Book Description
Born in 1869, Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens opened his own office in London when he was only 20 years old and began his career with a series of opulent country houses. The architect of such important commissions as the British Embassy in Washington D.C., in 1925, and the plan for New Delhi, the new capital of British India, in 1912, Lutyens continued throughout his career to design houses in which the vernacular manner adopted by Philip Webb and Norman Shaw in the previous century was developed with originality and wit and with remarkable formal control. As an upholder of the classical language of architecture, Lutyen’s achievement was not always appreciated by a younger generation of architects inspired by the modern movement, but the sheer beauty of materials and construction and the inventive handling of historical styles offered by Lutyen’s houses makes his contribution to early-20th-century domestic architecture on a par with that of his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Gavin Stamp, an expert on the architecture of Lutyens, presents 22 houses illustrated with exquisite duotone photographs culled from the archives of the great British magazine Country Life. Most of the photographs date from before World War I and show the houses as their architect intended they should look and performing as they were designed to perform, before the kitchens were modernized, the gardens simplified, and the interiors compromised to accord with modern tastes.
