The ideal of architecture as sculpted mass during the interwar period

Abstract

British architecture of the period from 1910 to 1940 is often presented as providing an important platform for the commissioning and display of avant-garde British sculpture. Sculpture historian Benedict Read has written that in this period, architectural sculpture was the only safe venue for the work of more radical sculptors such as Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein.1 Penelope Curtis has pointed out that the direct-carving movement emerged from architectural sculpture.2 The architects of the buildings to which these sculptures were applied are generally portrayed as discerning connoisseurs, who provided space for avant-garde art against a neutral architectural background.3 However, this narrative misrepresents what actually occurred. As sculptors sought to redefine the relationship of freestanding sculpture to built form through the direct-carving movement and explorations of cubist ideas about the relationship of masses, many British architects adapted their design practices to explore these emerging ideas about form at a larger scale. Architects such as Charles Holden, Giles Gilbert Scott and Edwin Lutyens engaged with the sculptors' ideas directly in their own work, searching for ways that their buildings could be better bearers of sculptural form.Critics of the era, including Charles Marriott, C. H. Reilly, Roger Fry and William Lethaby, trumpeted that architecture was a three-dimensional art, just like sculpture. With the rise of language about form in the early twentieth century, they stressed that both sculptors and architects sought to compose pleasing mass in space and had much to learn from each other. Although they occasionally made reference to psychology and the social role of art, this was primarily an argument about aesthetics. For these critics, the best architecture was monumental and sculptural in both conception and form. The formal similarities between the work of sculptors and architects during this period are clear (figs. 1-2), but the implication has been that such formal relationships were mere responses to fashion.4 The reality is that there was intellectual interaction as well, a joint desire to develop an adjacent concept of architectural modernity.Charles Marriott explained the new relationship between architecture and sculpture in Modern English Architecture (1924). He applied Clive Bell's ideas of significant form directly to architecture, declaring that architecture had much to learn from Cubism and Post-Impressionism: 'The art of architecture,' he explained, 'is the creation of significant form in three dimensions.'5 Architecture should be designed three-dimensionally, rather than simply projected up from a two-dimensional plan. Building, like sculpture, was a matter of seeking the significant form in sympathy with materials. Truth to materials, Marriott explained, was an architectural, as well as a sculptural, concern.Marriot claimed that since architecture was a three-dimensional art, architects who failed to fully explore that three-dimensionality as a formal characteristic were failing to produce fully realized buildings. In Marriot's schema, architecture was a sort of higher form of sculpture - to the basic requirement of meeting functional needs was added the requirement of creating three-dimensional art on a monumental scale. Sculpture existed in inherent relation to architecture, serving to support the aesthetic and symbolic needs of its wider environment. Marriot felt that sculpture that was meant to stand on a pedestal as an object of independent contemplation, sculpture that did not respond to the formal and material characteristics of its surroundings, failed to achieve the essential requirement of all art to intensify the spirit of place.6 Instead, architects and sculptors should work together to create a coherently sculpted whole. This idea was related to Arts and Crafts ideas about the union of the arts, but it involved a concern with formal sculpting of masses that broke with existing traditions. …