Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens ( ; 29 March 1869 – 1 January 1944) was an English architect known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. He designed many English country houses, war memorials and public buildings. In his biography, the writer Christopher Hussey wrote, "In his lifetime (Lutyens) was widely held to be our greatest architect since Wren if not, as many maintained, his superior". The architectural historian Gavin Stamp described him as "surely the greatest British architect of the twentieth (or of any other) century".
Lutyens played an instrumental role in the construction of New Delhi, which would later on serve as the seat of the Government of India. In recognition of his contribution, a part of New Delhi is known as "Lutyens' Delhi". In collaboration with Sir Herbert Baker, he was also the main architect of several monuments in New Delhi such as the India Gate; he also designed the Viceroy's House, which is now known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Many of his works were inspired by Indian architecture. He was elected Master of the Art Workers' Guild in 1933.
Early life Lutyens was born in Kensington, London, the tenth of thirteen children of Mary Theresa Gallwey (1832/33–1906) from Killarney, Ireland, and Captain Charles Augustus Henry Lutyens (1829–1915), a soldier and painter. His sister, Mary Constance Elphinstone Lutyens (1868–1951), wrote novels under her married name of Mrs George Wemyss. He grew up in Thursley, Surrey. He was named after a friend of his father, the painter and sculptor Edwin Henry Landseer.
Lutyens suffered from rheumatic fever during his childhood and hence missed formal school education. He had special liking for drawing and mathematics, and said to have devised a novel method of drawing what he saw: he would carry a small pane of clear glass, a penknife and pieces of soap; he would look through the glass at some building and trace the outline of the portions he saw using the sharp edge of a soap piece.
He studied architecture at South Kensington School of Art (now the Royal College of Art, London), from 1885 to 1887. After college he joined the Ernest George and Harold Peto architectural practice. It was here that he first met Sir Herbert Baker. For many years he worked from offices at 29 Bloomsbury Square, London.
Architectural career Private practice
Following his studies at the Royal College of Art in London, he was articled to an architectural firm in 1887, though he departed shortly thereafter to establish his own independent practice. His early work, produced between 1888 and 1895, drew heavily on the traditional vernacular of Surrey buildings. A pivotal shift in his approach came with his introduction to the landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll, who imparted to him the principles of “simplicity of intention and directness of purpose” that she herself had adopted from John Ruskin.
He began his own practice in 1888, his first commission being a private house at Crooksbury, Farnham, Surrey. During this work, he met the garden designer and horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll. In 1896 he began work on a house for Jekyll at Munstead Wood near Godalming, Surrey. It was the beginning of a professional partnership that would define the look of many Lutyens country houses.
The "Lutyens–Jekyll" garden had hardy shrubbery and herbaceous plantings within a structural architecture of stairs and balustraded terraces. This combined style, of the formal with the informal, exemplified by brick paths, herbaceous borders, and with plants such as lilies, lupins, delphiniums and lavender, was in contrast to the formal bedding schemes favoured by the previous generation in the 19th century. This "natural" style was to define the "English garden" until modern times.
Lutyens's fame grew largely through the popularity of the new lifestyle magazine Country Life created by Edward Hudson, which featured many of his house designs. Hudson was a great admirer of Lutyens's style and commissioned Lutyens for a number of projects, including Lindisfarne Castle and the Country Life headquarters building in London, at 8 Tavistock Street. One of his assistants in the 1890s was Maxwell Ayrton.Ormrod Maxwell Ayrton at scottisharchitects.org.uk, accessed 4 February 2009.
By the turn of the century, Lutyens was recognised as one of architecture's coming men. In his major study of English domestic buildings, Das englische Haus, published in 1904, Hermann Muthesius wrote of Lutyens, "He is a young man who has come increasingly to the forefront of domestic architects and who may soon become the accepted leader among English builders of houses".
Works
The bulk of Lutyens's early work consisted of private houses in an Arts and Crafts style, strongly influenced by Tudor architecture and the vernacular styles of south-east England. This was the most innovative phase of his career. Important works of this period include Munstead Wood, Tigbourne Court, Orchards and Goddards in Surrey, Deanery Garden and Folly Farm in Berkshire, Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Le Bois des Moutiers in France.
Munstead Wood, a house in Surrey, was designed by Edwin Lutyens and completed in 1896. It is considered the first project in which Lutyens fully expressed his personal qualities as a designer. The house balances the sweep of its roof with high, buttressed chimneys, and offsets small doorways with long strips of windows. The building established his professional reputation. Following Munstead Wood, Lutyens produced a series of notable country houses in which he adapted various historical styles to meet the requirements of contemporary domestic architecture.
After about 1900 his style gave way to a more conventional Classicism, a change of direction which had a profound influence on wider British architectural practice. His commissions were of a varied nature from private houses to two churches for the new Hampstead Garden Suburb in London to Julius Drewe's Castle Drogo near Drewsteignton in Devon and on to his contributions to India's new imperial capital, New Delhi (where he worked as chief architect with Herbert Baker and others). Here he added elements of local architectural styles to his classicism, and based his urbanisation scheme on Mughal water gardens. He also designed the Hyderabad House for the last Nizam of Hyderabad, as his Delhi palace and planned the layout for the Janpath and Rajpath roads.
Before the end of World War I, he was appointed one of three principal architects for the Imperial War Graves Commission (now Commonwealth War Graves Commission) and was involved with the creation of many monuments to commemorate the dead. Larger cemeteries have a Stone of Remembrance, designed by him. The best known of these monuments are The Cenotaph in Whitehall, Westminster, and the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Thiepval. The Cenotaph was originally commissioned by David Lloyd George as a temporary structure to be the centrepiece of the Allied Victory Parade in 1919. Lloyd George proposed a catafalque, a low empty platform, but it was Lutyens's idea for the taller monument. The design took less than six hours to complete. His design for the Cenotaph in Whitehall became a permanent national memorial. Its design incorporates subtle, non-straight lines—using entasis curves on the vertical surfaces and arcs for the horizontal planes. This deliberate geometry was intended to create an abstract, timeless form of remembrance, free from overt religious or figurative symbolism. Lutyens also designed many other war memorials, and others are based on or inspired by Lutyens's designs. Examples of Lutyens's other war memorials include the War Memorial Gardens in Dublin, the Tower Hill memorial, the Manchester Cenotaph and the Arch of Remembrance memorial in Leicester.
Lutyens also refurbished Lindisfarne Castle for its wealthy owner.
One of Lutyens's smaller works, but considered one of his masterpieces, is The Salutation, a house in Sandwich, Kent, England. Built in 1911–1912 with a garden, it was commissioned by Henry Farrer, one of three sons of Sir William Farrer.
Lutyens heavily influenced Sigurd Frosterus when he designed Vanajanlinna Manor in Finland.
He was knighted for his work at New Delhi in 1918 and elected a Royal Academician in March 1920. In 1924, he was appointed a member of the newly created Royal Fine Art Commission, a position he held until his death.
While work continued in New Delhi, Lutyens received other commissions including several commercial buildings in London and the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington, D.C..
In 1924 he completed the supervision of the construction of what is perhaps his most popular design: Queen Mary's Dolls' House. This four-storey Palladian villa was built in 1/12 scale and is now a permanent exhibit in the public area of Windsor Castle. It was not conceived or built as a plaything for children; its goal was to exhibit the finest British craftsmanship of the period.
Lutyens was commissioned in 1929 to design a new Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. He planned a vast building of brick and granite, topped with towers and a dome, with commissioned sculpture work by Charles Sargeant Jagger and W. C. H. King. In the 1930s, Lutyens received the commission for a new Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool. His design, intended to be the second-largest church in the world, proposed a colossal brick and granite structure crowned by a dome exceeding that of St. Peter's in Rome. The interior was conceived as a processional "Via Crucis," guiding the worshipper through a sequence of spaces culminating under the main dome. Work on this building started in 1933, but was halted during World War II. After the war, the project ended due to a shortage of funding, with only the crypt completed. A model of Lutyens's unrealised building was given to and restored by the Walker Art Gallery in 1975 and is now on display in the Museum of Liverpool.Conserving the Lutyens cathedral model, Liverpool museums . Liverpoolmuseums.org.uk. Retrieved on 29 July 2013. The architect of the present Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, which was built over part of the crypt and consecrated in 1967, was Sir Frederick Gibberd.
In 1945, a year after his death, A Plan for the City & County of Kingston upon Hull was published. Lutyens worked on the plan with Sir Patrick Abercrombie and they are credited as its co-authors. Abercrombie's introduction in the plan makes special reference to Lutyens's contribution. The plan was, however, rejected by Hull City Council. He was also involved in the Royal Academy's planning for post-war London, an endeavour dismissed by Osbert Lancaster as "... not unlike what the new Nuremberg might have been had the Führer enjoyed the inestimable advantage of the advice and guidance of the late Sir Aston Webb".
Overseas commissions Ireland (1906–1918)