Bodley at Bedford and 12 principles

The interior west end of Bedford School Chapel, a late, serene work by George Frederick Bodley – grade II* listed, which opened in 1907. Last year listed building consent was granted for a new organ, currently being made by William Drake Ltd in Devon. It will be installed in 2027.

GF Bodley was an interesting character. Devout like many Victorian church architects, an ardent admirer of Ruskin  who erroneously believed Gothic architecture was a north European art form, in a lecture of 1885 to students at the Royal Academy [reported in The Builder Feb 28 1885 pp 294-296] Bodley set out ‘some principles and characteristics of architectural design’ which we summarise as follows:

• Refinement ‘denotes restrained power… The whole building in its lines and mass should be the expression of reserve and power controlled… Good art.. is imbued with the expression of life. You see it in… the steady, sturdy, yet thrusting buttresses; in the varied modelling of carved ornament… the mouldings of … a string course.’
• Concentration refers to concentrating ornament, to avoid ‘a monotony of riches’.
• Symmetry ‘or balance in designs … with occasional variation from exact balance.’
• Economy ‘in the use of material… the great Gothic buildings in which … through delicate ribs of curved or straight stone the weight of the hanging vault is held, as if by magic… and passed down into the ground… without any undue waste.’
• Contrast in ‘the noble simplicity of design, one breadth of surface, contrasted with delicate detail’, such as the ‘wave moulding’.
• Avoidance of Extravagance of Manner, such as ‘a capital out of all proportion to its shaft’, but allowing height, the ‘proportion of Westminster Abbey at three squares … excellent, … without any undue exaggeration of height.’
• Suitability means ‘suiting [the] design to the place it is meant for, and to the surroundings.… a patriotism… loyal to the traditions of our beautiful English architecture’.
• Harmony, ‘not only of style, but of character and feeling throughout a building… It is better not to attempt… mingling of styles… Complete works of the great periods…have a unity of feeling, and breadth of effect, stamped upon them…. though there is the utmost variety of detail’.
• Colour in ‘the use of marble or other constructional colour, or in painting… caught from the teaching of nature and the great schools of painting… Look at the deep-toned glass of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the gradually refining glass of the fourteenth century… the figures rich and splendid in colour…’
• Work founded on that of the Past: ‘the more extensive your acquaintance with the works of those who have excelled the more… your powers of invention.’
• Consonance with Nature: ‘Though our art like music is not an imitative one, yet its characteristics should be those of nature in the spirit though not the letter.’
• Truth. Bodley refers to ‘Ruskin, to whose teaching we owe so much in the whole field of art.’  and gives an example of untruthful architecture where ‘Iron columns and iron girders are concealed by stone columns and thin stone friezes.’

How do these principles resonate with us now in the 21st Century?

Here is the east end: