Frere Hall and The Gothic Revival in Karachi
At the start of the nineteenth century, the British Raj’s political project had entered a new age of architectural development in India. The renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1813 meant that licensed missionaries could begin traveling to India, and newly erected symbols of Christianity, such as the church tower and spire, could command the skylines of cities such as Karachi, Bombay, and Calcutta.[Lari, The Dual City, 2001] The rise of the Gothic style in England in the 1830s under the encouragement of Augustus Welby Pugin meant that impressive and ‘honest’ Gothic architecture, with its deep ties to Christian values, was considered as the primary architecture that should be used by the Subcontinent’s rulers. The construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral of Calcutta in 1840 and the Afghan Memorial Church of Bombay in 1847 was only the start of introducing a new architectural vocabulary foreign to the Subcontinent.[Lari, The Dual City, 2001]
Against this backdrop, the construction of Frere Hall, Karachi’s first Indo Gothic building, stands out. As a landmark of Karachi’s predominately white, Civil Lines Quarter, Frere Hall served as a tribute to commemorate the service of Henry Bartle Frere, the Chief Commissioner of Sindh. Significantly, it was a building not for religious but for civic use, and the building accommodated Karachi’s first ‘public’ library.[Lari, The Dual City, 2001] The selection committee eventually selected Henry St. Clair Wilkins’s Frere Hall design from twelve contest entries. Wilkins was considered one of Bombay’s most accomplished military engineer-architects and was from the Public Works Department’s executive ranks.[Scriver and Srivastava, “Rationalization: The Call to Order, 1855–1900,”] For his designs, Wilkins adopted the Venetian-Gothic style. Considered the “most Oriental of all Italian styles,”[Chopra and Chopra, Monuments of the Raj] the type was also thought to be the most climatologically rational. Like the Old Secretariat of Bombay, later designed by Wilkins in 1867, several concessions had been made to suit the tropical climate such as the “deep arcaded verandahs”[Chopra and Chopra, Monuments of the Raj] that serve as a buffer between the interior and exterior. Development for Frere Hall finally began in 1865 and coincided with the construction of George Gilbert Scott’s St. Pancras Station and Hotel in London in the late 1860s.
Materials from near and far were collected for the construction of Frere Hall. Yellow stone was brought from nearby Gizri Hill, red and grey stone from Jungshahi town in the east, and white Oolite limestone by train from Bohlari ninety-seven miles far[Lari, The Dual City, 2001]. The polychromatic stones in yellow, red, white, and grey give the facade’s voussoirs and roundels a multicolored effect. Above the Venetian style pointed arches in the verandah and balcony on all four faces, one can observe quatrefoils decorated with checkered colored stones that are white and grey on the ground floor and red and white on the first story. The short columns in the verandah resembling Corinthian columns are adorned with trefoil ball-flowers.
From the south facade, the central rose window and octagonal tower are visible. The solitary tower features soaring lancet windows and a crown of trefoils with impressive yet restrained triangular geometric carvings. From the east and west elevations, there is also a clear view of the spirelet crowned with ‘Muntz metal’ similar to the octagonal tower. The steep roof is made of a clay tile covering and corrugated iron and formerly featured triangular dormer windows. These distinctive windows were removed after restorations of the hall in the 1970s.[Lari, The Dual City, 2001]
The eastern facade of Frere Hall features a flat-roofed, extended portico with both round and pointed arches. Above these, grey and white arches are repetitive wall carvings, a string course, and more quatrefoils. This rectangular entrance is open from three sides and leads to a narrower wooden staircase that leads to the hall’s inside. From the inside, a wooden double staircase leads to the main gallery hall, and ample light enters from the first story balcony, windows, and the quatrefoil roundels on the facade. Roshandans and quatrefoils decorated in stained glass adorn the tall, wooden arched doorways outside the interior hall and permit light to enter. The main hall is a long rectangular space with an elevated ceiling attached to a smaller hall. Smaller rooms for Frere Hall administrators and maintenance workers flank the central hall and are connected to the exterior wall. In addition to the central gallery, the public library is on the ground floor and hosts an impressive newspaper archive.
Ten years before the construction of Frere Hall, the British were constructing another secular building in the Venetian Gothic style, the Oxford Museum of Natural History by Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward. Both buildings are dressed in an architectural style with symbolic and religious origins and are public spaces with secular uses. The Deane and Woodward building’s buff-colored exterior walls are made of Calp limestone [Jackson. “A Victorian Landmark Trinity College’s Museum Building.” Irish Arts Review Yearbook] and are reminiscent of the exterior of Frere Hall. Additionally, the alternating use of red and yellow blocks above the arches create a multi-colored effect similar to Wilson’s design in Karachi. While Frere Hall emphasized verticality in its design, with its soaring octagonal tower and spirelet, the Oxford Museum has a clear sense of horizontality, order, and repetition. Another similarity can be seen in the array of dormer windows that line the museum’s steep roof.
Perhaps the museum’s most visually impressive aspect is the glass and iron-framed interior court[Bremner, “Littlemore Church,” Victorian Review 39, no. 1] and roof, a clear exhibition of Ruskinian ideas on architecture. Patrick Jackson writes that a “comparison of details such as the wall plaques and the windows with illustrations in Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851) and in the British journal The Builder (1851) show remarkable similarity.”[Jackson. “A Victorian Landmark Trinity College’s Museum Building.” Irish Arts Review Yearbook] For the architectural theorist John Ruskin (1819–1900), “Gothic ornament in particular was supposed to bear the imprint of individual impulse while relating to collective inspiration.”[Picon, “Learning From Utopia,” Journal of Architectural Education 67, no. 1] Dean and Woodward’s innovative combination of the cast and wrought iron structure and handmade stone carvings reflect this unique balance between individual creative effort and “collective means of production.”[Picon, “Learning From Utopia,” Journal of Architectural Education 67, no. 1] Various polished stones across the British Isles were used to construct the museum interior hall’s thirty columns.[Oxford University Museum of Natural History, “The Stonework of the Museum,”] Each of these columns is made with different decorative rock and is labeled with educational details regarding the stone’s geological origins, reflecting Ruskin’s idea that materials should be honest and “truthful.” The Ruskinian architects used Caen stone for the interior walls, a recommendation given by Ruskin himself in his Seven Lamps of Architecture.[Jackson. “A Victorian Landmark Trinity College’s Museum Building.” Irish Arts Review Yearbook 11] Besides the impressive variety of materials, there is also variety in design as the capitals and corbels are carved with different plants that represent all the botanical orders.
Ruskin considered Gothic architecture to be emblematic of a morally functioning society and was critical of contemporary architecture at the time for the dehumanizing exploitation of working people under industrialization. However, the ideals that claimed Gothic architecture could be used as a force for good within society are incongruous with the construction and social context behind Frere Hall and other Indo-Gothic buildings that excluded native populations in the Subcontinent. The British Raj’s conception of the public realm in the nineteenth century did not include Karachi’s local people when imagining a prosperous and harmonious society. Architect and conservationist Yasmeen Lari writes that “the organization and structure of the city had been devised to ensure segregation.”[Lari, The Dual City, 2001] She continues that “as the twentieth century dawned, the extent of discrimination was such that Indians were not allowed to share space with the British in trains, steamers, hotels, clubs, travelers’ bungalows nor even on the streets.”[Lari, The Dual City, 2001] As Karachi ‘developed’ and expanded, segregation was embedded in the organization of infrastructure and the distribution of technology. The Civil and Staff lines, where Frere Hall is located, were cantonments in which sparsely populated English families lived on large plots “with sufficient manual labor to ensure hygienic conditions even in the absence of an underground sewage system.”[Lari, The Dual City, 2001]
Frere Hall is a symbolic expression of colonial rule and celebration for a man who once said about India that “to be ruled by England was her destiny.”[Lari, The Dual City, 2001] While it was once an exclusive space reserved only for the white sahibs, fortunately, today, Frere Hall serves as a hopeful, optimistic model of what public spaces in Karachi could become. It is an accessible public building that has not just maintained but broadened its initial programmatic mission.
Bibliography:
Bremner, G. A. “Littlemore Church.” Victorian Review 39, no. 1 (2013): 18–22. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2013.0001.
Chopra, Pran Nath., and Prabha Chopra. In Monuments of the Raj: (British Buildings in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Srilanka and Myanmar), 27. New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 1999.
Chrimes, Michael Mark. “Architectural Dilettantes: Construction Professionals in British India 1600–1910. Part 2. 1860–1910: The Advent of the Professional.” Construction History 31, no. 1 (2016): 99–140. Accessed September 25, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26489022.
Lari, Yasmeen, and Mihail S. Lari. The Dual City: Karachi during the Raj. Karachi: Heritage Foundation, 2001.
Picon, Antoine. “Learning From Utopia.” Journal of Architectural Education 67, no. 1 (2013): 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2013.767120.
Scriver, Peter, and Amit Srivastava. “Rationalization: The Call to Order, 1855–1900.” Essay. In India, 43–44. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.
