Edwin Lutyens

"Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), perhaps the greatest British architect of the twentieth century, was introduced by garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, his celebrated collaborator, to Edward Hudson, the founder of the great British magazine Country Life, in 1889. Hudson thereafter did all he could to promote the work of a man he admired without reservation, commissioning Lutyens to design the magazine’s offices in Covent Garden in 1904, as well as three country houses. Country Life published articles about virtually all his buildings shortly after their completion, recording them as the architect intended, creating an unparalleled visual archive which is the source for this selection of outstanding photographs of Lutyens’s domestic architecture. Gavin Stamp’s authoritative introduction places Lutyens ?rmly among the giants of architecture: ‘an architect of rare genius and humanity.’ His selection of twenty-two houses, representative of all the phases of Lutyens’s career, illustrates the architect’s dual achievements as a renewer of both vernacular tradition and of the Classical language of architecture. Debate continues about Lutyens’s place in modern architecture, but his legacy of some of the most inventive and romantic examples of British domestic architecture is unquestionable."--