Iain Boyd Whyte holds a personal chair in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and a Getty Scholar. He is currently a Member of the Postdoctoral Fellowship Review Committee of the Getty Grant Program, Los Angeles, and a member of the Board of Trustees, National Galleries of Scotland. Work in progress includes a biography of Ove Arup and a reader on the German city, the latter in collaboration with Professo r David Frisby (University of Glasgow). 

A return to classical models and manners characterized much of the architectural production in the industrialized world between 1900 and 1914. In its international scope, the early twentieth century classical revival echoed the spread of Neo-Classicism in the late eighteenth century. Just as Neo-Classicism had found an initial impulse in the reaction against the French Rococo style - summed up by Baudelaire as "an excess of gay and charming frivolities" (1) - so the early twentieth-century classical rev ival in continental Europe can be seen as a universal rejection of the swirls and curlicues of Art Nouveau. In both instances, a process of purification followed, leading ultimately to a symbolic architecture based on pure geometry and Euclidean forms - the cones, circles and spheres favoured equally by Boullée and Le Corbusier.

In Central Europe the transformation from the curves of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil to a pared-down Neo-Classicism came very quickly. The rejection of floral motifs in favour of geometric, chequerboard patterns was already well established in the realms of graphics and furniture design by 1900. The shift in architecture followed four or five years later, and was marked by buildings like J.M. Olbrich's Tietz store in Düsseldorf of 1906-1908, or the crematorium near Hagen designed by Peter Behrens's in 190 -07, using the proto-Renaissance style of twelfth-century Florence. At a superficial level, comparable shifts can be found in Britain. Norman Shaw, for example, abandoned picturesque Queen Anne for the Wren revival on a grand scale at Bryanston House, Dorset, in 1890, and Edwin Lutyens followed a similar path in 1906, when the free plans and vernacular motifs of his earlier houses were replaced by variations on themes by Palladio, Sanmichele and Vignola at Heathcote, a grand bourgeois house in Ilkley, York hire. Yet the comparison between the Continental and British experiences cannot be pushed too far, not least because of the lack of a vigorous Art Nouveau tradition in Britain. Indeed, the aesthetic ambitions of Art Nouveau were subsumed in Britain at the turn of the century either into the handworked utopias of the Arts and Crafts movement, or into the florid High Baroque that dominated public architecture. A marked shift in sensibilities occurred around 1905, however, and both these tendencies were rejec ted in favour of a scholarly, Beaux-Arts classicism of French and American parentage, which was better able to accommodate modern structural demands. It is this shift that bears closest comparison with the parallel phenomena in Europe.

The Edwardian High Baroque was not itself a coherent force. As Alastair Service has noted: "One could say that there are three categories of English Neo-Baroque buildings; the Grand, the Capricious and the Arts and Crafts - though there are many examples which combine any two of these characteristics." (2) Three works by John Belcher exemplify these three attitudes. In the 1880s he had travelled extensively in Southern Germany, Austria and Italy, where the Genoese Baroque found his particular favour. Th s preference may well have been reinforced by a reading of Robert Reinhardt's study of Genovese palaces (3) and found expression in Belcher's building for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in London, 1888-1893 (with A. Beresford Pite: see Figure 2), in which architecture, sculpture and painting were integrated on both interior and exterior in a florid tribute to the Genoese model. If this represented the Arts and Crafts variant of the English Baroque, the Grand manner is well shown in Belcher and Pite s unexecuted design for the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington, London (see Figure 3). Although unsuccesful in the competition, this project attracted considerable praise in the professional journals for the plasticity of the main street facade and for its grand, Michelangelesque domes. The influence of Michelangelo's example at this time was doubtlessly stimulated by the publication in 1893 of J. Addington Symond's Life of Michael Angelo, and further reinforced by a long article by A. B resford Pite, "The Architecture of Michael Angelo", published in three parts in the Architectural Review in 1898. The literary dimension of the Baroque revival was further reinforced between 1898 and 1901 in a series of folio volumes entitled Later Renaissance Architecture in England, which were written by Belcher and Mervyn Macartney, and dedicated to the great triumphs of the English Baroque. The influence of the English examples on Belcher's own work can be seen in the Ashton M emorial in Lancashire (designed 1904, built 1907-09: see Figure 4), whose dome clearly derives from Wren's Greenwich Hospital (1704 onwards). Beyond providing a memorial to Baron Ashton, who had made a vast fortune through the manufacture of linoleum, this great domed building served no purpose and simply housed a table, four chairs, a clock and a model of itself - a perfect example of the capricious Baroque.

Figure 2: John Belcher and A. Beresford Pite, Institute of Chartered Accountants, Moorgate Place, London, designed 1888, completed 1893.

Figure 3: John Belcher Design for the completion of the South Kensington Museum, 1891.

Figure 4: John Belcher, Ashton Memorial, Lancaster, designed 1904, built 1907-09.

In its fusion of an international language and specifically English sources - Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Gibbs and Archer - the Baroque revival satisfied both imperialist and nationalist aspirations. Given the inability of the Arts and Crafts ideology to create on a monumental scale, the designers of town halls and government buildings invariably turned in the early years of the new century to variations on the English Baroque. As catalogued by J. Mordaunt Crook:

When John Murray wanted a striking motif for his Crown Estate Building in Whitehall (1906-10), he went straight to Hampton Court. For Belfast City Hall (1896-1907), Sir A. Brumwell Thomas borrowed directly from Wren: the towers of St. Paul's and the domes of Greenwich Hospital. At Stockport Town Hall (1904-08) Thomas chose Wren again for the tower and Hawksmoor for the twin porticoes.(4)

Figure 5: A. Brumwell Thomas, Belfast City Hall, 1896-1907.

As expressions of civic pride, the town halls often achieved great heights of virtuosity and decorative richness. A splendid example is Deptford Town Hall in South London, designed in 1902 by Edwin Alfred Rickards in partnership with H.V. Lanchester (see Figure 6). On the main facade a low pitched gable, carrying echoes of Inigo Jones' St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden (1630-31), acts as a pediment above a magnificently decorated central bay. While the writhing human forms supporting this bay are clearly derived from Michelangelo, (5) the detailing of the window itself is more reminiscent of the Viennese Baroque of which Rickards was a great admirer. (6) As Goodhardt-Rendel perceptively noted: "The Deptford town-hall, with its clear and simple plan, its admirably proportioned architectural treatment, and the charming nautical flavour of its ornament, stands high among cognate buildings of all ages." (7) The main entrance front of Hull School of Art (1905) offered an interesting variation on the Deptford th me, once again with Viennese echoes (see Figure 7). Rickards (born 1872) was a member of the last generation of architects to receive their training in the offices of practising architects rather than in the halls of the academy. Like Richard Norman Shaw (born 1831), John Belcher (born 1841), and Aston Webb (born 1849) before him, Rickards learned his trade at the drawing board, augmenting this practical training with classes at the Royal Academy and the Architectural Association. A gifted musician and con versationalist, Rickards enjoyed a lifelong friendship with Arnold Bennett, who took him as the model for George Cannon, the architect-hero of his novel The Roll Call, (8) and called him "one of the two most interesting, provocative and stimulating men I have yet encountered." (9) The other was H.G. Wells.

Figure 7: H.V. Lanchester and Edwin Rickards, School of Art, Hull, 1903-05.

Rickards' great verve and bravado can be seen in his competition winning design for the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, London (1904, revised design built 1905-1911: see Figures 8 and 8A), with its great Corinthian order, or in his megalomanic scheme for London's County Hall (1907). By this time, however, the tide of public opinion was moving against the piling up of sculptural forms in a Baroque ecstasy. This shift in informed taste was confirmed a few years later by the editor of the Architects ' and Builders' Journal, in the context of Edwin Cooper's design for St. Marylebone Town Hall (1911-18):

We cannot help asking ourselves whether all these colossal columns, domes, towers, groups of sculpture and other imposing features are felt by their authors to be the only natural and inevitable expression of the necessities of the case and the nature and purpose of the building. (10)

The new climate illustrated by this well-known quotation can be ascribed to the general, Europe-wide reaction against all excessive decoration, be it Art Nouveau or Neo-Baroque, and to specifically British developments relating to architectural education and techniques of construction. Taken together, these factors promoted a move towards Neo-Grec and Beaux-Arts models.

Figure 8: H.V. Lanchester and Edwin Rickards, Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London, 1904, revised design built 1905-11.

Figure 8A: H.V. Lanchester and Edwin Rickards, Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London, 1904, revised design built 1905-11, interior.

The influence of Scottish architects played a significant part here. In England the Greek Revival was moribund by the end of the 1830s, when it was replaced in the popular esteem by the Neo-Gothic and the Neo-Renaissance. In Scotland, by contrast, it continued throughout the century. There are various possible reasons for this: the arch-conservatism of the Scots, a degree of economic marginalization and a strong, Calvinist distaste for the latent Catholicism of the English Gothic Revival. Another, more angible reason was the example of Alexander "Greek" Thomson (1817-1875). As his nickname implies, Thomson favoured the trabeated example of Greece as his model - the architecture of podium, column, lintel, wall and roof - controlled by a rigid and highly developed system of geometry. His Egyptian Halls in Glasgow (1871-1873: see Figure 9) mark a watershed between the still-surviving Greek Revival and the beginning of a new architecture - of a shed that was endlessly expandable on the horizontal plane and w ich presented a uniform face to the world, making no concession to possible variations in internal use. Laugier's demand for the expression of both the apparent and actual solidity of the trabeated structure - the doctrine of "apparent utility" - is given full force on the suspended facade, with heavier orders used on each successive floor. At the top level, the windows are hidden behind the stubby Egyptian columns as if to assert the dominance of the structural wall over the openings, of material over spa ce. The appeal of Thomson's example to the changing mood of the new century can be judged from a long and highly laudatory article by David Barclay and Reginald Blomfield, who correctly saw Thomson as a key figure, linking the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But where Thomson was strong, with a strength sometimes amounting to genius, was in his mastery of abstract form, in his enthusiasm for an art which, in his mind, was guided by no other consideration than that of aesthetic effect. ... Thomson was a prophet, and too far ahead of his time. At the period when the Gothic infatuation was at its height, ... this solitary Scotchman made his stand for the art of architecture single-handed. (11)

Figure 9: Alexander Thomson, Egyptian Halls, Union Street, Glasgow, 1871-73.

Unlike the works of the Gothic revival, which were laden with emotional overtones and religious imperatives, Thomson's architecture was grounded on the Egyptian and Greek trabeated traditions, which sought no authority beyond that of the architectural syntax.

If Thomson was a prophet, his obvious apostle was John Burnet. A year after the Egyptian Halls had been completed, the twenty-one year old Burnet left his father's architectural practice in Glasgow to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was attached to Jean-Louis Pascal of the Atelier Blouet, Gilbert, Questel and Pascal. Returning to Glasgow, Burnet worked initially with his father, and then in partnership with John Archibald Campbell, another Pascal pupil. The work of the Burnet/Cambel partnership in the 1880s and 1890s reveals a wide variety of styles, from Neo-Grec and French Renaissance, to Scots Baronial and even Arts and Crafts. (12) The partnership broke up in 1897, however, a year after Burnet had made his first visit to America. Armed with his French connections, Burnet had made contact there with his American contemporaries at the École des Beaux-Arts, with Charles Foley McKim in Boston, and Louis Sullivan in Chicago, who had established the Adler and Sullivan partnership in 18 81. While in Chicago, Burnet must also have seen the pioneering steel frame buildings of Sullivan's former associate, William Le Baron Jenney - the First Leiter Building (1879) and the Home Insurance Building (1883-85) - together with the Tacoma Building by Holabird and Roche (1889-89) and Daniel Burnham's Reliance Building (1894-95).

In the first decade of the new century, Burnet produced a series of major works that moved from a residual Baroque, via the Beaux-Arts, to a proto-modernist, stripped Classicism. The Chicagoan influence was constantly present and the facade of McGeoch's warehouse in Glasgow (1905-06, demolished 1970: see Figure 10) is based on a Sullivanesque grid, ordered vertically by a notional base, shaft and capital. Only the curved pediments and the Baroque sculptural figures over the main door disturb the powerful rectilinearity of the composition. Burnet's progress towards an ever more simplified Classical language resulted in the Neo-Greek colonnade of the Edward VII Galleries at the British Museum in London (1904-14), a scheme worthy of Pascal's studio itself. It is significant that Goodhart Rendell, in his pro-Classicist survey Architecture since the Regency (1953), should have chosen the portico and central three bays of the Edward VII Galleries (see Figure 11) above the comment "Expertise recovered". The term "architectural", to Goodhart-Rendell, meant "logically organised" and he saw a paradigm of this principle in the teaching of the École des Beaux-Arts, which he described as "absolutely practical and rational in method." (13)

Figure 10: John Burnet, McGeoch's warehouse, West Campbell Street, Glasgow, 1905-06, demolished 1970.

Figure 11: John Burnet, Edward VII Galleries, British Museum, London, 1904-14.

Burnet was not the only Beaux-Arts trained architect to enjoy success in Britain at this time. Arthur Davis had followed Burnet into Pascal's atelier (14) and subsequently collaborated with the French architect Charles Mewès on competition designs for the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Although unsuccessful on this occasion, the partnership worked well, and Mewès and Davis launched their London practice with the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly (1903-06), the first, large-scale building in London with a steel frame. The frame was, of course, hidden behind stone dressings, which nevertheless succeeded in expressing rather then denying the steel underpinnings. In contrast, the efforts by Belcher and Joass to adapt their Baroque inclinations to the demands of the steel frame resulted in the contrived neo-Mannerism of Mappin House on Oxford Street (1906-08: see Figure 12), or the Royal Insurance building on Piccadilly (1907-08). The convergence of the steel frame, with its American provenance, and the Beaux-Arts style tha so well expressed the essence of its trabeated construction found a spectacular expression in Selfridge's store, Oxford Street (1907-09, finally completed 1928: see Figure 13). The initial concept that attracted the store's owner, Gordon Selfridge, was by a young American architect, Francis Swales, who, like Burnet and Davis before him, had worked in Pascal's atelier while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. Swales played a prominent role at the time as an intermediary between the architectural cultures of Europe and America and appears to have had considerable skills in self-promotion. His lecture to the RIBA in 1909 on the Franco-American connection prompted the chairman, Ernest George, to conclude:

Here was a nation [the USA], preeminently a practical nation, dealing with vast commercial interests and building huge monuments, not as monuments, but as works for which they had a practical necessity. They grafted the tradition, and training, and exact knowledge, and delicate feeling for Classic beauty which they obtained from France upon their own gigantic needs, and produced ... colossal works ... broad and magnificent designs. (15)

The Selfridges store embodied, in the English context, the complementary strengths of American enterprise and French academic rigour, while the distinctly Chicagoan flavour of the design can be attributed to Daniel Burnham, who was appointed as consultant to the project. The American influence was further reinforced by the choice of Sven Bylander, a Swedish engineer based in New York, to design the steelwork. (16) Although hung behind the giant colonnade, in a manner strangely reminiscent of 'Greek' Tho son's Egyptian Halls, the fenestration of the store revealed the existence of the steel frame. (17) The climax of this revelatory process came with Burnet's office building for the Kodak Company on Kingsway, (1910-11: see Figure 14), on which Selfridge's columns were reduced to pilasters on a front stripped of detail, which confidently stated its notional divisions into base, shaft and capital, and exposed its fire-resisting steel frame construction. This austere, stripped classicism was to provide the mod el for countless imitations erected in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s.

Figure 14: John Burnet, Offices for the Kodak Company, Kingsway, London, 1910-11.

In comparing the work of Charles Mewès in London (see Figures 15 and 15A) with that of his English contemporaries, Goodhardt-Rendel exclaimed:

Yet here was work of one born to a manner we were painfully acquiring, of one whose savoir faire made his English friends look distressingly awkward and inexpert. Design like this could only be learnt at school, where most English architects at that time had been - shall we call it privately educated? - by the uncertain method of pupilage. (18)

Whereas the courses offered in the nineteenth century at the Royal Academy Schools were supplementary to the training received as an apprentice in an architectural office, there was a move at the turn of the century towards full-time training in schools. The movement to organise and formalize architectural education in Britain had actually set in around 1890, in which year a large number of students petitioned the Queen's Commissioners for Scottish Universities, asking for a comprehensive course in arch tecture to be established at Edinburgh University. Nothing came of this initiative, but the Architectural Association opened a day school in 1901 and an honours course in architecture was established at Liverpool in 1904, under the guidance of the redoubtable Charles Reilly. In the same year the RIBA set up a Board of Architectural Education, marking the end of era of the artist-architect who had learned his craft as an apprentice in an architect's office. (19) As one would expect, the newly established ac demic discipline valued scholarship and method above instinct or native cunning and was naturally drawn towards the example of the École des Beaux-Arts. The most vigorous proponent of the Beaux-Arts and of Classical precedent was Sir Reginald Blomfield who insisted in 1902 that "We have left the nineteenth century behind us, with its gross materialisms, its confused ideals and blundering experiments in art. It is time that we return to the narrow way." (20) As an admirer of Alexander Thomson, Karl Friedric h Schinkel and Decimus Burton, and the author of A History of Renaissance Architecture in England (1897), Blomfield's preferred path was strictly classicist. As he argued in his Studies in Architecture (1905):

Good architecture is not arrived at by violent efforts to be original. If architecture is again to become an art with assured vitality, it must dispense with the inessential, and address itself to the root of the matter, namely, to the task of finding the absolutely best expression for the constructive necessities of a building. This is the lesson to be learnt from Justinian's architects. They taught the world that when all the conventions are exhausted, beautiful arc hitecture may yet be possible, given great knowledge of the art, hard and concentrated thought, and the free play of the imagination on the actual conditions of the problem. (21)

As Charles Reilly subsequently noted, the teaching in the early days at Liverpool "was largely based on Sir Reginald's. His books became text-books for professors and students alike." (22) The rapid success achieved by Reilly at Liverpool can be judged from the comments made by A.E. Richardson in an article of 1912:

It is impossible to praise too highly the efforts being made at Liverpool to raise the quality of architectural design. The academic nature of the training is of the utmost value to the student, inasmuch as it gives him a sound knowledge of classic art of all periods, and teaches him the right application of the same. (23)

Writing later in the same year, on the subject of "The Academy in Architecture", Richardson asked: "Is it not of supreme importance that a knowledge of the methods of Schinkel, Duc, Duban, Pascal and McKim should be added to our insular ideas?" (24)

Figure 15: Charles Mewès and Arthur Joseph Davis, RAC Club, Pall Mall, London, 1908-11.

Figure 15A: Charles Mewès and Arthur Joseph Davis, RAC Club, Pall Mall, London, 1908-11, interior.

In 1907 Blomfield was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy and his inaugural lectures - which praised English Classicism and damned the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts - were published in the Architectural Review. A year previously the same journal had launched an occasional series entitled "The Practical Exemplar of Architecture" (see Figure 16), which printed short descriptions and measured drawings of English classical detailing, with the intention of offering absolutely reliable and correct reproduction of all that pertains to the practice of architecture." (25) The great majority of the exemplars chosen by Mervyn Macartney, the journal's editor, were classicist and these expositions of doorways by Inigo Jones and windows by Wren soon found their way into practice, for example in the doorway of the house at 7 St. James's Square, London, by Edwin Lutyens (1913: see Figure 17). The passion for Classical scholarship and archeology was reflected at this time in the many paeans to the Doric that appeared in the architectural press as implicit endorsements of the Greek Revival. A writer in the Architectural Review felt that:

The Doric, the great style of the Greeks, wherever it is found, is marked by a noble simplicity, a quiet grandeur and a lucidity of articulation, which, like all sublime things, impresses the imagination at once. Other nations have built more ambitiously, none ever half so beautifully. (26)

Figure 16: Morden College, Blackheath, London, details of main doorway.

Another critic, looking specifically at the Temples at Paestum, noted "their severe simplicity of design, that simplicity in which art generally begins, and to which, after a thousand revolutions of ornament, it again returns." (27) This growing archeological interest was fostered by the British School in Rome, which had been founded in 1901 and reconstituted in 1911/12, close to the Villa Borghese and the Porto del Popolo. As the Architectural Review enthused:

The position which [Rome] has occupied as the centre of the ancient world, the capital of the greatest empire the past has ever known, the religious centre of all Europe until the Reformation, the reservoir of Greek art, and the home of the art of the Renaissance, has made Rome, as Sir Rennell Rodd has well said, 'the fountain head of all the humanities'. (28)

Also in 1912, a project was launched to establish a school of architecture in London under the patronage of the French Société des Architectes diplômés par le Gouvernement, and modelled on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although the proposed management committee included such luminaries as Alphonse Defrasse, Charles Mewès, Arthur Davis, H.V. Lanchester and Edwin Lutyens, nothing came of the scheme.

Figure 17: Edwin Lutyens, 7 St. James's Square, London, 1913, detail of door.

The contemporary mood of informed nostalgia, in which the systematic study of the classical past was tied directly to a programme for future action, was perfectly caught by the Georgian poets, whose first anthology appeared in 1912. The poet and critic, Lascelles Abercrombie, applauded this first volume of Georgian Poetry as "unmistakeable evidence of poetry's determination to undertake new duties in an old style" and this judgement might equally have been applied to the contemporary Beaux-Arts and Gree k revivals in architecture. (29) The New Theatre in Manchester, by Farquharson, Richardson and Gill, with its clear echoes of Friedrich Gilly and Schinkel, might be seen as the apogee of this determination (see Figure 18). A contemporary critic called it "a remarkably fine building", noting that "no theatre of a more scholarly and dignified character has been erected in this country within the last century". (30)

Figure 18: Farquharson, Richardson and Gill, New Theatre, Manchester, 1912-13.

Like the Neo-Greek revival, the Georgian impulse in poetry barely survived the First World War. As one of its chroniclers notes: "That ambitious adjective 'Georgian' had been applied proudly by Marsh in 1912 to mean 'new', 'modern', 'energetic', but by 1922 it had come to connote only 'old-fashioned', 'outworn', or worse." (31) While the revivalism of the pre-war years might well have attracted similar responses from the young lions of architectural modernism in the later 1920s and 1930s, the academic ' eorgian' style taught in the schools enjoyed - and still enjoys - a remarkable afterlife in Britain. Replacing the Arts-and-Craftsy cottages of the founding phase, the civic 'Georgian' became the quasi-official style of the garden cities movement in 1920s and was thus endorsed as the style of the future. In the hands of Louis de Soissons, an architect trained at the Beaux-Arts, it achieved a certain pallid distinction in the 1920s and '30s at Welwyn Garden City and spread from there to the better sort of s peculative suburban housing. A similar tale could be told for banking chambers, which degenerated from Lutyens's magnificent Midland Bank on Poultry in the City of London (1924) to the drab piles of 'bankers' Georgian', whose sooty pilasters and volutes adorn the High Streets of every provincial town. In a letter to Herbert Baker, written in February 1903, Lutyens proclaimed:

In architecture Palladio is the game!! It is so big - few appreciate it now, and it requires training to value and realise. The way Wren handled it was marvellous. Shaw has the gift. To the average man it is dry bones, but under the hand of a Wren it glows and the stiff materials become as plastic clay. (32)

In the hands of the Neo-Georgians of the 1920s and '30s and, indeed of the conservative wing of the 1980s Postmodernists - Quinlan Terry et al. - the game has become routine and the bones dry and stiff once again. An alternative tradition might be traced, however, embracing John Burnet and Ernö Goldfinger - a tradition of designers trained within the rigidly classicist confines of the École des Beaux-Arts, who went on to produce some of the best examples of British architectural modernism.

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