Edwin Lutyens - Biography

(1869-1944). Lutyens was an architect educated at the Royal College of Art (1885--7). His early career was marked by a series of commissions for country houses, many of them obtained through Gertrude Jekyll, for whom he built Munstead Wood (1896). At this time, he was chiefly inspired by the ideals of Phillip Webb and William Morris. Later on, classicism came to play a more important role in his work. His most important work of this period was the New Delhi planning commission that he accepted in 1912, and he designed the Viceroy’s House, probably the most important example of European Renaissance architecture in India. However, the characteristic style of the middle period of his career is a simplified version of Queen Anne, relying on fine proportions and mouldings, such as Middlefield, Cambridge¬shire (1908). During the 1920s, he designed the Cenotaph and more than 50 other war memorials. From 1926 onwards, he collaborated on many large blocks of flats, including his Westminster housing scheme (1928-30). Other works from this period include the British Embassy in Washington (1926--9) and Campion Hall, Oxford (1934). His most ambitious work of the 1930s was his design for Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, which was never built. The domed cruciform church would have been second in size only to St Peter’s in Rome. Lutyens was elected ARA (1913), RA (1920), and President of the Royal Academy in 1938. He received a gold medal for architecture from the RIBA in 1921, becoming the organisation’s vice-president in 1924. Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, CD ROM version; Brown, Jane, Lutyens and the Edwardians: an English architect and his clients, London and New York, 1996.

The works of Edwin Lutyens: