From Adam to Art Deco

One of my favourite places in London has ever been that facade along the Thames, on the North Bank, from roughly the east side of Hungerford Bridge to the west edge of Waterloo Bridge. I love walking along that esplanade, absorbing the jaunty, day-out-in-town atmosphere with other out and about people, and watching the boats weaving along the river. This atmosphere is helped, of course, by the glorious mix of classical and modernistic architecture on the built side of the road. And my favourite building of all is the Adelphi. Regular readers of this column will know my penchant for art deco and all that it encompasses. And this modernistic style owes its existence, in no small part, to the success and fame of Robert Adam, eighteenth-century practitioner of architecture and of the decorative arts. Though we associate art deco with modernism, the decorative friezes and moderate dimensions of the Adelphi are a nod to the Adam style.
Robert Adam was born in Edinburgh and in 1754, he set out on that requisite of every eighteenth-century gentleman, the Grand Tour of Europe. He gravitated naturally towards Italy where he met architects like Charles-Louis Clerisseau and Giovanni Piranesi, who practised in the wake of the excavation of Herculaneum. This was the sister-town to Pompeii, buried by ash and lava in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Robert was impressed by the simplicity of Roman architecture; the elegant interiors and striking wall paintings of the villas in carefully-planned streets. He returned to England in 1758 and together with his brothers, James and William, settled in London and established himself as an authority on neoclassical architecture and interiors.

From the word go, he was besieged by clients, both from the nouveau riche and the inner circle of the aristocracy, with commissions for interiors and buildings. In 1761, he gained a post as Architect to the King's Works. Classical proportioning is evident in the building at 7 Adam Street (a short distance from the Adelphi) in London, the rustications of the ground floor differentiated by blocks of cream-painted stone, with red brick reserved for the upper stories. The new Adam vocabulary eschewed the severity of the traditional Greek style, adding decorative elements in bas relief to the coursings running vertically and horizontally on the front of the building. Robert Adam had succeeded in creating a new vocabulary of architecture, while drawing from traditional sources. But it was with interiors that his firm really made its name.
The Adam interior is typified by delicacy and symmetry, unifying the rooms and echoing the classical dimensions of the house. Most particularly, Adam redefined the fireplace, with typical decorative coursings running the perimeters of the chimney place. By 1768, the Adam firm had begun their speculative scheme to build twenty-four 'first rate houses' on the north bank of Thames. But in the 1780’s, a national credit crisis put paid to the venture, and the brothers were forced to sell the plot to stave off bankruptcy. However, the Adelphi survives today in the form of the elegant art deco building on the original site. Art deco parallels the work of Adam in that it refers to ancient cultures, Mayan and Incan as opposed to Greek and Roman, and the resulting highly decorative surfaces are applied both inside and outside a building. The difference is that while Adam-style decoration makes much use of colour, art deco emerged for the electric age: witness the effects of light and shade playing upon upon the Adelphi monochrome surfaces. To appreciate the way from Adam to art deco, do take that walk along the North Bank.