What is pastiche?

[plasticpigeon]

Flyfishers post get me thinking about this. I find myself getting frustrated when people (usually architects) call any new building that tries to look old a pastiche. I understand that in Flyfishers case that as the house has evolved so much, it wouldn't seem correct to ape any particular style, and a modern addition is probably the most appropriate. However it must be possible for a new construction to be well designed and well built but in a style of years gone by, and still have merit and integrity. I'm sure that whether something is pastiche or not is down to quality of design. I think for example there is nothing worse than new builds with square casement windows with mock sash horns or mdf four panel doors, but some new builds can look very pleasing even when just copying an older style.

This is particularly close to my heart at the mo as there is a collection of Edwardian church buildings near me (2 halls and a church. One hall and church are grade II listed and the other hall is only locally listed. The Church wants to demolish one hall (which was designed by the same architect as the main church and fits in well on the site) as they say it is not big enough and also has only one large room and they think they can rent out rooms more easily if they are smaller. The community generally likes the building and would rather not see it go, but the biggest objection was to the proposed new building which looked totally out of place. In this instance if the old building is demolished, I would like to see a mock Edwardian building in its place to fit in. What do other people think.

I will also put up some pictures of two new developments near me which are within about 50 yards of each other. I will be interested to see which design people prefer. One is a pretty good copy of large Victorian semi detached houses but is actually 4 or even 6 houses per block. The other is modern housing which is badly designed but makes no attempts at being period.

 

[Lime]

The term pastiche is usually used in either a patronising or a derogatory sense and often both particularly by the pompous IME.
I think there is a lot to be said for copying as accurately as possible any method of building that has stood the test of time when adding to or repairing old buildings.
However the last 75 years has produced nothing of significance or value for old buildings except a mixture of cost-cutting and materials designed for speed rather than longevity.

 

[JoceAndChris]

1.
a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.
2.
an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge.

Architects refer to the second usage I think. They get upset by buildings that try to be in the styles of the past, but get the details very wrong, using poor materials for example, or making mockery of classical order with great chunky columns or pilasters, or forgetting there really ought to be a good decent space above window and roof for the correct entablature (architrave, frieze and cornice). To anyone with a trained eye, looking at the new "Georgian" housing estates is like looking at a not very serious stab at fancy dress, the idea is there but the detail, construction and material of the building is entirely wrong and a bit silly.

Long ago, as we all know, tradesmen could be afforded by the wealthy, labour was cheap - leading to great delicacy, laboriousness, intricacy, and exquisiteness of design. These days the opposite is true, as we who seek to replicate some of our lost features find out all too painfully. Tradesmen are simpletons compared to the tradesmen of the past, design is dumbed down, clunky, simplistic and off the peg. Gone are the trompe l'oeil artists who studied in Italy for 7 years under great masters of the craft, the disciples of Grinling Gibbons, who gave such vivid form to wood, the great stonemasons who enlivened the facade with festoons and crocketting, balustrades and consoles and Corinthian columns and and... Perhaps not entirely gone if you have many millions - but pretty much all gone for the middle classes.

This means that to execute a really authentic period design is almost impossible - it can only be pastiche and many think modern architecture has more integrity than the half-hearted efforts we see on our streets today.

Having said all that there have been and will be great architects who create beautiful buildings that draw on other styles, I'd cite Sir Clough Williams Ellis, no longer with us sadly, and Portmeirion, as the finest example you'll see.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

I can't add much to what Joce has said above. Perhaps a couple of photos? Both pastiche "townscapes" recently created as part of large housing developments. While neither is the worst example I could have chosen, I would suggest that one - I won't say which - is far worse than the other, in terms of proportions, detail, materials, consistency of design approach and a hundred and one other things. Unfortunately that example also represents the better-than-average mainstream of pastiche development today. It is, in fact, a misinterpreted pastiche of the other example, claiming direct influence from it and indeed involving a lot of the same people but not the same dogmatic controlling hand.

 

[Lime]

Wot?
They've got trees in the road!

 

[plasticpigeon]

Hello Gareth, Thanks for posting the pictures. I really would like to lean more about architecture. I may be made to look a fool here, but to me the lower picture shows a more attractive scene. I have an idea that it might be Poundbury. I've never been there but would like to go, as I'm interested in that sort of thing. I don't know about the upper one. I think it is the cluttered street as much as anything that detracts. The buildings are quite grand but obviously houses or apartments. Somehow it looks a bit American. It still doesn't look too bad to me really though. Near me is Dickens Heath, a very similar idea, but executed much more poorly, with really no attention to detail at all.

However, pastiche is a very derogatory term, and I must ask, why is particularly the lower picture here a pastiche. Can it not actually be a good way to build an attractive town. Just because it is a recreation of something old, why pastiche? If the design is of high quality and the buildings and the town a successful layout I can't see that it is a hodgepodge or a collection of elements from various sources from the past, but surely a well designed concept that makes a harmonious whole.

After the above examples here are 2 much more mundane examples of reasonably affordable housing near me. They have just been built and are only about 50 metres from each other. I would say one makes an attempt to fit in with what is around it (although the details are not all great, particularly the doors) and the other is just plain bad. The asking price is the same for both and they are both 4 bed newbuilds. In this case I am saying I prefer the "pastiche" to the other style which although it has bay windows and similar gables probably can't be attributed to much other than cost cutting. However it could be that in my part of the world I have become so accustomed to grim street scenes that I am just thankful for small mercies.

The old house is what the new ones should have been like!

 

[Gareth Hughes]

PP- I think your photos demonstrate precisely the problem of trying to do pastiche without the budget (not just financially, but in terms of effort of thought). The bottom pic shows a pretty nasty pair of buildings which loosely echo their neighbours, I wouldn't say they were pastiche as such, but they are hampered by a silly desire to "break them up" with different materials, gables, etc. The middle picture is pastiche, well-meant no doubt, but they must suffer more by comparison with their "real" neighbours when you notice the poor quality of the detailing, and the awful reclaimed bricks blotched with mortar and paint, giving an overall impression that is almost comically at odds with what it's pretending to be.

My lower pic is indeed Poundbury, and having gone expecting to loathe its tweeness (having had some involvement with it in its early stages, and with Dickens Heath too) I was pleasantly surprised - everyone should go and look at it, closely. On the whole it's pretty good pastiche, and the bits that aren't (which aren't necessarily the cheaper parts) stand out in comparison. The upper pic is Upton on the edge of Northampton, which is supposed to be a "rolling out" of Poundbury principles but which, for me, fails in all sorts of ways - a bleak and dismal public realm, random variety creating the the impression of an architectural zoo, a "High Street" which has been built as entirely residential with the "potential" to be converted to retail and other uses but which will never happen as the residents have already developed the habit of driving to the supermarket round the corner (Poundbury has avoided this by artificial economics in which commercial uses arrive paying heavily subsidised rents for the first few years until the habit of walking to the local shop has developed), and buildings in historical styles whose original models simply haven't been studied closely enough.

Poundbury, unfortunately, has been a very bad influence (just as successful developments of the past have always ended up been degraded by poor imitators) - taken as a whole - the masterplanning, the way traffic and parking, pedestrian and cycle movement, the economics of mixed uses, the integration of even pretty serious industrial uses, and the architecture - it can be counted a reasonable success (it's still a bit of a middle-class ghetto, and the roads leading into it from the existing estates on the edge of Dorchester are mostly blocked by bollards at the insistence of the residents of those existing estates, and the loose gravel paths are a total disaster). But, it gets praised as a success, people go and look at it and what they see first of all is the large areas of red brick, render and sash windows, and without taking away with them any of the many other lessons which have to be learnt together to recreate its success, they apply red brick, render and sash windows to slightly varied existing standard house types, on residential-only estates of culs de sac with layouts, parking and transport all dictated by tick-box highways engineers, and expect them to be a success. Even worse, they claim these poor imitations as being based "on Poundbury principles", which they manifestly aren't.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Gareth (and Joce) - thanks. That's most I've learned all week.

Ain't PPUK great?

 

[JoceAndChris]

Oh, I just pick up a few crumbs from the great feast within Gareth's brains. And I learn loads and loads about current affairs from your wonderful posts Robin, so yes, I'd agree with you about the value of this resource.

Good to read that post of Gareth's though, to clarify and confirm things we've all discussed before. Particularly I'd forgotten the crucial thing that makes or breaks the building - the setting and relationship with other elements.

I do like the look of Poundbury and if I couldn't have a period property I'd sooner live there than a modern looking housing estate of any kind.

 

[88v8]

This pub in Chertsey, near to where I formerly lived, was built in errrm, late 1990s(?) Some of the detailing, the bricks, lets it down, but the roof line, the 'sagging' ridge, are well done and avoid the level, straight, flat, plumb, effect which makes most new build blatantly new, whatever the efforts towards sympathetic material etc. Seen in the flesh it's an excellent effort.
Pastiche, yes, but like the buildings of Poundbury it does not jar.
http://www.vintageinn.co.uk/thekingfisherchertsey/gallery/

Went today to Torquay. There and en route saw so many buildings ruined by the crass insertion of plastic windows. It pains me to walk through what should be an old town, I have to try not to look. At least a new pastiche will still have its architectural elements intact, although doubtless future generations will find ways of spoiling them. One must never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.

Ivor

 

[Gareth Hughes]

Except that the Kingfisher in Chertsey is identical (give or take a few pantiles) to a pub I've passed a few times going out of Norwich, and to one I saw near Northampton on the Upton trip...

 

[88v8]

Except that the Kingfisher in Chertsey is identical (give or take a few pantiles) to a pub I've passed a few times going out of Norwich, and to one I saw near Northampton on the Upton trip...

Excellent! I'm glad it's not just grot which is endlessly reproduced.

Ivor

 

[Gareth Hughes]

This pub in Chertsey, near to where I formerly lived, was built in errrm, late 1990s(?) Some of the detailing, the bricks, lets it down, but the roof line, the 'sagging' ridge, are well done and avoid the level, straight, flat, plumb, effect which makes most new build blatantly new, whatever the efforts towards sympathetic material etc. Seen in the flesh it's an excellent effort.

Re-reading that, I'm reminded of the chapter "Spinlove's Special Roof" in the funniest book ever written (albeit 85 years ago) about the practice of architecture, "The Honeywood File", by H B Creswell. If anyone on here hasn't heard of it, or read it several times over, then shame on you. (It even has a long-running saga about a "new novelty super-paint" which should strike painful notes of recognition).
For those wanting an perfect architectural history without tears, Osbert Lancaster's "Cartoon Hostory of Architecture".

 

[LadyArowana]

Thankyou Gareth, fascinating, but I always thought these were pastiche

OK, getting my coat now.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Is this pastiche?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19349921

:lol:

 

[CliffordPope]

No, that's much better than pastche, it's brilliance!
Serves them right for letting it deteriorate.

Interesting question: supposing a famous artist had done it, deliberately in an amateurish style, perhaps to make a point about the slavish worship of second rate art. What if Picasso had desecrated the painting, and it was now worth £1m ? Would the authorities be so keen to "restore" it?

 

[Lime]

The word pastiche is given such a wide meaning.
That is a problem for me.

For some people it is a matter of honesty.
These people appear to be unable to accept a new building that looks anything like a building from the past no matter how well presented and constructed.
I have some sympathy for that view.
However, some old structures that have been cared for throughout their history are like George Washington's axe.
And yet again some were rebuilt not so long ago but it is convenient to forget the fact.
Most of Europe's "historic" buildings fall into that category as well as the biscuit tin's favourite castle, Eilean Donan.

Then there are those that give the same accolade of pastiche to new-builds that are mocking lego-like vague memories of former styles when the description "a mess of pottage" is far more apt.

It is all very confusing.

 

[88v8]

This pub in Chertsey, near to where I formerly lived, was built in errrm, late 1990s(?) Some of the detailing, the bricks, lets it down, but the roof line, the 'sagging' ridge, are well done and avoid the level, straight, flat, plumb, effect which makes most new build blatantly new, whatever the efforts towards sympathetic material etc. Seen in the flesh it's an excellent effort.

Re-reading that, I'm reminded of the chapter "Spinlove's Special Roof" in the funniest book ever written (albeit 85 years ago) about the practice of architecture, "The Honeywood File", by H B Creswell. For those wanting an perfect architectural history without tears, Osbert Lancaster's "Cartoon Hostory of Architecture".

Never heard of these, but eBay yielded both, thankyou. Tbh, the last thing we need is more books, will have to hide them from SWMBO.

Perhaps wonkiness can be carried to extremes, but unless the greatest vigilance is exercised during constrruction, any modern addition no matter how 'sensitive' will immediately condemn itself - in my eyes - by its flatness, squareness, levelness, plumbness... is that a word.... and the ghastly glitter of its float glass.

Talking of overdoing things, is this the origin of 'listed building'?

 

[Lime]

It looks as if it is a leftover from a tsunami.

 

[Flyfisher]

Perhaps wonkiness can be carried to extremes, but unless the greatest vigilance is exercised during constrruction, any modern addition no matter how 'sensitive' will immediately condemn itself - in my eyes - by its flatness, squareness, levelness, plumbness... is that a word.... and the ghastly glitter of its float glass.

But how many of our revered old wonky houses were built that way? No self respecting craftsman would have built a house with leaning timbers, sloping floors and a wonky roof. Our stock of historic wonky houses are the result of time - something that can't genuinely be added to new builds.

Lime makes a good point about 'pastiche' having many meanings (or, at least, being used in many ways) but deliberately building a wonky house would be a good definition for me, even more so if built from reclaimed materials.

That's not to be derogatory; these things are personal choice and aesthetic judgements, so there are no absolute rights or wrongs - except if such things are done fraudulently. It's largely about fashion isn't it? Like 'Georgian' electrical fittings.