About this talk

Running time: 29 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 third talk, Lutyens: New Delhi by Gavin Stamp, is devoted to Lutyens' monumental work of the period 1912 to 1939.

This is the second, by Peter Inskip, an architect in private practice, the author of a Lutyens monograph (published in 1979 by Academy Editions) and of articles on Lutyens' country houses and on English Renaissance architecture. Here, he examines the houses of 1900 to 1914.

He has taught architecture at several British universities. In his talk, he advances the view that Lutyens' houses are indeed metaphoric castles that are related to the site by the extension of the geometry of the house out to the garden, or by the treatment of garden elements as fictive fortifications to protect the houses against hostile surroundings.

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