Master of jokes
Alan Powers
Raymond Erith: Progressive Classicist 1904-1973
Sir John Soane's Museum, until 31 December
There are different ways in architecture to be both playful and serious at the same time, Raymond Erith was an architect fond of jokes, like the croquet shed he built at Aynho for Miss Watt, which looks as if the survivor of a pair of baroque gate piers has been given a skirtlike lean-to for its new function (she was, after all, a major collector of Surrealist art). At Bentley Farm, he built brick gate piers on the diagonal, 'askew', since this happened to he the client's name. In the
latter case, however, one has to go there in order fully to understand the appropriateness, for the drive takes a bend to the left, and the piers, which stand out in the open, look good from both directions of approach.
With the exception of Sir Edwin Lutyens, not many of the numerous classical architects working in Britain during the 20th century could make jokes, and some of those who did, such as Clough WilliamsEllis, seemed more like clowns. Erith did not wish to be compared with Lutyens, whose magnetic attraction had disoriented two successive generations. He lived through a period when the building opportunities of the Edwardians had shrunk. Perhaps it suited him to be a miniaturist, for it is hard to tell to what scale his personal interpretation of classical architecture would have stretched.
Despite adverse conditions, few did better than Erith at making an imaginative world through architecture. The centenary exhibition Raymond Erith: Progressive Classicist 1904-1973 enables us to test this assertion, although inevitably without a real standard of comparison other than Soane himself. The similarities between these two men, at moments so similar in their detailing, are explored in a catalogue essay by the curator, Lucy Archer, who has been chronicler and champion of her father's work. Kenneth Powell establishes a context in the 20th century, triangulating Erith between Sir Reginald Blomfield, Vincent Harris and Donald MeMorran, but settling for a comparison with an artist, Edward Bawden, which carries much truth.
Architecture proved to be a more vicious field of operation for Erith than Bawden's world of painting and graphics, however, and the drawings and photographs of Erith's houses, university buildings and other designs (newly taken in colour by Mark Fiennes) are the banners of a resistance movement against modernism, and even modernity itself. Bluntly, the Establishment was determined to marginalise him, and it is our loss that they so nearly succeeded, since he asked all the right questions about modern architecture's shortcomings in theory and practice. That his answers were personal to him rather than the only ones possible does nothing to diminish his value. When Louis Kahn (a near contemporary) made his famous statement that 'the brick wants to be an arch', he could have been paraphrasing Erith's attitude to developing a style out of the nature of materials.
At the entrance to the exhibition is a large composite sheet of drawings, giving in obsessively intricate pencil line a complete description of 'The Redoubt for Mr Freeman', a cylindrical house in Devon, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1949. No such house could be built at that time of shortages, so neither house nor free man of any description existed. Erith's sense of play was a political one, not in a crude party sense, but insofar as he used architecture to imagine a better possible world. In this, he was at least as true to his generation (the 'Auden Generation') as more self-evidently political architects. The fact that he rebuilt all three houses in Downing Street during Macmillan's premiership may be coincidental, but the symbolic resonance of his work there could bear further exposition.
Erith's thinking was also proto-green, in a more profound way than many of today's exponents of that vital current in architecture. He saw in the Renaissance not just a codification of architectural form, but also a vital connection through nature to the divine, and this was a generating force in his architecture. Lucy Archer's monograph on Erith of 1985 (still available in paperback) quotes a moving letter he wrote to his principal mentor, Hope Bagenal, on these matters, revealing a polytheistic theology that epitomises the post-modern ecological idea of divinity as embodied in the world and there for the having. As well as being a classicist, Frith was a romantic, who was also, of course, the contemporary of John Piper and Graham Sutherland. The name we have to give to his style of architecture has perhaps obscured this deeper truth about the nature of his 'progressiveness'. His buildings, so much more at home in nature than the majority of modernist ones, are the ultimate proof.
A two-day conference, `Mid-Centuty Classic: classical design in the time of modernism', organised by Alan Powers for the Twentieth Century Society and the Soane Museum, will take place on 26-27 November. See www.c20socieryorg.uk for details, or ring 020 7250 3857.
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