Yet more Lutyens
Gavin Stamp
Edwin Lutyens: Architect Laureate Roderick Gradidge (Allen & Unwin pp. 167, £13.95) Lutyens and the Sea Captain Margaret Richardson (Scolar pp. 42, £5.95) Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker & Imperial Delhi Robert Grant Irving (Yale pp. 402, £20) The Lutyensmania currently in evidence at the Hayward Gallery has also affected publishing: apart from the Exhibition catalogue, seven books on Lutyens have appeared in the last two years and more are to come. The tear-jerking Sir Edwin Lutyens by his daughter Mary Lutyens (Murray £12.95) I have already reviewed. As for architectural studies, nothing will ever replace Christopher Hussey's Life of 1950: arguably the finest architectural biography in the English language, which deserves reprinting. More recent contributions, directed towards the new market of interested architectural students, are rather dry. The book on Lutyens's houses by Peter Inskip (Academy £7.95) will appeal to those who like plans and diagrams, though it does present some perceptive formal analyses. The book on the same subject by Daniel O'Niell (Lund Humphries £8.95) suffers from the evident fact that the author does not care much for his subject.
By far the best of these new architectural books is that by Roderick Gradidge, who writes about Lutyens with all the illuminating and irreverent perversity which characterised his earlier Dream Houses. As a practising architect, he is cheerfully cavalier about facts, but the errors on the very first page are amply redeemed by his spirited and intelligent defence of Lutyens against the inhibiting generalisations ('Classicist', or `backward-looking') which used to be made by critics. Mr Gradidge likes early Romantic Lutyens the best and many of his illustrations are the fine Country Life plates which were not used in Lawrence Weaver's Houses and Gardens by Edwin Lutyens, first published in 1913. This is the book which best conveys the Edwardian glamour of Lutyens's houses when new, and it has now been very well reprinted in facsimile (Antique Collectors' Club £19.50).
Another delight is the little book by Margaret Richardson — the stalwart cataloguer of Lutyens's drawings at the RIBA — who reproduces in colour a series of Lutyens's typically whimsical and expressive sketches of the interior of an ideal (and unbuilt) house designed for Captain Day, skipper of the ship bringing the architect back from South Africa in 1919. These drawings show Lutyens's fertility of invention, his attention to detail, and his humour. Other publishing treats will not arrive in time for Christmas: Jane Brown's book about Lutyens and his great collaborator, Gertrude Jekyll, Gardens of a Golden Afternoon, is to appear next year, while the Cygnet Press is producing a facsimile of the evocative essay on New Delhi by Robert Byron, published in the Architectural Review in 1931 — the year the new city was inaugurated.
In my earlier `Lutyensmania' article, I commented on the phenomenon of the American interest in Lutyens, which helped to give respectability in England to so very English an architect in recent decades. Another product of this Transatlantic reverence is Robert Grant Irving's impressively authoritative Indian Summer, a book which is one of the few scholarly additions to the Lutyens bibliography since Hussey and which is magnificently illustrated, with many superb colour photographs taken by the author. Completing the new capital of British India, proposed in 1911, in spite of both the Great War and rising Indian nationalism was a triumph both for Lutyens and for British Government. As regards analysing Lutyens's New Delhi architecture, Mr Irving cannot supersede the earlier writings of Robert Byron and Christopher Hussey, but his subject is a wider one: the politics of creation and planning of a whole new city. Having worked on this book for, I think, over 14 years, the author has consulted a daunting number of sources and archives; he presents a wealth of new material, which is handled deftly in his well-constructed and readable narrative.
Architectural historians all too often concentrate on the architecture and forget the politics, the scheming and the fighting necessary to erect a building. New Delhi required great battles and assured diplomacy, and this is the story that Mr Irving tells in full for the first time. Not only were there battles about style — Eastern or Western; the very idea of a new capital was attacked by Anglo-India, by the old capital, Calcutta, by much Indian opinion and by many back in Britain — not least the powerful exViceroy, Lord Curzon. I am glad to find that a full tribute is paid to Lord Hardinge, Viceroy in 1911 and the creator of New Delhi, and it emerges that he supported Lutyens more strongly and consistently than is usually recognised. As for Lutyens, Mr Irving's account of how he acquired, defended and sustained his job as principal architect should be an object lesson to any aspiring modern establishment architect. The reputation of the city's other main architect, Sir Herbert Baker, has never really recovered from the devasting aesthetic strictures of Robert Byron, but Mr Irving defends him well and gives a fair account of the great squabble between the two sometime friends, which culminated in Lutyens meeting his 'Bakerloo' when he was defeated over the gradient which blocks the view of his masterpiece, Viceroy's House, from certain points.
My complaints about this admirable book are few — and patriotic. To refer to 'colonial Dublin' in the early 19th century is gratuitous and silly, and on several occasions Mr Irving's colourful tone reveals that ambivalence between naive admiration and jealous disapproval which has characterised the American view of Britain and the Empire — an ambivalence so painfully evident during the Second World War when Roosevelt seemed to be more concerned with the dismemberment of the British Empire than with the rapid growth of the Soviet Empire. Although Mr Irving clearly revels in the pomp and splendour of New Delhi, both then and now, he cannot resist concluding with a quotation from Georges Clemenceau who saw the 'Seventh Delhi' under construction in 1920: 'This will be the finest ruin of them all.' Possibly; but thanks to Lutyens's essentially non-political vision of pure architecture (unlike Baker who was obsessed with the symbolism of Empire), New Delhi's role in modern independent India makes it likely to outlive that other monument of Western cultural imperialism: Nehru's utopian city designed by Le Corbusier, Chandigarh.
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