THE NEW BUILDING TYPES OF THE I9TH CENTURY
unheeded—or at least undiscussed. Even to-day in such cases as the
British Museum and the Houses of Parliament people think much
too much of aesthetics and too little of function. Yet it should not
be forgotten that to build a palace for democratic government
and a palace for the instruction of the people was equally new. In
fact to erect public buildings, specially designed as such, had been
extremely rare before 1800. There were town halls of course, and
London had the Royal Exchange. Somerset House also had been
intended for Government offices and learned societies from the
beginning. But these were exceptions. If one takes the ipth century
on the other hand, and tries to pick out the best examples of town
architecture of all dates and all countries, a number of churches will
have to be included, palaces rarely, private houses of course; but the
vast majority of what one would collect are Governmental, muni-
cipal and later private office buildings, museums, galleries, libraries,
universities and schools, theatres and concert halls, banks and ex-
changes, railway stations, department stores, hotels and hospitals,
i.e. all buildings erected not for worship nor for luxury, but for the
benefit and the daily use of the people, as represented by various
groups of citizens. In. thisanewsocial function of architecture appears,
representative of a new stratification of society. But the work in
evolving plan forms for these new uses was more often than not
anonymous, or at least appears so to us. The Renaissance library
had been a hall of two or three aisles. The Renaissance hospital had
been almost exactly identical in plan. Both came without essential
modifications, from the monastic buildings of the Middle Ages.
Now schemes were worked out for special library stores with
stacking apparatus. For hospitals systems were tried of groups of
separate wards and separate buildings for each kind of disease. For
prisons the star-plan was invented (Pentonville) and accepted. For
banks and exchanges the glass-covered centre hall or court proved
the most serviceable solution. For museums and galleries a specially
good system of lighting was essential, for office buildings the most
flexible ground plan. And so every new type of building required its
own treatment.
But the academician architects were too busy with new trim-
mings for facades to notice much of all that. When the struggle
between Classicists and Gothicists began to subside, other styles
took their pkce. In the mediaeval field the generations before Pugin
had been all for Perpendicular. To Pugin and those who followed
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