Strawberry Hill: Architecture of the "as if"

Abstract

Strawberry Hill: Architecture of the ‘ ‘as if’ DIANNE S. AMES In 1750 Horace Walpole began the renovation of his lately acquired country house. He had a grand design for the place, and as he tells us, “gilders, carvers, upholsterers, and picture cleaners are labouring at their respective forges, and I do not love to trust a hammar or a brush without my own supervisal.”1 In the course of some sixteen years he exercised his prerogatives as a gentleman builder in this manner and constructed a twenty-two room house in the gothic style at an approx­ imate cost of £15,250.2 How are we to regard the enterprise? In his own estimation Walpole had succeeded: he had “realized” his dreams. In the estimation of his contemporaries he had succeeded: Thomas Gray the poet, no mean critic of the Gothic style, praised Strawberry Hill for “the purity and propriety” of its “gothicism”; William Pulteney , Sir Robert Walpole’s old enemy, wrote verses in its honor; and scores of eighteenth-century tourists wrote for tickets to see it.3 The judgment of the twentieth century has not been as enthusias­ tic. The critics seem to have mixed feelings about Strawberry Hill. Whatever some, like Wilmarth Lewis, may say in its favor, many mock the place, calling its decorations “cheap imitations,” as does Warren Hunting Smith, and deplore the use of lath and plaster, or worse, papier-mache, in the construction of the house, as does Ken351 352 / DIANNES.AMES neth Clark.4 The use of stone, however, does not preclude a Gothic imitation’s being a fake or a sham, though Pugin may have uttered syllogisms to the contrary, and Clark, writing in the twenties, should have inherited them. Can it be said that Walpole mistook papiermache for stone any more than he took what he called his “small capricious house” for a castle or a cathedral? It is often so inferred. I believe, instead, that Walpole may be said to have used his materials in a subjunctive way, and to have created an architecture of the “as if.” An architecture of the “as if,” like the philosophy of the “as if’ expounded by Hans Vaihinger in a book by the same name, is one that provokes us to make novel inferences.5 The buildings in this group, either in their forms or materials, lead the viewer to think about them as metaphors. In the case of Strawberry Hill, the house—which is in reality an eighteenth-century country villa—may be viewed as it would be if it were a Gothic castle. The word as signifies that it is comparable to an actual Gothic castle—Aston Hall in Dugdale’s The History of Warwickshire (1656), the model for the facade—and the word if that the analogy is a matter of make-believe. Other parts of Strawberry Hill are presented as if they were Gothic church architec­ ture, and the New Offices, as if they were Gothic collegiate architec­ ture. This whimsical congregation of analogies is not an attempt at archeological truth in the manner of nineteenth-century Gothic build­ ings, which failed to achieve it. At Strawberry Hill there are no failures, only fictions. Although other styles of buildings may perform the same inspira­ tional function, Gothic churches and their imitations are most consis­ tently conceived of as architecture of the “as if.” For example, Abbot Suger of Saint Denis (1081 [?]-1151), the acknowledged originator of the Gothic style, said of his own project: When out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many colored stones has led me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of heaven.6 Strawberry Hill I 353 Notably Suger uses quasi (“as it were”) to signify that he is making an analogy that is a fabrication, but...