Architecture
Lutyens rediscovered
Gavin Stamp
'Who is this guy?' was the surprised but understandable reaction of a visitor to the Museum of Modern Art in New York who, blundering past Guernica and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, found himself confronted by photographs of the Midland Bank in Poultry and Viceroy's House in New Delhi.
Perhaps he should not have been so surprised — except, possibly, by the stunning quality of the architecture — as in recent years the Museum has shown itself to be truly avant-garde by transcending the Avant-Garde. First Arthur Drexler shocked the American architectural establishment — still then worshipping at the shrines of Mies and Gropius — by presenting the accomplished classical renderings of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which once had such a profound influence on American architecture. Now he has allowed the architect Allan Greenberg to mount an exhibition about a great English traditionalist: Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The surprise is, perhaps, that this is happening in the United States, but the time is ripe. Architects now vie with each other in their rejection of the old orthodoxy, which now seems so sterile and destructive, and they are permitted to explore again the rich architectural vocabulary current in Europe and America before International Modern became so firmly established. Post-Modern architects may look for inspiration to the Arts & Crafts, early Wright, Beaux-Arts Classicism — and Lutyens.
'Post Modernism' was much in evidence in Washington recently. A dinner at the British Embassy to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of Lutyens's only American building was held by Peter Jay, for which imaginative gesture almost all must be forgiven (even the Modern British Art on the Embassy walls, which is intended as an advertisement for this country). Jay confessed to loving the building, 'despite its pomp and inconvenience' (in fact, Lutyens struck precisely the right note of necessary grandeur and, as always, knew how to plan for living and entertaining).
The most remarkable aspect of the evening was the public confessions by two pillars of the old-guard avant-garde. In front of an audience of VIPs, critics and the cream of the architectural profession — including Robert Venturi and Robert Stern — Philip Johnson, disciple of Mies van der Rohe and doyen of American architects, announced sua culpa, sua maxima culpa with characteristic wit and brilliance. His generation, he explained (echoing Watkin?), were consumed with 'the insufferable horror of arrogant morality' and were blind to the richness and subtlety of the architecture of men like Lutyens, men who, for better or worse, 'sat out on Modern Architecture — and I sat out on Lutyens'.
Now Johnson is 'a convert . . . a new Lutyens fan;' he analysed the qualities of Lut's Embassy and then praised New Delhi by saying 'I can't name a Palace as good as that.' (Such praise from a perceptive modern architect should not occasion surprise: Lutyens was about the only contemporary in whom that supreme individualist Frank Lloyd Wright was at all interested, and even steel-rimmed and totalitarian Le Corbusier could speak of the 'extreme care, great talent and . . . true success of New Delhi' — all the more evident, perhaps, in comparison with Chandigarh.) Nor, it must be said, is Johnson's Post Modernism confined to words: his design, for the 'Chippendale Building' recently amazed New York by its Classical details and return to the logic of the old Skyscraper Style.
Philip Johnson was followed by our own Sir Hugh Casson, who, although he could not go quite as far in stating that 'Modern Architecture is totally humourless,' was nevertheless able to confess about his own youthful opinion of Lutyens: 'Young architects in all periods tend to be prigs —old ones too —scratch a young architect and you will find a Boy Scout with a power complex — we were the prisoners of our ignorance and of our prejudices;' so that Lutyens during the three decades since his death, has been ignored when not despised; the humane and satisfying architecture he strove for, regarded as an immoral irrelevance. And what of Delhi for Sir Hugh? 'One of the wonders of the world'.
What is astonishing is that the long overdue re-assessment of the man who has been described as the greatest British architect should be happening in America. The exhibition in New York may be small — consisting of fine large photographs of ravishing country houses (before Folly Farm one woman just repeated 'why can't I have a house like this?') and the later monuments in his Classical or 'Elemental Mode' such as New Delhi and the war memorials— but it is a beginning.
But what is England doing? Lutyens's Centenary in 1969 was too early and a flop, but now the Modern Movement is on the run. Popular rejection of its public aspects is .clear enough, as regular readers of Christopher Booker's articles in this journal will know, and for architectural students Lutyens is decidedly the hero. Sir Hugh Casson has agreed that the Royal Academy should be the venue of the long-overdue major exhibition which he deserves, but one may doubt whether the art establishment in this country has ever heard of him, as that principal dispenser of patronage today, the Arts Council, seems still to worship the old Modern gods. This may be the result of years of propaganda which simply excluded Lutyens from all histories of the 20th century on the grounds that, in about 1905, he went off the rails and did not employ the style of Our Day and Age. It may also be because, as Casson perceptively observed, 'the English are never at ease with great monuments'. But the public love country houses, if left cold by war memorials and banks, and all the signs indicate that a new generation of architects agrees with the youngest of the old, Philip Johnson, that `today, Lutyens represents everything we find delightful'.
Act and guilt
In Hans Keller's review of Anthony Kenny's Freewill and Responsibility last week the italicised words were dropped from the following sentence: Dr Kenny, however, doesn't cater for my realistic interests at all: the conventional categorization of punishment is enough for him, so that he never comes to consider protective punishment — custodial punishment's protection of the citizen.
We apolpgize for this unfortunate omission.
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