English Domestic Architecture
The Story of the English House. By Hugh Braun. (Batsford. 'Os. 6d.) IN the preface to his present work the author states that he is "all too conscious of the gaps which mar his narrative," but "begs, nevertheless, that he may be forgiven them." In a book of one hundred and twelve pages in which the domestic archi- tecture of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is dismissed in twenty-three, and which mentions Inigo Jones and Wren only twice, neither illustrating nor examining a single example of either master's work, there is obviously much to forgive. Nevertheless, the book has a certain rarity value as illustrating a point of view the survival of which in the fourth decade of the twentieth century one might otherwise find hard to credit. Mr. Braun may properly be regarded as a last, lonely architectural bison, the sole survivor of the once vast Ruskinian hordes which roamed the length and breadth of the land, from the Cotswolds to South Kensington, in the distant days of the last Iron Age.
Today that intense hatred of the eighteenth century and all its works which animated Ruskin and so many of his followers appears to us as one of the less easily comprehensible phobias of the Victorian era, and to meet with it in a modern-day book on architecture gives one the same eerie feeling of unreality that would be aroused were one to encounter fierce opposition to the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill in a current treatise on morals. But there is no mistaking Mr. Braun's sentiments. "Symmetry, that stern destroyer of all the romance of medieval rationalism," he firmly labels as "an insidious blight" which "crept into all the building life of this country." This uncompromising rejection of the underlying principles of classical architecture extends also to the details. Cornice is always printed between the inverted commas of smug irony, and the abandonment of the casement window (that abomination of draughty desolation which has recently enjoyed, doubtless to the considerable satisfaction of Mr. Braun, a regrettable come-back) in favour of the sash is treated as one of the major disasters in the history of English architecture. The distaste for the former attained such dimensions, the author, uncomprehending and amazed, informs us, that "towards the end of the last century it was considered so barbarous a feature that even labourers grumbled when given cottages without sash windows." Seldom has the sturdy common sense of the lower orders been more abundantly justified. Occasionally, however, prejudice outruns knowledge. In one passage in which he compares the speculative builder of today with his predecessors of the eighteenth century, needless to say much to the latter's disadvantage, he signals out as a striking proof of eighteenth-century snobbery and incompetence the fact that no care was taken to see that the best rooms did not face north. Surely Mr. Braun is aware that the modern passion for sunlight is a phenomenon of very recent growth, and one which few, even had they wished, could have afforded to indulge in a period when wallpapers and stuffs were both expensive and sadly transient in colour.
However, for devotees of "the romance of medieval rationalism" the present volume will provide a veritable feast of good things. The author is not only highly knowledgeable about every aspect of the manorial hall and the Tudor farmhouse, but is possessed of a fine imaginative gift for clothing and peopling these mansions of his desire with a wealth of picturesque detail. Sunlight invariably plays through "seas of painted glass," walls are inevitably "arras-covered," forming a rich background for
"cavalcades of pageantry," while yeoman are always "sturdy" and happy to have a "stout roof over their heads."
Those who have not acquired a taste for Wardour Street medievalism will still find much in this book to interest them When Mr. Braun is discussing the actual methods of construction employed by early builders he is invariably interesting, and his final chapter, wherein the whole of modern domestic architecture from Nash to Mendelsohn is wittily dealt with in half-a-dozen pages (in which incidentally neither William Morris nor Philip Webb is even mentioned) represents a tour de force that can have few parallels in the whole corpus of architectural criticism.
OSBERT LANCASTER.
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