The Palace of Westminster

Judged on plan, structure and purpose, and this is the lowest axis. The plan resists the subtractive test at its spine. Take away the Central Lobby and Lords and Commons have no common ground, nor the public a place to meet its members; take away the royal axis and the Crown cannot reach the Lords without passing the Commons; take away the division lobbies and the vote has no form, for a division is a walk through one door or the other. Westminster Hall is compelled by the site, the one great room the fire spared, and Barry made it the door. What holds the figure here is how much yields: a uniform panelling along the river front that says nothing of the rooms behind it, courts and passages that read as a warren grown rather than required, and ornament that could be halved without loss to use.

Score: 8.0 / 10

What can be stated, and holds: the constitution of a parliamentary monarchy laid out as a building. The sovereign enters at the south, robes, processes to a throne in the Lords and goes no further; the Commons sits at the far end of the same axis; the two chambers face each other down a line of open doors, with the public lobby between. The Commons is a room of facing benches, government and opposition, kept by choice and too small to seat every member. A second disclosure, less intended, is as true: a state newly reformed after 1832 dressed itself as medieval continuity. Held at the bar because the building shows power as it wished to be seen, Lords in gold and Commons in plain oak and green, and nothing of what it cost the governed.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The height is high and comes often, outside more than in. The river front seen from Westminster Bridge or from Lambeth across the water is a long horizontal rising to two unequal towers and a spire, its silhouette changing with every step along the bank, at dusk and in fog most of all. Inside, Westminster Hall entered from the street, its oak roof spanning the great room, is the first space of the public route; the Central Lobby is vaulted and lit from above; the House of Lords, gilt and red about the throne, is a splendour of the first rank. The register is grandeur and richness, never terror. It falls within: corridors, committee rooms and offices are most of the building, and much of what lifts is sustained richness of surface rather than transport.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One archetype is built: the realm in procession. The axis from the royal gate to the throne, and from the throne down the open doors to the people’s house, is laid for a rite, the State Opening, which the building enacts each year. A second is built by descent: the Commons had sat in St Stephen’s Chapel, and the new plan keeps the choir’s facing stalls and sets the old chapel’s site on the public’s way in, so that the assembly stands where worship stood. The Clock Tower is the city’s watch tower made the nation’s time. These are construction, and they stay particular: this river, this fire, these benches. Held below the gate because much of the charge is evoked rather than built: the Gothic as ancestral nation, Arthur in the Robing Room, kings in niches.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance: the classical public building of Georgian London, Soane’s additions to the old palace among them, and a Gothic Revival that had been picturesque and domestic, at Strawberry Hill and Fonthill, or ecclesiastical. The departure: Gothic for the largest secular building of the state, detailed with archaeological exactness in every room; a modern institution of hundreds of rooms, with iron roofs and mechanical ventilation, built entire in a medieval idiom; a symmetrical body under a deliberately unequal skyline. The stake was real: costs and years far past the estimate, long quarrels with the ventilator and the commissioners, Pugin worked to collapse. Held below the gate because the competition, not the makers, set the style, and because the plan is the classical tradition the elevation claims to leave. The turn is half made.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Substitute another form and parliamentary life is lived differently. The Commons as an oblong of facing benches, too small for its members, makes debate a confrontation across a floor and a full house a crush; a semicircle would make it an assembly of blocs, and the rebuilding of 1950 kept the oblong for that reason. A vote is lived as a walk through one of two lobbies, counted at the doors. The Central Lobby makes access a place: the citizen waits there to see a member. The royal axis makes the sovereign’s relation to Parliament a passage that stops at the Lords. Held below the top on two counts: the facing benches are inherited from St Stephen’s, kept rather than made, and the bulk of the building, its corridors and offices, is an awkward, ill-serviced workplace that its form does not illuminate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: some 180 years of return, and an open question at the centre. How the design divided between Barry and Pugin has been argued since Edward Pugin’s pamphlet of 1867 and the Barry family’s answer, and is argued still, most fully in Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect (2007). The building has yielded to architectural history, in M. H. Port’s The Houses of Parliament (1976); to the history of the fire and the campaign, in Caroline Shenton’s books; to constitutional reading of the plan; to the critique of invented tradition; and to painting, in Monet’s series from St Thomas’ Hospital, about 1900 to 1904. Pugin’s designs, in their thousands, are still being catalogued. Held lower because the questions concern authorship, history and politics more than form, and the river front holds less on return than the rooms behind it.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the building made Gothic a style of the modern state and of secular public building at the largest scale, carried an exact Perpendicular from the church to the nation, and fixed the clock tower as a civic emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach runs through the Gothic town halls of Victorian Britain; through parliament buildings that answered it, at Ottawa, by Fuller and Jones from 1859, and at Budapest, by Steindl from 1885 to 1904; and through the clock towers of the empire and beyond. It is bounded: the High Victorian Gothic that followed left the Perpendicular for Italian and French models, the Battle of the Styles was lost at the Foreign Office, and most legislatures of the century built domed classical capitols. In its own century’s Revival it is the summit and the emblem more than the turning point.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole and legible: river front, towers, axes and principal rooms are the makers’, and the building has outlived the Victorian state that built it as the image of parliamentary government. The use is continuous and in its own purpose since the 1840s, the strongest survival of use a building of its age can show, broken only when the Commons sat in the Lords from 1941 to 1950. Its presence is as wide as any building’s. Then the charges. The Commons chamber, the heart of the use, was destroyed in 1941 and rebuilt by another hand in a plainer idiom: the form kept, the makers’ room lost. The fabric is heavily renewed, the Anston stone decaying within decades and refaced since; many murals failed early; the services are near failure, and a renewal of the whole is in train.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of plan is of the first rank: a programme of hundreds of rooms resolved by two axes and a lobby, legible at its spine. The command of ornament is load-bearing in the principal rooms: Pugin’s Perpendicular carried without a lapse from the throne canopy to floor tile, wallpaper and door furniture, so that the House of Lords is a single made thing. The iron roofs met the danger that had destroyed the old palace. Denison’s clock set a standard for public timekeeping. The costs: the stone chosen by commission decayed within decades; Reid’s ventilation never worked as promised; the great bell cracked; the river front’s panelling is repetition, ornament applied by the yard. Command of the whole as design outran command of the building as a machine.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Herland’s oak roof over the eleventh-century walls of Westminster Hall, and Pugin’s gilt canopy over the throne in the Lords. One law reaches both: the Gothic of England, from its oldest surviving royal hall to its most worked fitting, and Barry made the Hall the first room of the new building so that the law runs from the eleventh century into the nineteenth. Pugin’s detail governs every surface, and the Commons in plain oak and the Lords in gold obey the same law in different registers, which is the law of rank. What bends it is the fact Pugin named: a symmetrical classical body under Tudor detail and a picturesque skyline, two laws laid over each other and joined by ornament rather than structure. Scott’s chamber holds the law in a quieter dialect.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Orders held, and placed by one plan. The state, in both Houses; the Crown, in its entrance, robing room and throne; the social order, Lords above and Commons apart, rank stated by finish; the sacred, in the undercroft chapel, in a chamber descended from a chapel and in the bishops who sit in the Lords; history, in the medieval Hall made the door, the programme of national history on the walls and the monarchs in their niches; law, in the Hall where the courts sat until 1882; death, in the lying in state; time, in the clock whose bell marks the nation’s hours; the city and the river. They are integrated along the axes, not listed. What holds the axis is what is absent or only represented: labour, the household, the body, the natural order beyond the river, and the governed themselves, who enter as visitors to a lobby.

Score: 8.4 / 10