Slickworth House

Ickworth House, with its central rotunda and symmetrically curving wings is unusual amongst Palladian* buildings, although in other senses it is typical: its architecture revolves round a common core of geometrical elements - straight lines, isosceles triangles, cylinders (sometimes corrected to look like cylinders) circles, rectangles, right angles, spheres, golden proportions and the five orders. Above all Palladian architecture is obsessed with arranging these elements symmetrically, although as with its limited mathematical repertoire the symmetry of Palladian architecture is restricted to only a few axes of symmetry.

In my first childhood experiments with art I quickly mastered the depiction of simple mathematical shapes like boxes, cylinders, ellipses and the effects of perspective and shadow. I almost exclusively drew only those things like machines and buildings that can be drawn using this repertoire of geometrical constructions – vegetation, animals and people I found difficult and these remained beyond my powers for a long while, and even now I find them tricky. I have always connected with Palladian architecture primarily because it is so mathematically elemental. At Ickworth I spent a good while just staring down the stair well of the rotunda. With its layers of arches, stairs and portals created by reflecting the Roman arch it looked like something out of Esher. As a child I would have gone home got out my ruler and pencil and drawn this scene – and of course I could draw it because there was little it contained that could not be depicted using straight lines, and the mathematical repertoire I had at my disposal.

Although there is a beauty in the elemental perfection of Palladianism, its very perfection, in my opinion, prevents it from aging with grace. Part of the problem is that much of it is just show: rendering scored to look like stone falls off to reveal relatively coarse brickwork. Subsidence, cracks and 'imperfections' in the rendering stand out as gross anomalies amid mathematical precision. This reified platonic universe of ideal forms is easily disrupted by a world in change and decay and these show up Palladianism for what it is: a toy town world of very basic mathematics.

Grime also looks out of place set against the purity of the platonic. At Ickworth the curving facade of the wings were time stained and they reminded me of the discolored forbidding concrete facades of ugly modern buildings. The aleatory processes of staining were incongruous against the simple mathematical elegance of a facade best seen when the rendering is clean and crisp. Notice also my picture of the rotunda. I quite unintentionally composed the picture slightly askew and asymmetrically and to my eye this jars against the line of a building that demands symmetry and perpendicularity.

Late in the afternoon I left the world of Ickworth where all was (ostensively) mathematical harmony, peace and stillness to be confronted the very next day with the frenetic chaos of the Old Castle (where I work cleaning) as it suffered the denuding dangers of flash floods. A staircase became a noisy turbulent weir, a low-lying wall sprung a ground water leak through bubbled friable plaster, and there was the aftermath of mud and silt. This was the real world. Palladianism is often identified with an intellectual unemotional outlook and aggrandized as an apotheosis of reason. But in a sense it is the outlook of the child in development, the child who is beginning to grasp some elementary mathematical tools. But it mustn’t end there. That child must learn to put those elementary pieces together into fantastically complex forms in order to render the real world and to move on from toy town Palladianism. My experience in the Old Castle of a frenetic confusion, a sense of hopelessness that gropes for faith in the face of complex forces and objects is far more true to life. This was the real “high tech” world of a created order where one’s mathematics hardly feels up to the task of depiction. The juxtaposition of these two very different experiences at two very different stately buildings on two consecutive days couldn’t have been more eloquently symbolic.

* Palladian? I wrote this before I discovered from one authority that the Palladian period ended in the 1760s, about 30 years before Ickworth was built.