Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?
Clive Aslet (Triglyph Books, £20)
FOLLOWING his death in 1944, Sir Edwin Lutyens seemed an anachronism. Architectural fashion was against the designer of the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi and a multitude of country houses for Edwardian plutocrats. A major Arts Council exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1981, however, turned a small cult following into a mainstream craze. The outstanding figure of a talented generation of architects, Lutyens showed an alternative to then-prevailing Modernism; the theatrical transformation of the Brutalist bunker on the South Bank by Piers Gough blew the dust off this Edwardian colossus. Lutyens was suddenly everywhere and, inevitably, this pitch of excitement gradually faded.
There are compelling reasons for revisiting Lutyens, however, and nobody could do it better than Clive Aslet, former Editor of COUNTRY LIFE. Not only was Lutyens a supremely inventive architect with a desire
