Druidical isolation?
Style and architecture in Welsh history

In his comparatively brief lifetime as a practising architect William Burges was at the heart of the mid 19th-century debate about the need to rediscover a style of architecture appropriate for its time.

The view was that in earlier, primitive times, style imposed itself upon the artist, whereas the mid-Victorian architect had to rediscover style. Burges was an enthusiast for early 13th-century French architecture, and Castell Coch exemplifies his re-working of this style. Towards the end of his life he seems to have opted out of the “great architectural debate”, and, by 1876, five years before his death, American observers were describing Burges as an architect “immured by his own obstinacy in a position of somewhat druidical isolation.”

I suspect that no connection with Wales was intended in the phrase “druidical isolation”, but it makes an intriguing title for an article on style in Welsh architecture. This is the first of a number of contributions to About Wales that will consider whether it is either possible or relevant to identify what might be recognized as “Welsh architecture”. In some quarters this is an old chestnut, but recent initiatives that have followed devolution in Scotland and Wales are re-opening the debate. Phrases like “sense of place” and “local identity” are now part of common currency.

Last year, Matthew Griffiths suggested in About Wales that “…the concept of ‘place’ is located at the heart of a fresh way of doing things. We need to be more effective in defining both the character of places and the value and significance that people attach to them…” There are, of course, many “places”. The Countryside Council for Wales in Making places (1999), talks of “rural” and “urban”, “urban fringe” and “coast and mountain” as typical of the spaces of Wales.

The American architect Robert Venturi, says in Complexity and contradiction in architecture that his inspiration came from “…the two extremes: looking at very great historical architecture, and also looking at ordinary architecture of today and the past.” Were those who espouse a Welsh architecture to follow the same path what would they find?

The catalogue of the Welsh Arts Council’s 1975 exhibition, “Plans and prospects” dealt very largely with the historical architecture of Wales within the period 1780-1914, an age described as one that “saw the radical transformation of villages, towns and cities, and in some areas the landscape itself, as the unprecedented upheaval of the industrial revolution created new wealth, new centres of population, and new institutions.”

If we follow Venturi and look at examples of great historical architecture in Wales before 1780, it would be difficult to ignore the castles of Edward I and his heirs. As monuments to Welsh subjugation it might be argued that these are cases of “architecture in Wales” rather than of Wales. The country houses that were illustrated in the 1975 exhibition — the Ham at Llantwit Major (designed by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt), or Hafod Uchtryd (Thomas Johnes’ great experiment to establish an Elysium at Ysbyty Ystwyth in Ceredigion, designed by Thomas Baldwin and John Nash) — would, if they had not been demolished, also be examples of architecture in Wales. The movement that inspired Nash (who had strong connections with Wales) was that of the Picturesque, a European approach to setting buildings within an environment.

In a similar way, Ty Bronna (Fairwater, Cardiff: 1903), which is the only Welsh building by Charles Voysey, grew out of the Arts and Crafts movement. Our Welsh institutions, established in new buildings at the end of the 19th century, were built in neoclassic style. An example would be the City Hall and Law Courts in Cardiff (Lanchester and Rickards, 1898-1901). The National Library at Aberystwyth, was like Cardiff’s civic buildings, the subject of an architectural competition. Won by Sidney Greenslade in 1909, the competition brief stated that entrants should express “the national character of the institution” and “the commanding position of the site”. The extent to which the winner actually expresses Welsh national character remains an open question.

Tony Aldous wrote in his review of the Pevsner Glamorgan that “the architecture of Wales has been characterized as terraces of two-storey buildings and nonconformist chapels.” Part of the radical transformation of Wales that characterized the industrial revolution was a huge programme of chapel building through the United Kingdom; in Wales this programme was particularly intense. Following the pattern of the 18th and early 19th centuries (when the conversion of existing buildings was the fastest and cheapest expedient for dissenters empowered following the Toleration Act of 1689), many of the chapels of the 1830s and 1840s were built by congregations themselves. The Unitarian Capel Pen-rhiw, Dre-fach Felindre, was originally a barn of 1770, and was converted into a chapel in 1777. It is a graceful example of this form of building, and can be seen today in the Museum of Welsh Life at Cardiff.

From 1840 onwards, however, chapel building fell under the spell of “architecture”. The re-cycling and recreation of new buildings out of old and new chapels invariably involved the use of professional designers. Some of these — R G Thomas, or Beddoe Rees — were Welsh, but the selection of styles, none of them particularly “Welsh”, followed denominational taste. Welsh language congregations favoured the classic revival; English speakers preferred Gothic. In his Victorian Church, Christopher Wakeling suggests that this pattern exemplified the response of 19th-century architecture to social variety. While it is true to say that chapels can characterize the architecture of Wales, it is not true, in my view, that the chapels of Wales represent the architecture of Wales.

This is not to deny that the chapel-building programme of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a great effect on the built environment of Wales. In conservation terms it has also left us with a difficult problem to solve.

Following Venturi’s model of looking to the extreme of historic architecture to discern a Welsh style appears not to be the answer. Might a Welsh style exist then at the other extreme — in the ordinary architecture of the past and today?

The farm houses and buildings, rural and urban, re-erected at the Museum of Welsh Life, are authentic. They have been reconstructed as authentically as possible in order to preserve them in a fixed state that represents their historic character. In his Welsh house (1940), Iorwerth Peate quoted A G Ling (1936):

…in peasant architecture, the fundamental issues in building are made more clearly apparent. Social, climatic and geographical conditions all combine to produce an architecture in which fashion or style can play little or no part… The peasant knows his wants and builds. With his meagre resource he builds as simply as possible in the local materials available. His shelter is a clear expression of his life, simple and direct…

The non-existence of “style” does not diminish the importance of “peasant” architecture (pensaërniaeth gwerinol). Is this where we should look to begin to rediscover “sense of place” rather than “style”?

There are risks to this. For “peasant” and “folk” read “vernacular” and “traditional”. It is interesting that Ling does not differentiate between fashion and style, and speaks loosely rather than definitively of “architecture”.
The introduction to the Scottish Executive’s Development of a policy on architecture in Scotland avoids this trap by celebrating the concept of “style” without referring to it directly.

…So fundamental are buildings to our lives that we often take them for granted and regard them as simply the given backdrop to our day to day existence. But buildings are not given; they are consciously made and how they are made affects the quality of our lives. How buildings are made, the quality of their design, and of the built environments they help shape, should, then, be a matter of concern for us all.
Buildings serve us, and we relate to them, in many and complex ways. Their fundamental purpose… is to provide shelter, to protect us from and modify the effects of, climate… Yet buildings are more than simply utilitarian products. What we seek from buildings is not solely practical… they must respond to and sustain our social and cultural needs and aspirations.

In 1995, Kenneth Powell suggested that “The Land of our Fathers is increasingly becoming the land of bungalows, gimcrack industrial estates and heritage trails… The Welsh seem to value their architectural heritage so lightly that the very existence of a Welsh architecture has been brought into question.”

Thoughts about a Welsh style of architecture become academic and immaterial in the face of such a charge. The only comfort we can take is that the criticism is founded on the premise that a Welsh architectural heritage exists. Valuing that heritage for what it can be rather than for what it was is of far greater significance than arguing for or against the existence of a definitive Welsh style of architecture.

The issue is no longer about old versus new, but about the nature of the vital relationship between both of these. Patrick Geddes described this relationship as “historical essence and continuous life”. The Modern Movement was monument-obsessed and defiantly anti-history, but as new modern architecture emerges, the old fetishes become merely curious. David Chipperfield, talking in 1997 of his own work, has said

We should not live in a bright shining new future any more than we should hide in a comfortable pastiche of the past. We must inhabit an ever-evolving present, motivated by possibilities of change, restricted by the baggage of memory and experience.

Is the way forward to emulate what architects have achieved at one of the very finest of 20th-century museums, the Louisiana Museum at Humlebaek , Denmark (pictured above). Peter Davey has suggested that Bo and Wohlert’s early work “barely seems to have a style. But it does marvelously make places and allows the art and the landscape to speak for themselves.”

Siarlys Evans

References

Arts Council of Wales, Plans and prospects: architecture in Wales 1780-1914 (1975)

Anthony Jones, Welsh chapels (National Museum of Wales, 1984)

Chris Brooks and Andrew Sant, The Victorian Church: architecture and society (Manchester University Press, 1985)

Peter Davey, “Learning from Louisiana” Architectural review, cxcvii, no 1182 (August 1995)

Kenneth Powell, “The rape of the Valleys”, Perspectives (December 1995)

Kenneth Powell, Architecture reborn (Lawrence King, 1999)

John Newman, The buildings of Wales: Glamorgan (Penguin, 1995)

Countryside Council for Wales, Wales: making places (1999)

Scottish Executive, The development of a policy on architecture (1999)