ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY
Revival had been conceived, to Britain the degradation of machine-
produced applied art was due, to Britain the constructive reaction
against it. The domestic revival of Morris, Norman Shaw and
Voysey was British; British was the new social conception of a uni-
fied art under architectural guidance, and British the first achieve-
ments of design completely independent of the past. They are to be
found in the work of Arthur H. Mackmurdo's Century Guild about
1885 and then in that of Voysey and some architects influenced by
him, Baillie Scott, C. R. Ashbee and above all Charles Rennie
Mackintosh (1869-1928).
Art Nouveau, the first novel style on the Continent, and in fact
a style, it seems now, desperately set on being novel, drew its in-
spiration from English design. It started in Brussels in 1893 and had
by 1895 become the dernier cri amongst the young artists and archi-
tects of Germany, Austria and France. Of Continental buildings
designed between 1760 and the years of Art Nouveau not many
have so far been mentioned in this chapter. All that was of import-
ance either happened in Britain or could at least be followed just as
easily in Britain as abroad.
The position changed a few years before 1900. The stage reached
by Britain at that moment was one of truly contemporary design, but
of a free traditionalism (as against the earlier more pedantic His-
toricism) in architecture. The step that had to be taken to recover
a genuine style was that from Voysey's designs to buildings equally
bold. And die British character was (and is) all against such drastic
steps, so uncompromising an attitude, so logical a procedure. Thus
progress in Britain stopped for thirty years. Voysey's Tudor tra-
ditionalism was followed by a Wren and Georgian traditionalism,
equally pleasant in domestic architecture, but feeble if not painfully
inflated-looking in representational buildings.
The first private houses in which the new, original style of the
2oth century can be recognised are Frank Lloyd Wright's (born
1869), built in the nineties in the neighbourhood of Chicago. They
have the freely spreading ground plans, the interweaving of ex-
teriors and interiors by means of terraces and cantilevered roofs,
the opening up of one room into another, the predominant hori-
zontals, the long window bands that are familiar in to-day's houses.
Also at Chicago, and as early as the eighties and nineties, the first
buildings were erected withsteel skeletons (William Le BaronJenney:
'Home insurance Company, 1884-85) and facades not disguising
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