Praxiteles
Forum Replies Created
- Posts
The Sanctuary of San Biagio (St. Blaise), Montepulciano
The Casa Canonica or Presbytery built by Sangallo Senior.
An article from the London telegraph on the controversy surrounding the development of Chelsea Barracks. It is posted here because of the striking parallels encountered between the blighting mondernists proposals of Prof. Cathal O’Neill for Cobh Cathedral and the conservation/cultural/liturgical/historicals issues marched over by the modernist-blighters.
I’m backing Prince Charles in the joust for Chelsea Barracks
Chelsea Barracks will be turned into a series of 16 steel-and-glass tower blocks, to the horror of Prince Charles, local residents – and Andrew Roberts.By Andrew Roberts
Published: 2:09PM BST 11 Apr 2009Comments 10 | Comment on this article
A vision of the new Chelsea Barracks Photo: Paul Grover Yes, I know I’m being a nimby, living only a couple of hundred yards from the proposed Chelsea Barracks development. And, of course, every nimby declares that there are bigger issues at stake than merely his own back yard. But please hear me out. Here we see a princely struggle, between the Prince of Wales on one side and modern Britain’s Prince of Design, Sir John Sorrell, on the other. The stakes could hardly be higher architecturally, and the result of the contest will tell us much about where true power really lies in our country today.
Chelsea, a village in Middlesex in the Domesday book, became known as “a village of palaces” in the 16th century because of the splendour of the houses owned by Henry VIII, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury. The greatest palace of them all, however, was to be Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital, built in 1682 after Nell Gwynne had the idea for a home for veterans, a function it still serves superbly to this day. Chelsea Barracks is just across the road from the Hospital on the site of the old 18th-century pleasure pavilions known as Ranelagh Gardens. After the Crimean War, barracks were built there, as well as a fine Romanesque garrison church (incidentally the last of its kind still standing in London).
Candy & Candy and the Qatari royal family, the barracks are now going to be turned into a series of 16 modernist, steel-and-glass tower blocks designed by Richard Rogers, 121 feet high. The garrison church will be demolished and a hotel installed, despite its not being on Westminster Council’s initial planning brief. One glance at the plans shows how totally out of keeping the development will be with the low-level stone, brick and slate of the rest of Chelsea and Belgravia. So this is where our two princes open the joust.
Sir John Sorrell, chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), says he “applauds the strength and overarching principles of the scheme and the high quality design of the individual blocks and fully supports the planning application”. Prince Charles, by utter contrast, has “expressed a fervent desire that the scheme should reflect the stunning architecture of Wren’s hospital” and has written to the Emir of Qatar asking him to reconsider.
The fact that the local residents and their action group loathe the plans counts for little. The splendid Robert Taylor of Westminster Council, who likes Quinlan Terry’s attractive alternative, appears to be in a minority on his committee. The London Assembly member for the area, Kit Malthouse, has pithily denounced the scheme as “urban vandalism”, saying: “The pavilions of steel and glass would not look out of place in Frankfurt or Shanghai, but in the heart of Chelsea they are monstrous.” Yet these are mere standard-bearers in this great tournament over Chelsea’s future, between Prince Charles and Sir John Sorrell of Cabe.
Sir John is so much the prince of “design” that the word appears no fewer than 15 times in his Who’s Who entry. A long-serving former chairman for the Design Council, he either sits or has sat on more than a dozen design panels, design advisory boards, ministerial advisory groups on design, “design dimensions” (whatever they are), design “challenge groups” (ditto) and other related quangos. He has won numerous awards, medals and honorary doctorates and written books such as Joined Up Design for Schools (which prominently features the Richard Rogers Partnership). They speak of their prince in hushed tones in the hallowed halls of the world of Design – ie his club, the Groucho – because since he started practising in the Sixties, Design has become a force in the land to rival Architecture itself.
Facing this great modern potentate is Prince Charles, who for decades has been trying to argue that glass-and-steel tower blocks 121 feet high do not meet the human heart’s need for scale and beauty, and that areas such as Wren’s Chelsea have a character that will only be brutalised by Rogers’s “monstrous carbuncles”. The fact that most thinking people with common sense and a love of history completely agree with him is of absolutely no practical use in this new struggle.
Worse than Sorrell has been the architect Will Alsop, who has stated in relation to Chelsea Barracks that “we shouldn’t hark back to a classical age”, as though he and his colleagues have come up with anything recently that could possibly rival the splendour, symmetry and sheer beauty of the Royal Hospital. The reason why the Royal Institute of British Architects is constantly exhorting us never to “hark back” to the classical age – other words might be “celebrate”, “admire”, or “pay homage to” – is obvious. They know that if we do, we will soon realise that they are all pygmies beside Wren, that the Prince of Wales is right and that Rogers, Sorrell and the Candy brothers are only months away from saddling us with hideous blocks that will blight the much-loved vista of the Thames at Chelsea for many decades.
Emir of Qatar – may peace be upon you – hear our plea.
The artist who painted the stencils at the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady was the Swiss born Gottfried Flury.
Detail from the Church of the Assumption, Praha
FLURY, GODFREY (1864-1936). Godfrey Flury, decorative painter and commercial artist, was born in Oensingen, Switzerland, on July 6, 1864, the son of Josef and Zäzilia Flury. He was educated by priests in Solothurn, but instead of entering the church, at age sixteen he immigrated to the United States with his family. He found work in New York City as a painter and decorator and stayed in the United States when his family returned to Switzerland in 1886. He and his sister moved to Buffalo, New York, where their father had acquired some land; sometime thereafter Flury moved to Kansas City, where he established himself as a decorator. On April 14, 1887, he married Margaret Elnettie Shafer in Buffalo, New York; they had one son. A year after their move to San Antonio in 1891, Flury divorced Margaret.
In 1892 he moved to Moulton, where he painted the interiors and exteriors of homes and churches. In 1895 he was commissioned to paint the interior of St. Mary’s Church of Praha, a work that proved to be the most important of his career. He painted the ceiling of tongue-and-groove planks a cool sky-blue and emphasized the church’s classic vault with trompe l’oeil ribs that mimicked medieval stone vaulting; He adorned the wooden columns with painted Gothic capitals. The ceiling he divided into panels ornamented with painted vines, flowers, curving gold scrolls, and symbols such as a chalice, a star, and an eye within a radiant triangle. Above the altar Flury commemorated Praha’s Czechoslovakian heritage by depicting the main cathedral in Prague and an important convent nearby. At the highest point above the altar he painted three angels around a jeweled cross. The church was a great success and won Flury other commissions, notably one to paint the pressed steel ceilings of the Lavaca County Court House (since repainted). Sketches indicate that he also painted the interior of St. John’s (near Schulenburg), and the interior of the church in Cestohowa has been attributed to his hand, but there is not enough original work remaining in either church to support an attribution. The painted ceilings in the C. Cockrill and Kellough Faires homes in Flatonia have both been attributed to Flury.
On April 16, 1895, Flury married Agnes Valchar in the Praha church; they had two daughters and three sons. In 1902 the Flurys moved to San Antonio, where Godfrey worked primarily as a commercial artist after an unsuccessful attempt at chicken farming. His second marriage ended in divorce in 1911, and he moved to Austin that year. In 1911 Flury established a sign-painting business at 502 Colorado Street. At this time he ceased to paint the interiors of buildings and immersed himself in business, real estate, and civic activities. He transferred his Masonic membership from Moulton to Austin and joined the Shriners, the Scottish Rite Temple, the Austin branch of the Knights Templars, and the Austin Saengerrunde Society. On November 11, 1911, he married Alvine Glismann. This marriage, a happy one, lasted until Flury’s death. They had one daughter and one son. In 1918 Flury became a naturalized citizen.
His most notable artistic efforts during his Austin years were the preparation of elaborate floats for parades and various civic displays. Following the sale of his advertising company in 1929 he spent the remainder of his years traveling, dabbling in real estate, and painting scenic views of the Hill Countryqv and wildflowers and Austin landmarks such as Barton Springs.qv In 1934 he temporarily resumed control of his faltering advertising business, which he resold to a San Antonio company, and entered the University of Texas as a freshman to study mechanical engineering. He died at home on October 28, 1936. His friends subsequently organized a memorial exhibition of his work at the Elisabet Ney Museum.qv The interior of St. Mary’s Church in Praha was attributed to him in 1972, his work authenticated by preliminary sketches and notes that correspond to the church’s interior. These sketches were exhibited at the University of Texas Institute of Texan Culturesqv in San Antonio in April 1972.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Austin American-Statesman, October 30, 1936. Dorothy Agnes Flury, Our Father Godfrey: A Biography (Austin: Hart Graphics, 1976). Godfrey Flury Collection, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. Richard Pierce, “Maticka Praha,” Texas Highways, December 1974. Connie Sherley, “In Praise of Painted Churches,” Texas Highways, October 1989.
Kendall Curlee
Texas painted churches. This time built by the architect John Bujnoch and decorated by
Frederick Donecker:St. John the Baptist at Ammansville, Texas.
Another example of a re-reordering of a chapel sanctuary: the un-wreckovation of the high altar in St. Stephen’s Chapel at the Anglican Cowley Fathers’ complex in Oxford, a space designed by Bodley with a ciborium by Comper.
@gunter wrote:
You just can’t link beauty with faith, or goodness, beauty is a set of conventions that a culture invents, not some kind of fundamental truth.
Gunter!
The problem is that the neo-Platonist tradition does make this connection – thus asserting one of the major postulates of the Western tradition. Its idealism is in direct contrast with the materialism of Aristotle (which could be pressed to support the view taken in the quotation above). The same tension is often repeated in the history of western philosophy including the opposition of the systems of Berkley and Hume and beyond. On of the more comprehensive statements of the connection is to be found in Frederick Wilhelm Scheller’s Philosophie der Kunst published in 1802 which once again returns to the medieval ideals of Pulcheritudo and Splendor Dei.
P.S. As for the application of the theory to Victor Hugo’s creation, might one perhaps suggest Charles Baudelaire !
