Architecture – Nick Louras

At Rudyard Kipling’s House

October 28, 2021

In 1893, Rudyard Kipling and his American wife Caroline settled near her family in Brattleboro, Vermont. Kipling designed a house to suit them: an Indian bungalow in the New England shingle style. He named it Naulakha. The word means nine lakh, or nine-hundred thousand, an extraordinary price in rupees, signifying its value. There is a pavilion of that name at Lahore Fort in the Punjab.

Kipling intended to make Vermont his permanent home. But after a very public falling out with his brother-in-law it was not to be. He felt hounded by the local press, his family’s privacy encroached upon, and his home no longer a haven. The Kiplings moved back to England in 1896.

The three years that he lived at Naulakha were fruitful for Kipling. In his study at the back of the house, he wrote The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, parts of Kim and The Just So Stories. In 1896 his daughter Elsie was born there.

Growing up I spent many school holidays in lower Vermont: many long lush summers and white Christmases. I had seen Naulakha once or twice from the road but had never been inside. This week my family and I are up for the foliage, which begins just a little earlier than our own in the Hudson Valley. We have been staying at Naulakha, which is now a guest house. It is little changed from Kipling’s day. The desk where he wrote The Jungle Book sits in the study.

Where the statue of a lion appears on the bookcase today, the statue of a wolf can be seen in a photograph of Kipling from the 1890s (above). We found that same wolf in the attic, one of two plaster pieces given to the Kiplings by Joel Chandler Harris, the author of Br’er Rabbit. They depict Bagheera and Gray Brother from The Jungle Book.

Kipling belonged to a family of artists active in the Arts and Crafts movement. His father John Lockwood Kipling was the subject of a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert in 2017: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones was an uncle by marriage. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic permeates the interior design of Naulakha, leaving many built-ins and decorative fittings even as the house changed hands between then and now.

In order to reach Kipling’s study, visitors had to pass through Caroline’s office. She was the arbiter of who was admitted to see him. Above her desk hangs a portrait of the author by his cousin Philip Burne-Jones.

The house has a happy and comforting atmosphere—all the more so this time of year, with a fire in the hearth, and the children marching around exploring. We brought our happiness with us, of course. But the Kiplings found it here too.

“There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” Kipling wrote in 1898, “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live at either.”

Van Rensselaer Manor

March 4, 2021

From the year 1630 until well into the nineteenth century the Van Rensselaer family were lords of the manor of Rensselaerwyck, a vast fiefdom in upstate New York, around Albany. Killian Van Rensselaer had acquired the land from the Dutch West India Company ten years after the Mayflower landed and it remained in the family through successive Dutch, English, and American governments. I described the later years of the manor at length in my biography of James Fenimore Cooper, a friend of the family.

The manor house was dismantled in the 1890s and rebuilt as the Sigma Phi fraternity house, called Van Rensselaer Hall, at Williams College in Massachusetts. Unfortunately it was torn down by the college in the 1970s. The only surviving fragments of the house were interiors donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wallpaper of the great hall has been used to reconstruct the room in the American Wing. On a recent visit to the museum I took the opportunity to photograph the furnishings in detail.

Greenwich Village Gothic

January 23, 2021

Grace Episcopal Church on the corner of Broadway and Tenth Street in Manhattan is the most important early example of Gothic Revival architecture in New York. I posted a picture of the beautiful courtyard in an earlier post. The architect was James Renwick, Jr., who went on to design the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He was only twenty-four years old when he undertook the design of Grace Church.

It was constructed between 1846 and 1847 when wealthy New Yorkers were moving north into Greenwich Village from the crowded Downtown. Nevertheless the parish had a limited budget. While the edifice itself is marble, the spire was initially wooden, and much of the interior is lathe and plaster. A marble spire was added in 1881.

The church is a landmark of the Village. During its heyday its congregation comprised fashionable society. As Matthew Hale Smith wrote in 1869, “To be married or buried within its walls has been ever considered the height of felicity.”

Plymouth Rock, 1920

August 24, 2020

A hundred years ago this year for the tricentennial of the Mayflower landing, a neoclassical portico by the architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White, was erected over Plymouth Rock.

The lead architect on the project was partner William M. Kendall. It was Kendall who had chosen the inscription, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” for the New York City General Post Office building designed by the firm in 1912. The line, taken from a description by Herodotus of the Persian postal couriers, has become the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service.

Kendall was the son of classicist Joshua Kendall, and a Mayflower descendant.

See also: The Mayflower Quadricentennial and Around Plymouth.

Lambeth Palace Library as it Might Have Been

June 9, 2020

The library of Lambeth Palace contains the great collection of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the records of the Church of England. It has historically been kept in the palace complex but this year a purpose-built edifice was erected to house it.

Mock-ups of the design were released well in advance so it will surprise no one that the finished building is cold, institutional, and modern. But it might have been very different.

The architect Francis Terry recently shared designs on Twitter that he had submitted to the project. Terry’s vision for the library was a lovely Victorian gothic building sensitive to its surroundings and in keeping with the Tudor and Gothic survival/revival layers of Lambeth Palace itself.

This is Terry’s design:

This is the design that was built:

Terry describes his plan in an essay for UnHerd, writing:

Back in 2015 there was a competition to design a new library for Lambeth Palace. My scheme was up against the great and the good of the architectural establishment. I decided to design a Gothic style library reminiscent of the other buildings of Lambeth Palace. To avoid a huge tower with no windows overshadowing the garden, I decided to put all the archive space underground. It was a concept that would be more detailed and rationalised if my design was chosen by the judges. It is extremely rare for traditional designs like mine to win prestigious architectural competitions and so it came as no surprised when my scheme was rejected at the first available moment.

The winning design strikes me as distinctly inappropriate for an ecclesiastical setting.

American Classicism

February 7, 2020

The White House has drafted an executive order that would make neoclassicism the default style for new federal buildings. If the administration follows through it will be cause for celebration. Neoclassicism was the architectural language of American public buildings for two hundred years.

In the post-war period this style has been abandoned in favor of egregious modern designs. Marion Smith of the National Civic Art Society, which proposed the order, tells The New York Times, “For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive, and inefficient buildings.”

The National Civic Art Society is fast becoming one of my favorite organizations. NCAS is also leading the campaign to rebuild Charles McKim’s original Penn Station.

As an aside, I wonder who in the administration is a champion of classicism. Probably not the president himself since we know what his taste in architecture looks like.

Rest in Peace, Sir Roger

February 7, 2020

Sir Roger Scruton has died. We lose the greatest contemporary English philosopher and an irreplaceable voice for Burkean conservatism. A statement from his family reads:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Sir Roger Scruton, FBA, FRSL. Beloved husband of Sophie, adored father to Sam and Lucy and treasured brother of Elizabeth and Andrea, he died peacefully on Sunday 12th January. He was born on 27th February 1944 and had been fighting cancer for the last 6 months. His family are hugely proud of him and of all his achievements. (12.01.2020)

At the time of his death Sir Roger was working on the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. He had been appointed, removed, and finally reinstated as a commissioner in 2019. I wrote about his appointment at the time.

The commission has now published its report, Living with Beauty. The entire report is compelling, accessible, and worth reading. Its recommendations fall under three broad aims: Ask for Beauty, Refuse Ugliness, and Promote Stewardship. Specific recommendations include a “fast track” for beauty and a “re-greening” of towns and cities.

The report has been received warmly by the government, and if acted upon will be a worthy legacy for Sir Roger who has been a crusader for traditional architecture and urban planning.

Machen on Architecture

August 9, 2019

In 1987, The Prince of Wales famously excoriated the shortsighted city planners and developers who rebuilt London after the Second World War. “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe” he said. “When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”

Decades earlier the weird-fiction writer and sometime Londoner Arthur Machen expressed similar sentiments. In the Spring 2019 issue of Faunus, R.B. Russell quotes a letter by Machen to Montgomery Evans around the end of the War. Machen writes:

And that brings me to the confession that I don’t curse the Germans very fiercely for their London destruction so far as the new buildings are concerned. It is we who destroyed London & wrecked the Strand, pulled down the Adelphi, abolished Clifford’s Inn (pre-Great Fire), built flats where Clements Inn once stood with green lawns. You can remember the old Café Royal: it wasn’t Germans who ruined it. And as for the Wren churches in the City: it was with great difficulty that the Bishop of London was restrained from pulling many of them down & selling the sites 20 years ago.

Modernity Encroaches on Dr Johnson’s House

February 17, 2019

JohnsonHouse1

In London it is not hard to find surreal juxtapositions of the old and new. One of the most striking, I think, is the view from the upstairs window in Dr Johnson’s House.

17 Gough Square can be found in the warren of alleyways between Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and Fetter Lane. It is the only surviving London residence of the lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). The perfectly restored eighteenth-century building has been open to the public as a museum since 1914.

Inside one can easily imagine oneself in the reign of King George II—until one looks out of the north windows. A massive glass and steel block of barristers’ offices at 5 New St Square fills the view. There is a moment of dislocation in time. One feels like a Georgian suddenly confronted with a temple to an alien god outside of his bedroom.

Rebuild Penn Station

January 15, 2019

“One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” That was the judgement of Yale historian Vincent Scully on Penn Station in New York after it was buried under Madison Square Garden.

The demolition of the original McKim, Mead & White-designed station in 1963 was an act of architectural philistinism unmatched in American history. It is often said to have galvanized the historic preservation movement but that movement has been on the defensive ever since. Year by year the immense stock of beautiful architecture in New York is whittled away at, and the number of ugly ill-considered developments increase.

It would be nice to reclaim some lost territory in the name of beauty and culture. Where better to start than Penn Station itself?

The National Civic Art Society is campaigning to reconstruct the original 1910 edifice. Visit the NCAS’s Rebuild Penn Station website for more information on the project and how to support it.

Pictured below, Pennsylvania Station as it was…

pennstation1