About this talk

Running time: 24 minutes

Sir Edwin Lutyens was the last great architect of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. His vast output of over 300 buildings and projects showed a continuing devotion to traditional techniques of construction and borrowing from the past. There has recently been a revival of interest in his work, leading to an Arts Council Lutyens exhibition in autumn 1981 at London's Hayward Art Gallery.

To coincide with this, we published three talks on Lutyens covering the span of his work. They are all by members of the organising committee of the exhibition.

In the first talk, Lutyens: Dream Houses, Roderick Gradidge discusses Lutyens' great country houses built between 1889 and 1902.

The second talk, Lutyens: The Metaphoric Castle by Peter Inskip, is devoted to the houses of 1900 to 1914.

This is the third, in which Gavin Stamp concentrates on Lutyens' monumental work of the period 1912 to 1939, starting with Viceroy House in New Delhi. Gavin Stamp, architectural historian, writer and lecturer, is the author of "The Temples Of Power" (published by Architectural Press) and, with Colin Amery, of "The Victorian Buildings Of London" (published by Architectural Press).

He has arranged several important exhibitions: "Silent Cities" (which included Lutyens' war memorials); "London 1900" in 1977 and 1978 at the British Architectural Library's Heinz Gallery; and "The English House" in 1980 at London's Building Centre.

In his talk, he speaks of Lutyens' increasing devotion to Palladio, and how, in New Delhi, he managed to fuse the monumental classical tradition of Europe with Indian features. For Viceroy House he transmuted the Doric order, and made it into something new, a Delhi order; and even with this he played unorthodox tricks, while for the remarkable war memorials he designed an almost abstract Elemental mode. Lutyens' extraordinary career moved from his early picturesque to monumental classical buildings of a sort which had never been designed before.

Please note that a transcript of this talk is available - please contact us for further details.