Bleak Houses by Timothy J. Brittain-Catlin

Author:Timothy J. Brittain-Catlin [Brittain-Catlin, Timothy ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: architecture, failure, society
ISBN: 9780262026697
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.6

Cardboard “Regency” façade kits for railway modelers, designed by Donovan Lloyd for Superquick in the 1960s. By kind permission of Superquick Models (PEMS Butler Ltd.).

It must surely be its unreal delicacy that made the style all the more attractive in the interwar age with its morbid fears, or in the postwar era when so much was uncertain, or unrecognizable, or in ruins. It seems logical that architects of these tumultuous periods should want to cling on to the Regency as they might want to cling on to a disappearing childhood, knowing, likewise, that this had been a style that was fated to die. The ultimate illustration of the period for me is James Durden’s Summer in Cumberland (1925), in which a boy in cricket whites stands outside a Queen Anneian Palladian window, looking in as his mother and sister sit at a table laid with a white cloth and a silver tea service.38 Here one feels on one’s skin the dappled light, the buttery glow of the painted room, the distant view of the hills, the flutter of the cut flowers within and the trees without. The significance for me is that the artist has perpetuated a scene which, while perfect, is transient, will come apart and never come back, more so than is the case in most genre painting. This boy, as a painted figure, will never reach his sex-hungry twenties; this mother will never grow old and frail; this sister will never be sold to a loveless husband. The attraction is that transience, that fleeting grasp at something beautiful, something that is gone, something which belonged to someone else anyway. It is the only picture I have ever wanted to be in. If a number of people, the satirist and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster among them, thought of the revived Regency style as a kind of reboot from where architecture had arrived at before the Gothic Revival savaged it, it must surely for others have been a style of failure, one whose future annihilation was perpetually awaiting it in the wings.39

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