Sunken Cathedrals

So far my blog entries have just about kept pace with the moon's orbital cycle - hardly cracking along, but this is regularity of a sort, I think. So I'd like to explain the even longer than normal pause by mentioning that I've recently been abroad having a quiet squiz at Italy. Yes, lucky me. Anyway, as much fun as I've had exploring that country's staggering bounty of architectural treasures (treasures that have been documented enough without further yabber from me), I have returned to Melbourne as fascinated as ever with my home town and as eager to continue exploring and writing about it. Once a month. Or perhaps I'll even try to get down to it a bit more often.

No Gelato. Seriously, just don't bring gelato into the five hundred year old church.
You psychos.

So then...

Clearly I'm not putting myself up for any photography gongs here, but I'm hoping that my low-res, traffic-dodging effort captures what I love about this view from the top of Russell Street.

I often approach the CBD on foot from the north and always enjoy catching a glimpse of the steeple/tower duet that elegantly dominates this long downhill vista. (Ignore the Schiavello/Abode bridge in the foreground which is only a temporary inconvenience). My awareness of this pleasure - one I would normally take for granted - has been focussed by the realisation that my view of these pointy structures might soon be interrupted by the office development currently going up next to Scots' Church. Big whoop. Fair enough - this news is unlikely to cause a sensation, but it did prompt me to contemplate my fondness for these aspirational structures before they no longer puncture the skyline as their designers intended and as the've done for so long.

Fortunately, the view above is not under any threat and at close range the two buildings still pack a punch. And before I go badmouthing new office developments, it is worth considering that when we're talking about buildings with a heavenward thrust, the 1920s T&G building might once have been viewed as no less of an interloper than the glass towers of today.

The illustration below is from a book called 'Contrasts' published in 1836 by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. The book contrasts images of contemporary English settings with their pre-Renaissance equivalents. In Pugin's book, the image that accompanies the one below ('Catholic town in 1440') is an image of a modern industrial city where the church steeples have been replaced by the smoking chimneys of factories.

The principle that the church should be the tallest building in sight is illustrated plainly enough, as is the architectural intention behind these pointy erections - heaven is a thing beyond reach, but the church is on the way.

I have referred to Scots' Church and the T&G tower as aspirational structures, and they do seem to be aiming at similar architectural gestures, but clearly it is to disparate goals that they aspire. (I was hoping that 'spire' and 'aspire' might have shared the same derivation, but it turns out that they don't even come from the same language. Typical English.)

Pugin would certainly have been disgusted by the sight of a commercial building like the T&G building - and an insurance company at that - aping the  heavenward gesture of a Gothic church - probably worse than he hated the chimney stacks. And it isn't just the building's ambitious vertical reach that would have bothered him; the classical language in which the building is dressed would have added insult to injury.

Pugin was a convert to Catholicism - a move that was about more than just religious conviction. For Pugin, Catholicism represented not just a faith, but a way of life that existed in a forgotten past - a time before the Renaissance, before Henry VIII started divorcing and beheading wives and before the modern age of industrial capitalism was even the seed of an idea. The idealisation of mediaeval Europe was not just a personal quirk of Pugin's - in fact it was quite a common theme among nineteenth-century romantics, but Pugin really personifies the theme. The illustration above is one of many that depict mediaeval England as a paradise dominated by Catholic virtues like community, humility and charity.

For Pugin, Gothic architecture, which began in France in the early 12th century, was the true architecture of Christianity and embodied its highest virtues. An architect himself, he dedicated his life to promoting a revival of the Gothic style - not just for churches but for any building wishing to belong to a world of revived Christian virtue. Pugin designed a great number of churches including a few in Australia, and most notably collaborated with Charles Barry on the design of the Gothic-inspired Palace of Westminster.

A Pugin church in New South Wales (source)

In promoting the exclusive pursuit of the gothic revival, Pugin was a bit of a lonely crusader. The nineteenth century was after all the age of architectural eclecticism. Moreover, his stand against 'Classical' architecture (Classical architecture being anything that revives or develops the theme of ancient Roman or Greek architecture) must have seemed like a David and Goliath scenario. To Pugin, Classical architecture was pagan architecture and had nothing to do with the Christian world. Never mind that the Catholic church in Rome had gone Classical during the renaissance and never looked back, and that Christopher Wren had in the late 1600s dotted London with 50 odd Classical (Baroque, specifically) churches including St Paul's Cathedral, which still dominates the city today.

Notwithstanding his extreme views, Pugin ultimately had an enormous influence on nineteenth century architecture and managed to inspire a whole generation of keen, if less fanatical, Victorian Gothic architects. One of them was William Butterfield who was the original designer of St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne. Butterfield was a key figure of the Victorian Gothic - a style which was heavily influenced by Pugin's ideas. Looking at St Paul's, there are other influences to be observed as well. The checkerboard pattern on the front facade for example is a nod to the ideas of John Ruskin whose obsession with the Gothic architecture of Venice introduced a more fanciful decorative element into the Victorian Gothic vocabulary. What St Paul's owes to Pugin (for whom Ruskin had little regard) is its heavy, rustic look. The simple, unadorned walls with their relatively small windows give the building a a primitive aspect - an aspect that would have been more dominant had Butterfield's design been fully realised. (The spires, added much later, where not part of Butterfield's design).

Butterfield, who never set foot in Australia, resigned before St Paul's was completed and the man who took over the job (and for his part remained faithful to Butterfield's designs) was Joseph Reed - probably nineteenth-century Melbourne's biggest architectural star. It was also Reed who designed Scots' church, which brings us all the way back to where we began. Forty years on and several oceans away, Pugin's stern views have been watered down somewhat, and for Reed, the Gothic, rather than being the one true language of Christian virtue, is just one of any number of styles a modern architect might use to dress up a building. Reed was a true Victorian eclectic. Some of his other famous buildings - the Melbourne Town Hall and the State Library for example, are dressed in one or another of the Classical fashions. Below is the pagan temple front of Melbourne Town Hall.

If you look at Scots' Church, you can still see Pugin's heavy, rustic Gothic, which no longer specifically tied to Pugin's values (values like simplicity, humility and honest functionalism), has become a dress-up style like any other. Much of the detail here is a revival of what is known as the English 'decorated' Gothic style (late 13th and 14th century).

Just across the road, we find Joseph Reed at work again, on another church - St Michaels, which makes an equally lovely pairing with the T&G tower. St Michaels is not a Gothic revival building, but a revival of the earlier Romanesque style (a subject for another time). Into the mix again, Ruskin's Venetian two-tone brickwork patterning - not a feature of the Romanesque, but featured here just because, why not?

The impressive T&G building was built some 60 years after Reed's churches, but the easy historical eclecticism of the nineteenth century - although fervently rejected in avant-garde circles since the turn of the century - was alive and well in Melbourne, where the popular spirit of Art Deco was just emerging. The T&G is not an Art Deco building, but it sort of belongs to that world - a world that is just learning to express its proud sense of modernity, but is clutching at architectural language from across the centuries and beyond, looking for the right words. The T&G building was designed by A&K Henderson, who designed a bunch of fine Melbourne buildings in an eclectic range of inter-war styles. Here they have adopted what is sometimes referred to as the 'commercial palazzo' style. This was a technique developed by early skyscraper designers in Chicago. You take an Italian Renaissance palazzo (a palatial urban building - usually home to a rich Florentine family or some such) with its heavy rustic base and projecting cornice at the top, and you stretch out the middle section until you have as many storeys as you need. The resulting style is a paired-back, quasi-modern renaissance classicism. The stepped tower is unrelated to the renaisance palazzo - it is a tower for the sake of a tower. And why not?

I suggested earlier that Pugin would have been offended by the T&G building - a commercial tower (and you can imagine how the idea of an insurance company would have sat against Pugin's mediaeval community values) dressed in classical garb, reaching for the heavens and out-reaching its pious neighbours. But viewed in the context of Joseph Reed's eclecticism and the eclecticism of Melbourne generally it seems like a perfectly suitable neighbour. It is less of an interloper than it is simply a later incarnation of the irreverent Melbourne spirit. Perhaps I will come to feel the same way about the glass tower that is soon to dwarf all of these earlier ones.

The 'contrasts' in Pugin's book (such as between church spires and industrial chimneys) are designed to convey a clear view as to which is the favoured option. The contrasts in Melbourne's skyline are rarely so didactic, and that's one of the things I love about this city. It is a cacophony of voices competing for the truth, then admitting that they're actually not all that serious about the truth anyway and finally just agreeing to get along.

The thing I love about standing at the top of Russell Street and catching a view of Scots' Church and the T&G - that mismatched couple of aspirational edifices - is that it neatly summarises this condition. The fact that both buildings are reaching up in a vain attempt to break the Melbourne skyline seems to make the dichotomies they represent - Christian and pagan, sacred and commercial - all the more meaningful. I love this view because it feels like a metaphor for the permanent condition of civilisation, which must always contend with, but will forever forget to account for the obsolescent truth of everything.