e only skin deep. There are, however,
two or three ways of making use of brickwork without covering it up, and
of gaining good architectural effects thereby, and to these I beg now to
direct your attention.
The architect who desires to make an effective brick building, which
shall honestly proclaim to all the world that it is of brick, may do
this, and, if he will, may do it successfully, by employing brickwork
and no other material, but making the best use of the opportunities
which it affords, or he may erect his building of brickwork and stone
combined, or of brickwork and terra cotta. Mr. Robson, till lately the
architect to the School Board for London, has the merit of having put
down in every part of the metropolis a series of well contrived and well
designed buildings, the exterior of which almost without exception
consists of brickwork only.
If you examine one of his school-houses, you will see that the walls are
of ordinary stock brickwork, but usually brightened up by a little red
brick at each angle, and surmounted by well contrasted gables and with
lofty, well designed chimneys, rising from the tiled roof. The window
openings and doorways are marked by brickwork, usually also red, and
sometimes moulded, and though I personally must differ from the taste
which selected some of the forms employed (they are those in use in this
country in the 17th and the last centuries), I cordially recognize that
with very simple and inexpensive means exceedingly good, appropriate,
and effective buildings have been designed.
Among examples of architecture wholly, or almost wholly, executed in red
brick, I cannot pass over a building built many years ago, little known
on account of its obscure situation, but a gem in its way. I allude to
the schools designed by Mr. Wilde, and built in Castle street, Endell
street.
Of buildings where a small amount of stone is introduced into brickwork
we have a good many fine specimens in London. One of the best--probably
the best--is the library in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This is a large and
picturesque pile, built under Mr. Hardwick, as architect, in red brick,
with patterns in the blank parts of the walls done in black brick. It
has splendid moulded brick chimneys, and the mullions of the windows,
the copings, the entrances, and some other architectural features done
in stone. The building is a good reproduction of the style of building
in Tudor times, when, as has been already mentio
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