8

Fallacies of Competition Drawings.

any architect would make me a very different design if I employed him directly from what he would send in for any competition. The President Sir Gilbert Scott most significantly interjected, 'We are obliged.'

Even if the taste of committees were better than it generally is, there is another difficulty which very few people are aware of, and that is their inability to judge without experience how large the building and its parts will look; that is, with reference to the human body, which is the ultimate scale by which it will be tested. Indeed architects sometimes deceive them

selves in that way. I asked one who sent me some plans for a church which I had to judge of, containing pillars divided into as many sections vertical and horizontal as would have done for a cathedral, if he had any idea how high they would be in reality, and he was evidently bonâ fide surprised when I showed him that the capitals would just reach his shoulder. Not long ago I had a design for a wooden screen for an internal porch sent me, which looked well enough on paper, and had been approved by other people, who had never thought of trying the actual dimensions of the parts. The result was that I knocked out exactly half the divisions, or reduced the parts to half their number. The mistake in this case was the more inexcusable, because the architect was proposing to add this thing in the modern babyhouse style to which he was accustomed, to a church of mine in which everything is larger than usual in churches of that size.

Fallacies of Drawings.-But though these mistakes are often made from mere ignorance, the getting up of competition drawings with an appearance of imposing size is by no means the result of ignorance. It is managed by various pictorial devices. One of the

Fallacy of Multiplicity of Parts.

9

commonest is displaying in the foreground a number of fine ladies and gentlemen on horse and on foot, looking very small compared with the building. Steeples are always surrounded by a flight of crows, which are evidently designed by their number in the flight and its apparent size, to contribute to the grandeur of the building, and because rooks notoriously despise all but very high trees. If my friend with the many-shafted and banded pillars had drawn a congregation in his church, we may be sure he would have kept their heads far below the caps of those pillars which would really have been hidden by their shoulders, and I am equally sure that it would not have been found out by one judge in a thousand. It is no wonder that ordinary people should be ignorant of all this when so many architects have yet to learn that cutting up a building into little bits, which are perceived to be insignificant as soon as you come near them, immediately gives the impression of what I called the babyhouse style to the whole, instead of deceiving the eye into the belief that it is large because of the multitude of parts, as it does in a drawing. Not that I defend the opposite error of making the parts gigantic and too few, and so diminishing their due effect, of which St. Peter's at Rome and the Victoria tower of the Houses of Parliament are notorious examples; though it is true that that error has a kind of grandeur in it, while the other is a miserable attempt at imposition which invariably fails in stone though it too often succeeds on paper.

Depth of Shadows.--Another, and in fact the commonest of all the fallacies of architectural competition pictures is that of showing a false depth of shadows in all the recesses in the walls, and so giving an appearance of thickness and massiveness to the whole, which

ΙΟ

Depth of Shadow-casting Parts.

those who make the pictures thereby show that they know the building ought to have, though they must know equally well that it has not, according to the working drawings, of which again ordinary judges are no judges, and naturally assume the pictorial view to be a true one. But I do not impute intentional deceit to all who thus exhibit inconsistent pictorial and working drawings; for it is evident that, notwithstanding all that has been written about the importance of depth of all the shadow-casting parts of buildings, not merely in the Gothic styles but in every other, the majority of architects still wilfully ignore it; and perhaps it is not wonderful that they refuse to be taught by writing what they apparently cannot see with their eyes in all those old buildings which they profess to imitate. I will not repeat what I said on this subject in my former book on Church Building, beyond this one fact, that I persuaded the architect to double the external depths which he had at first designed in all the Doncaster church windows, by showing him from his own books that they would then be no deeper than the windows in old churches of the same style. I will however refer to what was said, not by an amateur but by a professional architect, in a very able book a good while ago now, viz. Garbett s Rudimentary Treatise on the Principles of Design in Architecture, one of Weale's Series-now belonging to the publishers of this. He says at p. 103, as an illustration of this special fallacy of preliminary drawings, that the difference between the actual depth of the windows in the river front alone of the Houses of Parliament and the depth shown in the original picture amounts to not less than 112,000 cubic feet of wall; which (he adds) would be enough to make all the difference between

Thickness of Window Mullions.

I I

a sublime building and a mean one.' Other writers have spoken to the same effect; but nevertheless the architects go on in their stereotyped way of putting Gothic windows twice as near the outside of their walls as the inside, while the walls themselves are often only half the thickness that they would have been in the time and style which they profess to follow.

Window Mullions too thin.-Another cognate trick is that of showing massive mullions and window tracery in the pictorial designs, while the working drawings have them mean and thin, sometimes containing not half, or even a third of the stone which would be guessed at from the pictures. I believe I may say that the two Doncaster churches, which were finished together in 1858, were the first modern ones in which something like the old proportions of thickness and depth were adopted, on my convincing the architect from the measures of some similar old churches that they ought to be. I remember the contractor for one of them saying that the east window, for which I gave a new design, contained twice as much stone as he had guessed at from his experience of what a modern window of that size generally would contain.

Fallacious Tenders.—But you may ask, is there no remedy for all these difficulties and fallacies of competition? For some of them I do not see that there is, especially for the unwillingness of good architects to contend for prizes awarded by judges whom they know to be generally unqualified and incapable of judging how their designs will look when translated from paper into stone, and who generally select the most pretentious of all the plans sent in, and the least likely to be well built for the estimate. I say well built, because the maker of the worst possible plan in

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Fallacious Tenders.

this respect can always fortify himself with a contractor ready to undertake it, and who will doubtless build it somehow, relying either upon swelling his bill with 'extras' ordered by the architect, and probably necessary to be ordered because they had been omitted in the plans and specification, of which the judges understand nothing; or else upon being allowed to scamp the work. Hence we read of cheap churches falling down before or soon after they are finished, and we learnt from a bishop's sermon for rebuilding one of them that that style of work is called 'jerry building.' Many contracts are taken solely in reliance on these two modes of converting a losing contract into a paying one.

*

Fixing Price beforehand. One of the commonest evils of these competitions is that the cost of the building is fixed beforehand by persons who know nothing more of the matter than that they have been told that a building of the same kind somewhere else cost, or was contracted for to cost some given sum, perhaps not half enough to build it properly; and often they proceed to fix the price without even that amount of information. A man may

invite plans for a house to cost anything he likes, for the architect can adapt the size to the price; but public buildings generally have not only the price but the required size specified. And then what are competing architects to do? If the committee sent for a single architect and gave him those conditions, he would soon tell them whether it was possible or not to erect such a building properly for such a sum of money. But competing architects have no opportunity of doing so at least any one who does knows it is equivalent to losing the job. Consequently there are always some * Bishop of Manchester, in September 1874.