The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [122]
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention, and for a time no one had more of both than Robert Adam. If Vanbrugh was the first celebrity architect, Adam was the greatest. Born in 1728 in Scotland, the son of an architect, he was one of a quartet of brothers who all became successful architects, though Robert was the undoubted genius of the family and the one remembered by history. The period from 1755 to 1785 is sometimes called the Age of Adam.
A painting of Adam in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made in about 1770 when he was in his early forties, shows a kindly looking man in a powdered gray wig, but in fact Adam was not a particularly adorable fellow. Arrogant and egotistical, he treated his employees poorly, paying them little and keeping them in a kind of perpetual servitude. He fined them severely if they were caught doing any work other than for him, even a sketch for their own amusement. Adam’s clients, however, venerated his abilities and for thirty years simply couldn’t give him enough work. The Adam brothers became a kind of architectural industry. They owned quarries, a timber business, brickworks, a company for making stucco, and much else. At one point they employed two thousand people. They designed not just houses but every object within them—furniture, fireplaces, carpets, beds, lamps, and all else down to incidental objects like doorknobs, bell pulls, and inkstands.
Adam’s designs were intense—sometimes overwhelming—and gradually he fell out of favor. He had an inescapable weakness for overdecoration. To walk into an Adam room is rather like walking into a large, overfrosted cake. Indeed one of his contemporary critics called him “a Pastry Cook.” By the late 1780s, Adam was being denounced as “sugary and effeminate” and had fallen so far out of fashion that he retreated to his native Scotland, where he died in 1792. By 1831, he was so thoroughly forgotten that the influential Lives of the Most Eminent British Architects didn’t mention him at all. The banishment didn’t last terribly long, however. By the 1860s, his reputation was undergoing a revival, which continues now, though these days he is remembered more for his rich interiors than for his architecture.
The one thing all buildings had in common through Adam’s day was a rigorous devotion to symmetry. Vanbrugh, to be sure, didn’t entirely achieve symmetry at Castle Howard, but that was largely accidental. Elsewhere, however, symmetry was adhered to as an immutable law of design. Every wing had to have a matching wing, whether it was needed or not, and every window and pediment to one side of the main entrance had to be exactly mirrored by windows and pediments on the other side regardless of what went on behind them. The result often was the building of wings that no one really wanted. Not until the nineteenth century did this absurdity begin to end, and it was a remarkable property in Wiltshire—one of the most extraordinary ever built—that started the process.
It was called Fonthill Abbey, and it was the creation of two strange and fascinating men: William Beckford and the architect James Wyatt. Beckford was fabulously rich. His family owned plantations all across Jamaica and had dominated the West Indian sugar trade for a hundred years. Beckford’s doting mother made sure her son enjoyed every advantage in his upbringing. The eight-year-old Wolfgang Mozart was brought in to give him piano lessons. Sir William Chambers, the king’s architect, taught him to draw. Beckford’s wealth was so inexhaustibly great