Ideal English taste
John Martin Robinson
EDWIN LUTYENS: COUNTRY HOUSES by Gavin Stamp Aururn, £35, pp. 192, ISBN 1854107631 For over a 100 years Country Life has published weekly articles on English buildings, especially country houses, and in the process has built up a library of some of the most accomplished architectural photographs ever taken. In recent years a series of volumes has been published, drawing on selections of these pictures. This, the latest volume, is devoted to the domestic work of Sir Edwin Lutyens with illustrations of 22 of his houses, representing all phases of his career. The pictures, frozen at a perfect moment, are works of art in themselves. The visual result is an updated and extended version of the Country Life book Houses and Gardens by E. L. Lutyens written by Lawrence Weaver in 1913.
This book is a highly appropriate addition to the series, as no architect has ever had a closer relationship with a magazine than Edwin Lutyens had with Country Life. Lutyens was introduced to the magazine's founder Edward Hudson by the garden designer (and Lutyens' collaborator) Gertrude Jekyll in 1889. Hudson, thereafter, did all he could to promote the architect's career, commissioning the magazine's offices from him in Covent Garden and three country houses for himself, as well as recording nearly all this architect's new buildings at the time of their completion.
What makes this book particularly valuable, however, is the brilliant introductory essay on Lutyens' houses by Gavin Stamp, which sets Lutyens in context and gives equal emphasis to the architect's dual achievements as an extender of the vernacular tradition and renewer of the classical language of architecture. Stamp quotes Christopher Hussey's assessment:
The genius of Lutyens was a legend that dawned on the early Edwardians, had become a portent before the first world war, and remained a fixed star in the architectural firmament, despite the rising of the constellation of Le Corbusier, until his death on New Year's Day 1944 ... In his lifetime he was widely held to be our greatest architect since Wren if not, as many maintained, his superior.
Stamp accepts this assessment and certainly places Lutyens in the trinity of late 19th-century and early 20th-century domestic architects alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh: close contemporaries who were each born within a year of each other and the 'most interesting architects practising in the English-speaking world at the beginning of the twentieth century'. Stamp's intelligent and perceptive analysis of Lutyens' genius, however, occasionally trembles with uncharacteristic lack of confidence. Valuable space is wasted in quoting from and refuting the worthless opinions of forgotten hacks like Robert Furnaux Jordan who surely are beneath a scholar's sights? Most surprisingly, we are told that the 20th-century classical revival was not a result of the Boer war. As it began 20 years earlier, in the 1880s with the houses of Norman Shaw, has anybody ever seriously suggested that it was?
Generally, however, this is the most balanced survey of Lutyens' late-Victorian and Edwardian houses so far to appear in print and reveals the full gamut from some of the Master's more extreme and eccentric early inventions, like the Pleasance at Overstrand (1897), to the supreme masterpiece of the Viceroy's House at Delhi (1912-31). Stamp's descriptive analysis of the latter alone would make this book worth buying:
It is the finest as well as the largest complete executed building designed by Lutyens and the unlikely summation of all that he had been striving to achieve since designing his first houses in Surrey some four decades earlier.
It is a building of astonishing originality and monumentality, dynamic yet almost the embodiment of solid mass. Even the columns are Lutyens. own invention: the Delhi Order.
The black-and-white photographs capture the formal geometry, the lines, precision and abstract forms of Lutyens' architecture, but not the wondrous colours and tones which are partly responsible for the humanity of these dream-like houses, whether the soft reds of brick and tile in Surrey or the startling polychromy of rhubarb and cream stones in the Viceroy's House. A fascinating detail revealed by Stamp is that the Viceroy's House, one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century and, one hopes, a work of almost eternal permanence, cost only £800,000. This seems rather good value compared to the £800,000,000 spent on a plastic tent some 70 years later.
Some of the photographs have the character of Dutch paintings, with carefully arranged still lives of roses in pewter jugs, fruit on china dishes and old leather books. Some of this was due to Country Life's photographers who re-arranged rooms to cre
ate the most picturesque effect. A note on the photography would have been useful, as the seemingly uncontrived shots are actually full of tricks. A characteristic approach is the very low angle of the camera lens which exaggerates the scale and monumentality. Those who first learnt of Lutyens' architecture through Country Life pictures are often surprised to find the reality much smaller than expected. Another aspect which can cause disappointment now is the deterioration of the contents and decoration. None of the Surrey houses remains in the possession of descendants of their builders but they have continued to be bought by prosperous new owners. Though many of Lutyens' clients were 'new money', several (not all!) were connoisseurs and collectors, and the Country Life photographers always removed anything visually offensive from their shots. So it is a jolt to visit some houses today and find not oriental rugs, blue and white pots and polished oak but glass coffee tables, car seat sofas and shag pile carpets in these exquisite interiors. Far better to browse through the photographs in this book redolent of an 'ideal' English taste.
Gavin Stamp should have the last word:
Houses by Lutyens present a wide and sometimes paradoxical range of images, allowing very different interpretation. At once modern and traditional, formal and picturesque, classical and romantic: there is something in them for everyone.
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