Clandon Park fire: is a marble marvel lost forever?
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Version 0 of 1. One of the most striking architectural spaces in Britain is a completely cubic hall that glistens with white marble and is intricately enlivened by pilasters, pediments, grand doorways, classical reliefs and statues. Look up, and the entire ceiling is a rich wonderland of sculpted stucco. This room, influenced by the Italian genius Palladio, is a magnificent piece of installation art, created centuries before the idea of installation art even existed. Related: Clandon Park fire leaves Surrey stately home 'essentially a shell' Or rather it was, until fire ravaged Clandon Park House in Surrey this week. I hope against hope the marble hall can be salvaged from the fire that has torn through this great building, cared for by the National Trust. But the damage to Clandon looks catastrophic. Heroic conservators and firefighters worked to pull as much of the 18th-century porcelain and furniture as they could from the flames, but a lot of the fabric of Clandon has clearly been tragically lost. Does that matter? Isn’t it just a bit of posh heritage culture that has gone? On the contrary, Clandon’s architecture – let alone its contents – embodied a great opening up of the British imagination. The audacity of its marble hall deserved to be better known as a national glory. I only visited this stately home once, but its great central space is one of the most vivid memories I have of architecture. It is – was? – dreamlike. In the early 18th century, British aristocrats fell in love with the designs of the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. This brilliant visionary was the son of a miller and had begun his career as a stone-cutter: his craft skills helped give his architecture its immaculate sense of detail. Palladio took ancient Greek and Roman ideas about mathematical order and musical harmony to a refined pitch of white marble grace: from his churches in Venice to his villas in the Veneto countryside, his buildings possess an exquisite symmetry and Augustan calm. The first great Palladian building in Britain, the Queen’s House in Greenwich, was built by his gifted British admirer Inigo Jones more than a century before Clandon. What they have in common are halls that take the form of a cube. I actually stood in the cubic hall of the Queen’s House a few days ago. It was like being at the heart of some secret code. Such uncanny geometric precision invokes the music of the spheres and a mysticism about mathematical space that goes way back to Pythagoras. There is nothing elitist or obscure about immaculate architectural beauty. It speaks to something universal – our feel for symmetry, harmony, and the wonder of the cosmos. Palladian architecture is utopian in its dreams of the perfect and yet liveable place. Something heavenly went up in flames this week. |