which owes so much to the centralised spaces of the now demolished Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster with all their connotations of the sublime. It was supposed to be a drawing room for Lady Bute but it must have been perishing in winter.

     I have occasionally described churches on this blog as a Schtazkammer; this house certainly is, or rather a series of inter-linked jewel caskets. Such a strange thing it is to suddenly step into the one public room left from the time of Henry Holland all chastely Neo-classical - like a sudden gulp of cold water! In my first post I talked about castle is sort of a mimetic of the Ideal City, I would really like to take that idea further because I see the house as an attempt to contain, at the symbolic level, the whole cosmos.  In decorative terms, to give you an example, all over the house both inside and out there are carvings of animals - armadillos, and monkeys, bears and parrots, I could go ad infinitum - all fauna in fact. A proper beastarium. Burges's inventiveness and joy know no bounds. A further example: Lord Bute's wondrous bathroom in the Bute Tower is lined with wood and marble panelling. The marbles are various. All are neatly labelled as though from a scientific collection.  The house, then, attempts to bridge the growing materialism of the 19th century, and its apparent need to categorise, with the pre-modern and Bute's deep religious sensibility expressed as in his Roman Catholicism and his occultism. As I type this I return in thought to Hegel and the idea of sublimation. For me it reaches a conclusion in the extraordinary paradise garden, a Hortus Conclusus of sorts, at the top of the Bute Tower.  Concealed from below behind the battlements it is in the form of a Pompeian courtyard garden open to the sky and surrounded by a covered walk way.  Extraordinary indeed.

     Since the death of Burges and the posthumous completion of what was then unfinished the intervening years have, perhaps, been unkind.  The Great Staircase and the Moat Garden were destroyed between the wars. In the late Forties the Butes vacated the castle gifting it to the City of Cardiff, and a music college moved in. The west gardens are not what they were and the chapel, and the ornate 'Swiss Bridge' that Burges designed to connect castle and Garden, have been demolished.  Thankfully, however, a lot of restoration work has been done on the interiors.

     A final word about our visit.  Firstly you may have noticed there are no pictures of the exterior of the castle - Castle St is not really photogenic - too much signage, etc.  In many ways off-putting but do not be so easily discouraged the rewards inside are great. The castle grounds when we visited were little better and verging on the scruffy.  I should also point out that there is limited access to the interiors and it is best, as we did, to take the guided tour. Our guide, David, was very good.  The additional cost well worth it.

Cardiff castle I

Or, let my lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in some high lonely tow'r,

Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,

With thrice-great Hermes.

Il Penseroso, II 85-8, Milton

     It's been nearly two weeks now since our visit to Cardiff Castle and specifically the work of the Victorian Gothic Revival architect William Burges. We were not disappointed, for what Burgess achieved at the Castle, in collaboration with a rich and discerning patron, is truly remarkable. And it's Burges's work I want to concentrate on.

     But first a little history, a little context.  The site of Cardiff castle is ancient, located strategically at the lowest fording point on the river Taff. The Romans came here and established a succession of forts, one on top of another as it were.  (What you can see now at the castle is a reconstruction undertaken in the 1920s. A mistake, I think, as it did involve the destruction of the medieval walls on the south, east and north sides of the castle and the demolition of several historic buildings along Castle St in the process for very little, if any, aesthetic gain.) The remains of the last fort, built about 280 AD, were seized by William the Conqueror on his return from pilgrimage to St David's, and that fort, refortified with a great motte in the north-west corner and the the interior interior space divided into an inner and outer bailey came to serve as the administrative centre for the Marcher Lordship of Glamorgan. Towards the end of the Middle Ages a new residential block was constructed by the Earl of Warwick along the west wall of the old Roman fort. And rather stylish it is too - constructed in blue lias and with elegant two storey bay windows. Late in the 18th century Henry Holland and 'Capability' Brown were busy at work landscaping the grounds and adding wings to the north and south of the Earl of Warwick's work producing a neat symmetrical Gothick façade. A country house in fact. It was this enlarged structure that eventually formed the core of around which Burges's work coalesced.

     By then the Industrial Revolution was well under way in south Wales and Cardiff was booming - the 'Chicago of Wales'.  Cardiff's exponential growth was due to the foresight of the 2nd Marquess of Bute, a Scottish landowner (Cardiff had passed into the ownership of the Butes in 1766), who took a massive financial gamble to develop the docks at the mouth of the Taff and thereby turn Cardiff into one of the most important mercantile cities in the British Empire.  It also, eventually, made the Butes very rich.
     The 2nd Marquess died in 1848, heavily in debt, and his son, aged 6 months, inherited. John Patrick Crichton-Stuart 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847-1900) is a deeply interesting if complex character, a polymath with all sorts of interests, some which at first sight may seem in contradiction. Industrialist and medievalist. Crichton-Stuart was a devout Roman Catholic, a convert from Scots Presbyterianism, with a deep interest in the occult. I suspect too that he was a bit of a recluse.

     His first commission from Burges at Cardiff, the Clock Tower, illustrates these sometime centrifugal tendencies well. And what can be said of the tower can be said of all that Burges achieved at Cardiff. for it set the tone of what was to follow. And what Burges and his client produced was a structure rich in layered meaning and complexity. The tower, built beautifully, in contra-distinction to the original house, in Forest of Dean sandstone, stands at the south west corner of the castle some distance from the house.  I am not sure about the original arrangement but now it is connected to the main house by a covered, and beautifully detailed wall walk. It contains accommodation for two - the Marquess and a servant - arranged vertically in a manner that a man of his wealth would not in the Middle Ages have had. No medieval tower in Britain, at least, ever quite looked like this. Yes, it is a public display of seigneurial pomp, a projection of personal power and status (as if that was ever the sole reason for anything. Such reductionism is a waste of time), but it is also a public building in the manner of those lofty towers you find on civic buildings in Medieval Italy. A civic building then and one that soon became the embodiment of the new Industrial city burgeoning at its foot. In fact as Andrew Richardson notes in his essay 'Ancient and Modern - Cardiff Castle' in 'Buildings and Places in Welsh History' the castle increasingly became the setting for a series of civic events. as the century progressed. In one sense it is a strange building in which to make a home for it could be argued that its inhabitant is subsumed by its rhetoric. (The rooms inside maybe lavishly decorated but are small and intimate.) It makes me think of a stylites' column in 5th century Syria that very public act of retreat from the world. Another indication of Bute's reclusive temperament is the eventual closing of the castle grounds to the casual visitor. It is in all, however, an extraordinary thing for a 21 yr old, newly come into his majority and now vast wealthy, to commission. An act, I feel, of intense confidence and self will. And to think that simultaneously across that burgeoning, sprawling city, in Roath, he was also beginning the rebuilding of the Anglican church of St Margaret of Antioch under the local architect John Prichard. Thus began Bute's architectural patronage.
     The collaboration of m'Lord Bute and Burgess, perhaps one of the fruitful in all British architectural history, transformed the sw corner of the castle, adding towers and heightening the existing, walled gardens were created to s and w beyond the castle walls increasing its size and further isolating, one can imagine, the Marquess from the world, and creating a dreamlike, almost visionary, quality that owes something to the real castles illustrated in the 'Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry' and perhaps to Pre-Raphaelite art. Yes, it is a fantasy but it is more than that; Cardiff Castle, bearing in mind that the castle is symbolically a place of order in a chaotic world, is an extreme example of the nineteenth century cult of the house - house as defense and refuge, essentially, from rapacious Modernity - in the which the house is fractured and reassembled and re-presented as ideal city. Perhaps as 'Emblematic City', even the heavenly Jerusalem itself. The ambiguity and indeed contradiction is immense.*

     Burges and the 3rd Marquess worked together for another 13 years until Burges's death 1881, after which things were completed by William Frame, Burges's assistant.  In those 13 years tastes changed within the Gothic Revival from the muscular High Victorian Gothic back to a refined Puginian style, that is back to a style that is grounded explicitly in our national Medieval styles.  Quite possibly a 'rogue' architect, Burges's earliest work at the castle was definitely within the High Victorian Gothic style - strong and blunt with considerable heft with much massive, inert wall surface - buttresses, for instance are quite rare. There is something distinctly Early French Gothic about this work, but it is noticeable that as the work progressed later Gothic and local influences both present themselves. The exotic, too. Client and architect achieved much, all of it of an almost overwhelming quality and inventiveness, humorousness too. The quality of the masonry to take one example is superb, as is the exterior woodwork. Burges was an an architect who could think readily in the 3 dimensions - according to the architect and critic Patrick Nuttgens not that common an attribute in architects. At times it all verges on the sublime, but that said the whole - Burges and pre-Burges as at it were - forms, on the exterior at least, a somewhat unhappy composition, not entirely successful.  The contrast in materials is unhelpful. Perhaps, had Burges lived, it was all to be sublimated into one organic whole.

* For another example of this in Burges's work see his competition entry for The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, London 1866-67.

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio complete

     Well, as I've said before this has taken years, and oddly at times I thought I'd never get there, but here are all thirty of the Rustiche as re-interpreted by good myself. The bf thinks I'm mad.  Apologies for the photo - I took it this afternoon in our sitting room. Anyway hopefully they should all be mounted and framed ready for my exhibition at Aberglasney in September.  Watch this space for more details!

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastain Serlio XXX

     Well, it's come to an end.  It's finished!  I have completed all thirty of the Rustiche arches contained in Sebastiano Serlio's posthumous 'Extraordinario Libro di Architettura'.  In a way it's an anti-climax, but it does mean I can develop new projects - I'm thinking about producing an architectural alphabet next.