The morning journal-courier., 1908-01-11
BRITISH ARCHITECTURE.
It Is Very Trying to Artistic Sensi.
 bilitics.

I would like to say that the Birk- beck bank is an institution which points a moral in every possible direc- ton were it not for the fact that it's directors. conscious of their high mor- al rectitude. built for themselves a monument which actually shrieks to heaven in It's garishness. Prosperity brought them the ambition to be housed in their own edifice and so they put up financial palace which Is permanent advertisement of the typical ten-shilling check book. Their palace is built of majolica and Doul- ton ware-characteristic to the very cornices. It is "greenery, yallery" to such an extent that whenever I am
 d to pass the site I become vio- lently bilious. But then, on the other
 Id. 1t might be argued that here is building which reflects the mind of section of the people who have neith- CT art nor soul Is 1t, perhaps, not bet ter for nation that 1t should ex- press In it's buildings and, monuments its own innate thoughts and inclina- tions rather than become slavish copy | lsts of the ancients?
 The modern British architect, like the modern British sculptor. is veri- ] table terror Wherever he is allowed a free rein to his imagination he per petrates things that cause the flesh to creep and put metaphorical goose flesh on ones artistic sensibilities. London Is in the vortex of rebuild ing mania. Whole districts are in the hands of the contractor, the builder, the house. breaker; but through it all there is an utter lack of cohesion and artistic proportions Wherever the ar chitect has sensibly confined himself to the reproduction of old English mod els, such as the magnificent building occupied by the Warnings or that of the South Kensington museum, he has achieved a magnificent triumph; but in the majority of instances the de- signers of buildings, possessed with a I better qualified to rank as artists than the makers of totems in Alaska. A large proportion of present-day archi- tects remind me of the cook who iias married the prosperous butcher, and, i feeling her new-found importance, makes herself round-shouldered with the weight of her jewelry. His one idea is to overload his new building with marble statues, gargoyles, crests, shields and other barbarous excres- cences.
 The late Barney Barnato, who start ed life as an East-end street juggler and ended it as a South African mill lionaire, sought to cap his meteoric career with a Park lane palace which should forever stand as monument, not only to himself but to his archi- | tect. He built house facing Hyde Park which on its walls harbored doz- lens of gentlemen in stone, one more in- congruous than the other It was like vast monument of many statutes and the public said they were Mir. Parnato's disappointed shareholders whom he had turned into stone Fools build houses; other people live in them" Rarnato never lived In his stat ue box. He was drowned before it was finished, and MT. Sassoon, who bought if. spent a large sum of money strip ping the stone gentlemen from it's walls. To-day it looks like an ordin- ary house; but directly opposite the inventor of a washing blue has put up A palace which is cross between a bird cage and music box-Ralph D.
 Plumenfeld's London Letter in Town land Country. 44a sl-