I'll celebrate by going a bit off piste and pointing out that I recently noticed how clever Georgian facade design/layout is. As long as you stick the basic rules on window lay-out, you can use any common building materials, build anything between two and seven storeys, use it for town or countryside, seaside or inland, urban or rural, posh or basic; you can build flats, terraced, semi-detached or detached, residential or commercial.
You can apply it to just about anything and it seems to fit in anywhere and between anything. It's actually surprisingly simple and very easy to copy.
1. Basic town centre buildings in Dublin, four storeys plus basement, red brick.
2. Residential in Edinburgh, two storeys plus attic (and possibly basement), mini-balconies, sandstone. The attic windows are pretty gross actually, see 4 below.
3. 19th century McMansion somewhere in Atlanta, two storeys plus attic, London bricks and fancy porch:
4. Re the attic windows; at some stage, people decided to pretend that their houses didn't have a roof, so the parapet at the front was so high as to obscure it entirely. The 'bog standard' type of window is set back and unobstrusive as per below, three storeys plus attic, London:
Even better is, the windows are evenly spaced left to right (as in examples 1 and 2) and the attic windows are the same width as the main windows and line up with them, as in the three attic windows in example 3. I'm not really a fan of the parapet walls because it makes it bloody hard to clean the gutters and blocks the view from the attic windows, if any.
5. No post about Georgian architecture is complete without a picture of The Circus in Bath, three storeys (possibly plus attic or basement?), mini-balconies, fancy parapet, sandstone Bath stone, which is soft limestone:
6. 32 Smith Square, London. Seven storey office block (probably plus attic and basement), red bricks, part rendered, built in the 1950s:
Sunday, 17 June 2012
My 7000th Blog Post
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30 comments:
Congratulations on your tenacity and hard work.
Circus: definitely basements.
In fact, some of them have sub basements too.
Smith Sq.....nice to use the EU building where Gawain noow works....
"now" of course.
Yes, Georgian architecture was inspired. The purists had strict guidelines to optimise and enhance design, including room height, depth and width ratio.
S, thanks.
TW, yes, I just happened to have read somewhere that it was built in the 1950s. The political history of that building is another topic entirely.
P, is there anywhere i can look that up?
" It's actually surprisingly simple and very easy to copy."
And several thousand faux-Georgian estate houses show that it's also surprisingly easy to get wrong.
Parapets: I think the idea was to pretend your house had a flat lead roof (posh) rather than a slate or tile one (common). Georgian architecture is full of things pretending to be posh: pine doors grained to look like mahogany, cast iron railings painted to look like bronze, cast iron downpipes painted to look like lead, rendered walls "lined and ruled" to look like ashlar stonework etc. Parapet gutters are a crap idea: when the outlet gets blocked or the lead lining cracks or is nicked, all the water goes into the house, soaking the walls just where there is a maximum of timber built into them.
The Edinburgh houses have had their first floor windows lengthened, probably at the same time the strage attic windows were built. No self-respecting Georgian designer would have had the windows cutting through the string course.
Nearly all Georgian houses in Bath are built of Bath stone, which is a soft limestone. Another feature of Georgian architecture prevalent in Bath is that the facade was built first and then the plots were sold off, so that, from behind, the houses are often quite different to one another. Problems arise when the builders who built the rest of the house didn't tie into the facade properly.
Money can't buy you love, but if you have enough of it you can have a John Adam. Sigh.
B, thanks for all the technical details, but I was just pointing out that the facades seem supremely inoffensive, they sort of fit in next to anything and for any purpose.
Of course things have to be built properly inside, but as the pictures illustrate, there is no need to do pretend stonework out of render, they look just as nice in brick, limestone, sandstone, anything.
BS, or just have on built to order.
MW, that's good idea. Might as well get that Turner painted to order too while I'm at it.
I had a miniature version of one of those houses in the middle of Brighton. But they were built straight on to the old strip fields and were too close together and too narrow. There was a severe shortage of storage space.
I prefer my 1939 flat in Gothenberg.
Have you heard of or ever seen any Georgist architecture?
I think that there is a golden ratio that governs all this. 1:1.618?
BS, I'm sure there are art forgers who can do you a passable Turner. Worst case, you've got yourself a passable Jackson Pollock.
P, you'd get that problem with all miniature houses.
RS, aha, I was wondering whether anybody would make the Georgian/Georgist tie in.
L that rule comes up a lot, but with this style of facade, I don't think it's that important.
Au contraire, Mr MW. I was talking to a blokey about the houses in East Berholt that were designed by the same architect that restored 10 Downing Street - Erith I think - and the 'golden ratio' was fundamental to the design.
M, yes, I'd agree about the fitting in, it's probably down to that ratio Lola mentioned. Lined and ruled render was used because the builders/owners didn't want a house that just looked good, they wanted one that looked expensive and good.
P, Brighton is a bad example of Georgian building (or a good example of bad Georgian building). Brighton became fashionable suddenly and an awful lot of houses were run up quickly and on the cheap. I read an article by a local Building Control officer called "Never stand in a bay window in Brighton" giving some of the horrors he had found over the years, including a bay window that was only held onto the rest of the building by four six inch nails.
L, the Golden Ratio is bound to sneak its way in somehow. What's noticeable is the way that the windows (and ceilings) are tallest at ground and first floor level, and then get smaller/lower as you go up the building.
B, it's not just the ratio. If you give somebody a picture of that Dublin bog standard facade to use as a template, they can easily scale up or down to smaller or larger buildings. But if you give somebody a bog standard English semi-detached as a template, there's no way they can scale it up to an office block, and it looks daft if you have a detached house that looks like half a semi.
B, apparently in Brighton, the front skin of bricks is real, the rest of it is made out of builders' rubble mixed with cement and no wall is tied to anything. Heck knows why they ended up with more rubble than actual bricks.
From memory, from my days as a draughtsman, the 'golden ratio' was particularly applicable to Georgian (as opposed to 'Georgist'?) architecture. I cannot quickly recall the relationships. I think I'll waste some more time by looking it up!!!
Dublin is noted for its Georgian architecture.
"Have you heard of or ever seen any Georgist architecture?"
You'd have to look for an architect who was a Georgist. Alteratively, anything that maximises the floor space of a building for a given plot size could be considered Georgist, i.e. a skyscraper. OTOH, a bungalow would be very un-Georgist.
L, yes, I'd be interested know what was in proportion to what.
B, that's the thing.
Somebody linked to a fine article a while back, which I printed off and re-read only yesterday that explained that tower blocks and compact grid pattern cities are in fact the worst use of land. Far better to have lower bu much larger blocks with a central courtyard; a cross shaped city (so that everybody's back garden looks over the countryside) rather than a square (where everybody's back garden overlooks another road or another back garden), it's basic maths - measured in journey times, amount of sunlight, number of junctions, nice views etc.
But bungalows on large plots in urban areas are the worst of all worlds.
MW - That's why buidling with atriums are so efficient.
Don't know of any Georgist buildings but Ebenezer Howard designed the Garden City on Georgist principles. And those ideas were put into practice with Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City. So there is definitely a Georgist school of urban design.
And if you're looking for an architect who was a Georgist, Frank Lloyd Wright qualifies.
D, good stuff, ta.
Derek. EH was a bit too 'planned' for me, but didn't he employ Lutyens to do some of the house designs? Or were they just Lutyenesque?
L, that's the problem with planned cities, they always look a bit too 'planned' and all planners make mistakes/no planner can anticipate what demand will be in future.
If you plan for a 100,000 population city then a dual carriageway is enough, if it swells to 1 million you'll be kicking yourself you didn't go straight to a four lane motorway and if the town only gets to 20,000 then dual carriageway looks like a waste of money.
"rather than a square (where everybody's back garden overlooks another road or another back garden)"
I think the idea of the (Georgian) square was that, instead of everyone having their own, pocket handkerchief sized, back garden, they all shared a large garden out the front, with room for trees and a good-sized lawn. Of course, people lived more communally in those days.
Right enough, Lola, I didn't know that. It appears that Lutyens co-operated with the Garden City planners in the creation of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Even more curious (and bringing things back to the original topic of Marks post), it seems that Welwyn Garden City was built not only as a Georgist city but also as a (neo-)Georgian city.
Oops meant to include a link to the site where I got that info. Warning! The colour scheme may hurt your eyes.
Hi Mark. I'm not sure specifically where I saw the mathematical basis for design. Pre-internet days in a book. Def had floor plan/diagrams etc and directly referenced classical Greek architecture (though probably principally for grander designs). I tried googling, but haven't found much
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