The Masterbuilder: William Butterfield and his times

I have spent more time in one particular building than any other in my life, apart from my family homes. The Chapel at St Columba’s College in South Dublin was finished in 1880, and so it is not too far from its 150th birthday. In the 1870s the school authorities took the decision to replace the original Chapel on the site, a decaying building close to the original house, and despite fragile finances they also took the decision to commission one of the era’s most distinguished architects, William Butterfield, for the replacement. He chose a new site higher than the old one, his completed building standing prominently over the school, and also looking down on the city of Dublin.

Now Nicholas Olsberg has written a new biography of Butterfield, who died in 1900 at the age of 85 after an extraordinarily long, varied and productive career. The production from Lund Humphries is gorgeous, with lovely drawings interspersed with historical black and white pictures and James Morris’s stunning contemporary photographs, including ones of our Chapel on pages 308 to 311 (and here they are too).

The first thing to say is that Olsberg’s achievement is superb. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could write better about this architect. It is also particularly cheering and even indeed moving to read a study built on such deep and complete knowledge of a physical subject in our own digitalised and evanescent culture.

In his Prologue the author identifies his time at Rugby School, arriving in 1956 from Manchester, as the source of his fascination with Butterfield as a ‘character-shaping agent’:

I warmed only very slowly to the tamer tones of the sturdy past, the demure, provincial, fussy faces of Butterfield’s Rugby.

But gradually the buildings seeped into his psyche and

I came secretly (for it would have been shameful to confess) to love them all; would arrive early for Sunday evensong to watch the light come through the claws of the chapel apse; and spared no chance to wander the Temple Reading Room alone and sit with a book beside its great marble heart as the western light faded through the leaded windows.

The lyrical note in that paragraph resurfaces regularly through the course of the book, but most of Olsberg’s writing is controlled and analytical, alert to the ways in which Butterfield’s work was studded with ‘endless oddities of conjunction and incident’, while all those elements also cohered into a ‘unity that underlines variety’. That unified vision threads itself through so many of these buildings: looking through the illustrations I was again and again startled by echoes of the St Columba’s Chapel in buildings I have not previously known, such as the interior of the Church of St John Evangelist in Dalton - which is also utterly different.

The book makes the connection between Butterfield and one of the poets I most love teaching, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I have written about Hopkins recently, and by coincidence his final resting place in the Jesuit plot in Glasnevin cemetery is just over 15 miles from the Chapel at St Columba’s. I wonder if Hopkins ever took a short trip out into the countryside during his troubled time in Dublin to see Butterfield’s building, since he did make trips around England to see his churches.

The power of Hopkins’s poems comes from the extreme energy of the style contained within disciplined structures, especially the sonnet form. As Robert Bernard Martin writes in his biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: a very private life (1991) on the Sonnets of Desolation:

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these poems is the sense of contained anarchy, of inchoate, almost unspeakable emotion given verbal form. And no less remarkable is that Hopkins should have picked the sonnet for the purpose. Whether or not he thought out the matter, the fact is that he chose one of the most disciplined verse forms because it best held his explosive emotions in check. These poems shock doubly because of the contrast between the decorum of the sonnet form and the dark energy pulsing against its restraints.

Of course, Hopkins used the same form for his more typical poems of celebration too, most brilliantly in ‘The Windhover’, but the same point applies: for him, structure and containment were all the more vital given the thrilling pyrotechnics of his style. Nicholas Olsberg points out that in August 1874 Hopkins spent a day in All Saints’ Church, Babbacombe and 5 years later wrote to Robert Bridges on the ‘inscape’ he perceived at the church, and

the scale and rhapsodic treatment of the choir and sanctuary have a richness that no one in 1865 could have anticipated.

‘Rhapsodic’ is truly an apposite word here, perfectly suited to ‘The Windhover’ or ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ or ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’, in all of which the rhapsody is kept in check by the sonnet form. Olsberg believes Hopkins’s sonnet ‘To Oxford’ is a direct but unrecognised reading of the façade of the Chapel at Balliol College, Oxford. I lived not far away beside Keble College for three years, and Robert Bernard Martin writes that

Most telling for Hopkins was the fact that it had been designed by the one modern architect he admired unreservedly, William Butterfield, whose buildings he had travelled around the country to see, and whose work at Merton and Balliol had inspired him while he was still an undergraduate.

And so to the structure which I have known intimately for 45 years. Butterfield chose the site in what Olsberg calls the

radical step of setting the building apart from the body of the college on newly terraced and raised ground.

In 1896 the Great Fire at the College removed the Old Schoolroom which had been on the Chapel Square (a term from 1921, once the First World Memorial had been built), and opened up what I sometimes fancifully imagine as an Italian hill-town piazza flanked by the Chapel, memorial wall, Deerpark, Big Schoolroom and Cloisters. It is a wonderful open space above the main level of the school.

Olsberg points out that the interior is more restrained than many other churches by Butterfield due to

The severely Protestant taste of the newly disestablished Church of Ireland and the college community.

However, it is still beautifully polychromatic in the ‘abstract pattern of tilework’ and

What results is a chapel marvellously sited in a manner as firmly evocative of a new sobriety of ornament and warming space: ancient and modern, structure within and structure without.

It is also a perfect space for the human voice, with no need for modern electronic amplification - both for the individual reading a lesson or talking to the school and for the tremendous communal singing which distinguishes our community. You can read my pamphlet on the building here (and pick up a copy just inside the door).

So much about Butterfield is uplifting - his attention to architecture as a positive element of civic life, his understanding of how it should serve the human in us rather than imposing itself, the crispness and clarity of his designs, his great range (churches, hospitals, schools, cottages, houses and more), his evident efficiency in delivering results, his precision and care with detail. Nicholas Olsberg writes of St Ninian’s Cathedral Perth, the building which Butterfield said was the one of which he was most proud that it demonstrated ‘chaste magnificence’ and that it was

A design in which grandeur came entirely from essentials, expressing nothing but an ‘absolute honesty of purpose.

And his last new church, St Augustin’s in Bournemouth, was

a poem written out of the mere assembly of the planes and shapes of a building in themselves, by one for whom the greatest poetry lay in the most useful and unpretending.

‘With witness I speak this’, having spent so much time during 45 years experiencing such a poem in architecture. It is wonderful that Butterfield’s achievements have been gathered together and celebrated in this richly rewarding book, written with such sensitivity, attentiveness and intelligence.

Photographs in the carousel below taken by James Morris, Daniel Owen, Finn Richards and others. Includes a photograph of the pre-Butterfield Chapel at St Columba’s (demolished 1879).