page_title: Alfred Waterhouse
section_title: Waterhouse as a planner of buildings
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Waterhouse / London practice (1865–1902) / Organisation of Waterhouse's architectural office / Waterhouse as a planner of buildings
caption_attribution_description: English: This 1881 plan shows the original arrangement of the Natural History Museum in London. The museum has since been extended and rearranged. The scale bar shows 100 feet, which is 30.48 metres.
context_page_description: Alfred Waterhouse RA PPRIBA was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his design for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country. Besides his most famous public buildings he designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II, and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London. He was particularly active in designing buildings for universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge but also what became Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds universities. He designed many country houses, the most important being Eaton Hall in Cheshire, largely demolished in 1961-63. He designed several bank buildings and offices for insurance companies, most notably the Prudential Assurance Company. Although not a major church designer he produced several notable churches and chapels.
context_section_description: Waterhouse has a lasting reputation as a planner of efficient buildings, he was adept at using awkward sites to advantage, and with his public buildings combining large and small rooms and circulation spaces in a coherent manner.
  Part of Waterhouse's presidential address at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1890 addresses the subject of planning buildings:
  Your buildings must faithfully adapt themselves to those for whom you build: must embody their requirements, and give what they want, in the most direct way possible, Do not let the conventionalities of style interfere with this. First find out exactly what is wanted; never think about the elevation of your building, till you have ascertained this, and embodied it in your plans as fully and perfectly as you can. Afterwards clothe the building so planned in the most fitting dress you can devise. That dress may be in many cases extremely simple, in others ornate; it may have to be sometimes severe, sometimes of exquisite beauty, if you can make it so. As you have in the first instance been solicitous that your building should adapt itself in every way to the needs and conditions of the people who are to use it, so now strive that every detail of the dress in which you clothe it shall help to make its purpose clear
caption: Plan of the Natural History Museum London 1881, showing the layout of the galleries on the main floor
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