How the Scots Invented the Modern World (28 page)

The other key word was
movement.
Robert Adam had become fed up with the rigidly inflexible uniform façades of doctrinaire Palladianism and neoclassicism. Movement in architecture meant “the rise and fall, the advance and recess, with other diversity of form, in the different parts of the building,” as it stood before the viewer. To achieve it, Adam was ready to break another neoclassical taboo by using decoration. He saw that the discreet use of decorative elements—statues, vases, trophies, rams’ heads, twisting acanthus, grotesque faces and masks— could “add greatly to the picturesque of the composition.” Adam was even willing to accept the occasional use of trefoil and quatrefoil leaf designs from the medieval Gothic, something that would make the average British Palladian faint dead away.

His brother James was even more emphatic on this. James was in many ways the real theorist of the pair, and in his diary from his Italian travels he jotted down the key ideas that he and Robert would publish, almost word for word, ten years later in their
Works in Architecture.
James Adam advocated the use of decorations because they “give such amazing magnificence and render an edifice so wonderfully interesting to every spectator. . . . This, then, is the great secret of beauty in architecture and what every artist who would please must study with the greatest attention.”

James also advanced another notion, which has continued to influence architects down to our own day: form must follow function. “ I am more persuaded than ever that architecture is capable of receiving any sort of character one pleases to give it, so that nobody would be at a loss to say to what purpose such a building was put.”

This meant various things, but two stand out. First, obviously, was that a church or a temple should look like a church or a temple, a house like a house, and not vice versa. But the Adam brothers would also assert that an architectural style must be flexible enough to compose and decorate any type of building. Therefore any building could be made to be beautiful, not only a town house or a commercial building, but even a warehouse—or a factory.

If European architecture had been “servilely groaning” under the burden of a misleading neo-Palladian dogma “for three centuries past,” then the time had come to set it free again. The place to do that was London. Robert Adam returned to Edinburgh in 1757, but stayed only long enough to gather up and organize his drawings and materials. He then set off for London to establish himself and begin scouting up the necessary connections that would enable him to launch his own architecture business.

Fortune, and friendship, worked to his advantage. He managed to arrange meetings with two of the most influential Scots living in London. One was Chief Justice Lord Mansfield, who promised to help Robert with “all his interest.” Eventually, Robert would work on his country estate at Kenwood. The other Scot, even more important, was John Stuart, Lord Bute.

Bute was the nephew of the Duke of Argyll, a Scottish peer in his own right, and virtual monarch of the Isle of Bute. But he owed his real political prestige to the fact that he had been tutor to the new king, George III. The king made him his chief political adviser, and then, in 1761, First Lord of the Treasury. Bute was probably the worst prime minister of the century—given his competition, no mean accomplishment. But he had sense enough to try to surround himself in a hostile England with talented and ambitious Scots, and his private secretary happened to be Adam’s old friend John Home. Home introduced the two.

The first meeting was not a success. Bute’s natural temper, according to one observer, was “dry, unconciliatory, and sullen.” Afterwards, Robert stepped outside and “fell acursing and swearing. What! Had he been presented to all the princes of Italy and France and most graciously received, to come and be treated with such distance and pride by the youngest earl but one in all Scotland!” The second and subsequent meetings went better, though, and with Bute’s help, Robert Adam began to secure his first significant commissions. Whatever else history may say about Bute, he does deserve thanks for recognizing the talent and genius of Robert Adam, so much so that in November 1761 Bute secured for him the title of Architect of the King’s Works—a title Robert shared with William Chambers, who also happened to be a Scot.

Even with Bute’s help, it took nearly three years before Adam’s architectural business began to bring him substantial financial reward. Many of the buildings he built or decorated in the next ten years are familiar names to students of architecture and art history: Harewood, Compton Verney, Croome, Luton Hoo, Kedleston, Lansdowne House, and Syon House. Robert learned to supervise everything connected with his projects, not just the architecture and the construction inside and out, but what we today would call the interior decorating, including the furniture, rugs, doors, chimney pieces, and display porcelain. Everything had to reflect the neoclassical vernacular he and James (who joined his brother in London after his Italian tour in 1763) were bent on creating, a language of design that would create a new visual lifestyle down to the last detail, even the window latches and candle snuffers.

Where did this Adam style come from? Part of it was inspired by the archaeological discoveries in southern Italy at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which showed Europeans for the first time what ancient domestic interiors really looked like. Part of it, too, came from a source of ancient building ideas that, it is astonishing to realize, had been almost unknown to previous architects: Athens in Greece. Neither Adam brother had been there but another Scottish artist, James Stuart, had. He and Nicholas Revett had lived in Athens from 1751 to 1755, and had brought back an inventory of drawings and etchings that they published in their multivolume
Antiquities of Athens.
It became as influential as Campbell’s
Vitruvius Britannicus
in changing the visual taste of a generation. But its most immediate effect was to reinforce the insights of Robert Adam that the key to all ancient design was the projection not of weight and power, but of elegance and sophistication. Refinement, one might even say. So here were the elements for constructing a setting for the social morality of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, not to mention the new urban Scotland.

This fit nicely with the other great, but more unexpected, source of inspiration for the Adam style: the writings of Lord Kames. Kames’s theory of art, summarized in his
Elements of Criticism,
was that beauty truly is (as the cliché has it) in the eye of the beholder. Human beings have an innate sense of beauty, which objects—paintings, houses, landscapes, a bar of music or a couplet of poetry—trigger in our consciousness. The job of the artist, Kames suggested, was to create and arrange those elements that would generate that response.
¹⁸

This notion of beauty as a universal human response to certain objects had a huge impact on both brothers, and particularly James. But unlike Kames, they did not believe that there was a single objective formula for achieving it. Instead, the artist had to be willing to be flexible and adaptable, even to the point of breaking all the rules, in order to bring out what was, after all, a subjective response from his audience or patron. Robert Adam confessed in a letter to Kames that this approach “may do harm in the hands of rash innovators or mere retailers in the art, who have neither eyes nor judgement.” But by knowing his material thoroughly, by supervising every nuance and detail, as Robert Adam did, and, of course, by drawing on his own sense of the “picturesque,” the skilled artist or architect could bring it off.

Yet the ideas of Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment entered into the Adam brothers’ program in a more subtle way. The point of turning to the ancient Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, and even Egyptians was not merely to copy their designs, but to translate their sense of refinement and beauty in a new, modern idiom. The new design style would provide a visual environment to remind moderns of the virtues of their ancient predecessors, but would also be suited to contemporary living. Progress was possible, in the arts just as in society. By drawing on the best of the past, by combining and recombining it with elements already at hand, the Adam brothers believed they could turn domestic architecture into a civilizing instrument. It could offer material comfort together with moral uplift: it would pass on to modern Britons the spiritual power of ancient Greece and Rome, while still providing the viewer with “great variety and amusement.”

To our eyes, jaded by nearly a hundred years of modernist pseudo-Bauhaus starkness and streamlining, the result may seem frilly and fussy. Robert Adam’s Drawing Room from Lansdowne House (now housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and his “Etruscan Room” at Osterley Park, with their gilded stucco, blue and gold trophy panels, and liberal uses of pastel reds and greens, remind us painfully of another eighteenth-century domestic style, French rococo—a style the Adam brothers actively detested. We miss what contemporaries, who had grown tired of the cold, empty, and impersonal interiors the Adam style replaced, all recognized in the brothers’ work: the promise of becoming “modern ancients,” as it were, combining Stoic moral seriousness with a sense of individual freedom and comfort. The Adam brothers themselves were convinced they had revived an ancient standard of artistic perfection for a modern audience. “We flatter ourselves we have been able to seize, with some degree of success, the beautiful spirit of antiquity, and to transfuse it, with novelty and variety, through all our numerous works.” Whether they had carried this off or not, “we shall leave to the impartial public.”

Insofar as that impartial public consisted of wealthy patrons in both England and Scotland, the answer was resoundingly positive. In 1764 their bank account at Drummonds stood at 6,620 pounds. Seven years later, in 1771, it had grown to over 40,000 pounds. Robert Adam had become a man of substance. He owned a splendid house off St. James’s Park, where he entertained friends such as the famous actor David Garrick and visitors such as David Hume and James Boswell, and played golf in the park. He also sat as member of parliament for Kinross-shire. He employed the best craftsmen and artists he could find for his projects: Thomas Chippendale for furniture, Joseph Rose for plasterwork, Josiah Wedgewood for porcelain, Matthew Boulton for ironwork, and painters such as Angelica Kaufmann and her husband, Antonio Zucchi, for frescoes and painted friezes. According to a letter Hume wrote to Adam Smith, the Adam brothers employed more than three thousand craftsmen in their English workshops alone, while still maintaining an equally active business in Edinburgh.

Yet they almost destroyed it all with their one great failure, Adelphi Terrace. It was to be their crowning glory (the name Adelphi came from the Greek for “brothers”) and the Adam version of the New Town: a magnificent residential apartment complex or “terrace” rising up from the mudflats along the Thames, at Durham Yard, north of Westminster. The plan combined elegant apartments above, with startling river views, and warehouses and commercial wharves underneath: as complete a fusion of politeness and commerce as one could expect.

Constructing it brought an epic battle with the London City Council that ultimately required an Act of Parliament to resolve. The Adam brothers managed to tie up most of their personal fortune in Adelphi Terrace. Finally, with great fanfare, it opened in 1771. Robert Adam himself took apartment number 4; David Garrick and his wife settled into number 6. Josiah Wedgewood agreed to open a pottery showroom in the galleries below. The British government also contracted to use the lower floors and wharf space, which was supposed to defray costs. But in the end the government reneged. Robert and James Adam lost almost everything; only the massive scale of their architecture business, with important commissions pouring in by the week, saved them from bankruptcy. David Hume, who had advised them against it, confessed “my wonder is how they could have gone on so long.” It was in fact a pure ego play, akin to the real-estate-development mogul’s ego, with which we are today so familiar. As with Robert Foulis, the dream failed—but the terrace remained (until it was demolished in the 1930s), and the subterranean complex of galleries became the foundations, literally, for another great urban project: the London Embankment.

What Robert Adam had attempted at Adelphi Terrace—applying the Adam style to middle-class urban living—he had a second chance to do with Charlotte Square in Edinburgh’s New Town. It marked his triumphant return to his native Scotland, after having conquered the wealthy and powerful in England. It was the last remaining piece of James Craig’s original plan—the city did not even own the land when Craig was drawing his final sketches—and the city fathers had decided that the natural candidate for completing it was Robert Adam. Work began in 1792, just as his health was failing, but Adam labored to give the project the pictorial harmony he believed all domestic architecture deserved.

The result still looks very much as it did when it was finally completed in 1820, almost thirty years after Robert Adam’s death. The three-story terraced houses, with their elegant Corinthian pilasters in the center topped by full-bodied sphinxes at each end, surround an open square on four sides, while streets enter at each corner. The façade of the north side reproduces exactly that of the south side, giving the square the sort of architectural unity the city fathers wanted for this west end of the New Town. Built in the pale yellow-gray sandstone that characterizes so much of the New Town, Charlotte Square still projects a serene, almost glowing effect.

Like so many of Robert Adam’s later designs, exteriors at Charlotte Square stayed simple while the interiors became more ornate. At number 1, which has the best original interior, and number 7, the so-called Georgian House, we can still get a sense of how he adopted his unique stylistic idiom to the environment of the Edinburgh upper middle class (Charlotte Square attracted lots of lawyers and doctors). But the real revolution he introduced was in the floor plans, adding a new feature he had experimented with in town houses he had built in London’s Portman Square. This involved installing separate back staircases for servants and domestics, away from the main hall. This not only added to the family’s privacy, along with separate “tradesmen’s entrances,” but also marked a major social change. In the new design for middle-class living, servants, like children, were to be seen and not heard. The logistics of domestic life were made as unobtrusive as possible, much as they are now. The focus of the middle-class home, like that of the noble’s country house, becomes “presentation of self”: polite, refined, and highly individual in character.