Unlocking Lutyens: A Gateway to the Hidden Legacy of John Pell and Sir Christopher Wren

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Radford, Dennis Cawthorne, Douglas
Copyright Year	2008
Abstract	Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869–1944) have been extensively documented over the past hundred years and clearly show a career with at least two phases. The first is characterised by the design of private country houses in the Arts and Crafts style and, in collaboration with the horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll, the development of their gardens. The second begins around 1900 and reflects a shift towards NeoClassicism, initially in country houses and later in a wider range of larger public buildings and monuments both in England and abroad. Lutyens developed his use of the Neo-Classical idiom throughout the latter part of his career into a unique style of design which Arthur Stanley George Butler has termed his ‘elemental mode’. This was characterised by a highly controlled use of form and mass, apparent adherence to rules of Classical proportioning and the sparing use of symbolic Classical motifs. However, very little is known with any certainty about how Lutyens actually achieved this style, in particular what role was attributable to intuition and good taste, as is often assumed, and how much may have been attributable to quantitative and formalised methods of design. Circumstantial evidence exists that strongly suggests that quantitative analytical methods may have been used in a method which drew upon his interest in puzzles and mathematics, his interests in architectural history (particularly English NeoClassicism), his leanings towards mysticism and his exposure to Theosophy. Around 1919 Lutyens was invited to design the war memorial in Victoria Park in Leicester, known, at that time, as the ‘Arch of Remembrance’ to commemorate the men of the city, and the county of Leicestershire, who had died in the First World War. It is one of a number of memorials he designed for sites in England, France and Belgium, India and South Africa. As a monument it has a purely symbolic function and is not burdened with the functional demands of inhabited buildings and as such can be viewed as an exercise in purely architectural composition and a particularly clear exemplar of Lutyens’ ‘elemental mode’ of design. It would appear from this to be a useful candidate for analysis to reveal what, if any, formalised or quantitative design methods Lutyens may have employed. Before embarking upon such an enquiry it is helpful to examine in more detail the background, work and personality of Lutyens to assess circumstantial evidence and potential motives for his use of such design methods.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1017/S1359135508000948
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2086/5636/ARQ%20Vol%2012%20no%201%202008%20Raford%20&%20Cawthorne%20on%20Lutyens%20(L).pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135508000948
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article