Raymond Erith

by Kenneth Powell Quinlan Ter Lucy Archer, Quinlan Terry, Kenneth Powell

80 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raymond Erith (1904-1973) was against all forms of technological innovation. Instead, he found pleasure reiterating traditional styles of English architecture, a practice at which he became a master. To shield himself from modernity, he conducted a virulent anti-modernist crusade, which a small circle of admirers continues to perpetuate today. Even alternative non-modern movement architects of his time, like Giles Gilbert Scott, H. S. Goodhart-Rendell, or Wallis Gilbert & Partners didn’t interest him. He seems to have suffered from an oedipal drive to reject and disown the civilisation that nourished him‚ (but which did not stop him collecting vintage cars and using the telephone from his hideaway in Essex). For fifty years he shut out the entire modern experience and then surreptitiously peered at it through chinks in his defences; this was, no doubt, the root cause of an inner agitation he see in his best work. He even tried to develop a “progressive classical” ideology based on such dubious assertions as “Alberti’s reputation rested more on his theory than his practice”. Despite his terror of modernity (or, as one suspects, because of it) his best work could not avoid engaging with very modern issues about style, rhetoric and representation. In every project he used architecture deliberately as a language of signs and signifiers, expressing not the detached classical serenity he thought he was aiming at, but a restless twentieth century desire for personal expression. And he built it with an expertise that takes the breath away, which not even his severest detractors could fault. His wrongheaded reactionary attitude produced many self-conscious and ugly projects, but he also completed a series of delightful houses in a plainer style, using a classically-derived language deliberately marred and interfered with by mannered Erithian “jokes”: slipped windows, deliberately distorted proportions, kinky balusters. In the aggressively reinterpreted stripped neo-classicism of his in-laws’ house at Dedham (1937) one might go further and see affinities with quasi-modern, quasi-traditionalist tendencies elsewhere in Europe, like the metaphysical “Novecento” movement in Italy. Alongside less interesting examples of his flat, literally classical style (such as King’s Walden Bury, 1969-71), this book gives us a chance to enjoy some magnificent drawings and photographs of Erith’s inadvertent modernism. On a good day, Erith’s subliminal modernity expressed itself in the form of anxious, agitated compositions made from quasi-classical or cod-traditional arcades and cornices, distorted and caricatured. Setting these off against absolutely unadorned, taut surfaces built with maniacal precision, stretched until they are pulled tight, Erith’s magisterial library for Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1959-66) looks as good as the young Asplund or Eliel Saarinen, with whose neo-traditional work it might have potential affinities. His ebullient, Turkish-looking unbuilt factory for Ipswich towers up in layers of glazed galleries above a heavy brick and stone base, as good as the proto-modern Italian architect Giovanni Muzio (1893-1982). The horizontality of Erith’s competition project for the TUC building (1948) was perhaps intended as a swipe at the modern movement, just as through narrowed eyes, and perhaps after a glass of wine, his timber-built Jack Straw’s Castle (1963-64), triumphantly described by Erith himself as “the ugliest building in Hampstead” might, compositionally speaking, in its whiteness and its horizontality, be a caricature of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein. His “folly” at Gatley Park, Herefordshire (1973-76) is a giant pepper-pot of a building in roughly-coursed local stone, with deliberately ungainly proportions. Rebuilding the British Prime Minister's residence at no. 10 Downing Street, along with nos. 11 and 12, between 1959-63, Erith deployed impressive technical skill to strip away Churchillian and other accretions. His new additions included a colonnade at the rear of No. 10, supported on fat ionic columns deliberately made to look as though they are sinking into the ground. That’s his spirit in a nutshell.