Charles Barry

British architect

• Born: May 23, 1795
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 12, 1860
• Place of death: London, England

The chief architect of some of the most famous buildings in England, Barry designed London’s Houses of Parliament, one of the finest examples of the Victorian Gothic Revival.

Early Life

Charles Barry’s father was a successful merchant in the city of London, the owner of a stationery business. At the age of fifteen, Barry was articled to a London firm of architects and surveyors, and he remained with them until his father died six years later. At the age of twenty-one, he used his inheritance to finance a Grand Tour of the Continent, intent on studying the architecture. Over a three-year period, he traveled through France, Italy, Greece, and the Near East, accumulating the firsthand knowledge of the architectural styles that he was to use with such facility in his professional life.

A personable, genial young man of considerable confidence, he set himself up as a practicing architect upon his return to England. Shortly after settling into business, he entered a government competition that was to provide churches in newly developed suburbs in cities throughout England. Barry, despite his modest experience, was awarded contracts for churches in the Islington district of London, in Manchester, and in Brighton. The neo-Gothic style in public buildings (particularly church buildings) was popular at the time, and Barry was able to adapt his skills to it easily, if not with any particular brilliance. He showed himself able to work within modest budgets and to deal sensibly with the complications of government contracts. The churches were aesthetically interesting, built of brick with Gothic detail added in stone, but they showed little depth of artistic power.

The fact is that Barry was not a fully committed adherent to the Gothic revival. He could, and often did, work in other styles, providing his clients with what they wanted. He seemed most at home, and most engaging, in designing nineteenth century British versions of the Italian Renaissance palazzo. In Rome or Florence such buildings were combinations of the town house and the palace of the great family. Barry put them to use in the first instance as havens for the English clubmen. His first important commission for such a building was the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall, which he began in 1829 (finishing it in 1832) and which is one of the best examples of how he could adopt models from another culture and time, without self-consciousness, to the needs of Victorian London. The Travellers’ Club still possesses the dignity and charm that make it one of the handsomest buildings on that famous street. Its success established Barry as a designer of distinction.

Life’s Work

Barry’s ability to manipulate different styles, to adapt himself to the taste and enthusiasms of his patrons, made him a popular architect not only in the city but also in the country, where he gained commissions to reproduce a version of the Italianized country house. He was also willing and able to renovate and add to houses that in one way or another had become boring or unsuitable to their owners, and there are several great houses throughout England that have additions by Barry, sometimes in his Italian style, sometimes in his Gothic style, occasionally in Tudor imitation.

Architecture, perhaps of all the arts, is the one most inclined to allow imitation, and it was not considered invalid for owners to request the renovation of buildings that had come down through the family and through several centuries. Often, such renovations, such demands for additions from other historical styles, could make for the unfortunate destruction of original masterpieces. Occasionally, such messing about with the buildings not only made them more civilized but also added to their aesthetic value. At Harewood House in Yorkshire, Barry’s facade, grand outer staircase, and some interior work in the library seem to have been successful, but his addition of an Italianate tower to Georgian Bowood in Wiltshire is, in the eyes of Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian, “incongruous.”

Such imitations seemed to work best if they were all of a piece, and Barry’s Reform Club, a return to the Renaissance Italian urban palace, was set immediately west of his former success, the Travellers’ Club. There is some considerable opinion that the Reform Club (begun in 1837) is not only a finer building but also his greatest work in the Renaissance style. Weightier, somewhat grander than the Travellers’, both inside and out, it displays the growing maturity of his work and his ability to go back to the same model with sufficient variation and imagination to allow it to be put side by side with his older building without fear of cloying the appetite, despite the basic similarity of the two structures. It was the mark of an architect of breadth and some considerable courage.

Barry’s greatest fame, however, was not to come from tour de force juxtapositions of buildings in the same style. Indeed, it was not to come from his practice in the neo-Renaissance Italian mode at all, but from that style with which his career had begun, with the city church commissions—from answering, once again, the English allegiance to the Gothic, the style that was always before their eyes in the great cathedrals. The English Baroque architects of the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century, Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, in their sometimes eccentric eclecticism, had managed to use Gothic motifs in a mix with classical and Renaissance ideas, but the Palladians, who came into vogue in the period after 1715, deprecated such barbarism for the high, fastidious purity of neoclassicism. The result was some of the finest architecture in the history of Great Britain, but it was not to last out the century unchallenged.

If the Gothic was unfashionable at the higher levels of aesthetic decision, it retained its hold on the affection of less sophisticated provincials, and the local church was often constructed with Gothic models in mind. Aside from these residual traces, however, Gothic came to mean, first, in the literary arts, a world of imagination, of teasing fantasy, of escape from the high rationality of the eighteenth century into the mysterious, into personal feeling. Horace Walpole not only invented the horror story (The Castle of Otranto, 1764) but also shared in the antiquarian enthusiasm about which he wrote; he assiduously collected examples of Gothic design and built himself a Gothic play-palace, Strawberry Hill. The pointed arch, the delicate tracery, the machicolated profile that reeked of fortified castles, the rich plethora of motif caught the late eighteenth century imagination in letters and was to lead to the Romantic movement, but architecture was also to be gradually influenced. If some wanted to live in the grandeur of Renaissance Italy, others wanted the frisson of an idealized medievalism.

Barry’s early churches had been exercises in satisfying that desire to link the new, industrialized England with its roots in antiquity. The opportunity for a project on an entirely different scale came in 1834, when the House of Parliament burned down. It was decided that the new buildings should be either “Gothic” or “Elizabethan”; Barry chose to enter the competition with a plan that was basically classical in form, but dressed from head to toe (right down to the inkwells) in Gothic detail. To achieve this, he brought in as his assistant Augustus Pugin, who, despite his youth, was already a master of the Gothic mode. Barry provided the overall plan, and Pugin did the drawings, adding the details that were to turn the buildings into the best example of the Gothic Revival in Britain.

Although the overall conception of the project was Barry’s, Pugin’s contribution was central to their success in winning the commission. Years later, after both men were dead, their children were to engage in a public quarrel over who really was the major contributor. It is true that Barry was somewhat less generous than he might have been in sharing the praise, but Pugin admitted that he could not have led the project. He believed that he had nothing like Barry’s organizing ability or stubbornness in fighting back the onslaughts of the bureaucrats, the public, and the envious architectural community, all of whom threw themselves singly and collectively into thwarting Barry, who exhausted himself in making the buildings such a success.

Whether the Parliament complex is a major work of art is questionable—Pugin himself considered it somewhat fraudulent, a classic shape decked out in Gothic trappings—but there is no doubt that it is the most famous seat of government in the world, and that its Thames-side profile, punctuated by the Big Ben Tower, has appeared on more labels for English products than perhaps any other object in the history of art.

The success of this massive project fully established Barry’s reputation and was to do the same for Pugin in later years when the extent of his contribution was fully known. So ambitious was this undertaking that Barry was not to be free of it during his lifetime, and the project was finally completed by his son. Meanwhile, however, Barry worked on other contracts as well. The Reform Club was designed after he had begun the Parliament project; in Birmingham, he designed the King Edward Grammar School in the Tudor style; in Manchester, he used his Italian palazzo plan for the Atheneum. He provided the ground plan for Parliament Square in London, and he also had a hand in laying out Trafalgar Square. Both have been altered since, but his terrace on the north side of Trafalgar Square is extant.

Perhaps the finest example of Barry’s use of the Italian palazzo for a residence (although it is now a corporate head office) is Bridgewater House in Cleveland Row, facing onto Green Park. Built quite late in his career (1847-1849), it is a longer, lower, richer variation on the model that he used just down the street in the Reform Club. The long side is to the park, a quite splendidly arrogant display of architectural sonority, floating slightly above the park level, crowned by a richly detailed cornice topped by his favorite device, the ornamental urn.

Significance

If it is understood that art need not necessarily be original, that it can just as well be memory of that which has preceded it, the history of architecture and of some architects can be better appreciated. Sir Charles Barry was an imitator in the best sense of the word, just as Palladio was, and as Burlington was of Palladio. It is probably true that Barry was not quite as great an architect as either of these men, but he produced individual buildings of some considerable merit, whose aesthetic worth lies not in their originality but in the way in which the style of established merit has been made to work again, in another place at another time.

Barry also showed that it was possible to satisfy the public, to give them what they wanted, without necessarily destroying artistic integrity or merit. On several occasions, it must be admitted, Barry’s additions to already established buildings did not quite work, but he was often able to solve problems of mixed styles in ways that showed how technically ingenious he was, how able to manipulate the highly difficult art of design and execution in order to make architecture that had some lasting value. He never forgot the obligation of the architect to make art that was also useful. He was not a great artist, but he was often close to being so, even when he was obliged to give his patrons what were, in fact, copies of something long ago and far away.

Bibliography

Barry, Alfred. The Life and Works of Sir Charles Barry. London: John Murray, 1867. A family bias, aggravated by the fight between the Pugins and the Barrys, should be remembered in reading this work, but it does give a strong sense of the Victorian sensibility.

Cannadine, David, et al. The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture. London: Merrell, 2000. An illustrated history of Barry’s most famous work, placing the buildings in a historical, political, and cultural context.

Clark, Kenneth. The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1964. The most popular, readily available essay on the peculiar zest for making everything old that seized the Victorians and turned their architectural landscape and all its trappings into the new Middle Ages. Enormously readable and scholarly; the ramifications of the movement are fully explored, not only in architecture but also in literature and life.

Dixon, Roger, and Stefan Muthesius. Victorian Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. One of those handsome, easily read, popular books on the period. Generous illustration. Some care taken to avoid technical mystery. Barry turns up quite often but is most carefully discussed in the chapters on public and religious architecture.

Ferriday, Peter, ed. Victorian Architecture. London: Jonathan Cape, 1963. Barry is best understood in the full context of Victorian architecture in general. This book is a collection of essays by leading experts. Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, one of the best commentators on Barry, contributes an essay; there is also an essay on Pugin that provides some sense of the collaboration between Barry and Pugin.

Goodhart-Rendel, H. S. English Architecture Since the Regency. London: Constable, 1953. This author provides the essay on the country house in Ferriday’s Victorian Architecture (see above). In this book, he meets the problem of the originality of nineteenth century English architecture, given its dependence upon prior models. It is densely argued and deeply attached to the idea that architecture is part of the social history of ideas and must be judged in context.

Little, Bryan. English Historic Architecture. New York: Hastings House, 1964. Puts the great public buildings into the context of English history. The last five chapters, beginning with the eighteenth century, are very good for setting the Gothic movement clearly in the mind as something more than a fad.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. London: The Cities of London and Westminster. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1981. The best and most detailed examination of Parliament, the Pall Mall clubs, and Bridgewater House. An education in how to look at, and talk about, a building.

Service, Alastair. The Architects of London. London: Architectural Press, 1979. For all his roaming around in the country, Barry’s best work is to be found in the city of London. The short, informed chapter on him in this book, putting him in the context of his contemporaries, is very good.