Chapter 1 of 24
Peter Inskip
I intend to restrict this talk to a consideration of a number of Lutyens' later country houses, on the whole built in the period 1900-1914. But the ideas that I wish to put forward are equally applicable to his work on other building types - palaces, churches, war memorials, and so forth. One of the fascinating things about buildings by Lutyens is that there seem to be so many different valid ways of approaching his work. It can be considered stylistically. He worked in a vernacular style, very much like his English free—school contemporaries such as Voysey, followed by an early eighteenth century domestic manner, and then a stripped form of classicism. Or they may be thought of through typological groupings — houses, churches, town planning schemes, war memorials and commercial works. Or a third way of considering his buildings would be to think of them geographically. Even if he started work in Surrey just south of London, his buildings spread not only through England but through the whole of the UK; he worked in France and Spain, South Africa, and of course in India where his chief building is the Vice-regal lodge at New Delhi. But there are projects in America and even in Russia. But the emphasis on all these groupings tends to be perceptual - the charm of the style or the clever treatment of an element such as a roof. But can you really explain Lutyens' architecture in this way? I don't think so.