Edwin Landseer Lutyen

A painting depicting the collected works of Sir Edwin Lutyen, by Carl Lauben. It features all of Lutyen's major works, including, prominent in the centre, the unbuilt masterpiece the Liverpool Cathedral. 

There is possibly no other city on earth that can be said to be the product of a single creative mind to the same extent as New Delhi - the creation of Edwin Landseer Lutyen. He is often described as the greatest British architect of the modern era by those not infected by the democratic evils of modernism; he had a profound impact upon the building of the new capital of British India, New Delhi, throughout an extended period in the 1920s and 30s.

For a range of reasons, the British had found it prudent to move the capital of the Raj from Calcutta in 1911. They then set about constructing an entire new city among the previous six incarnations of the city of Delhi on the Jamuna River, and the task of designing it along with its grand imperial architecture fell to Lutyen. New Delhi today - where this author has recently arrived, his third visit - is still often referred to as "Lutyen's Delhi" and - leaving aside the appalling pollution and the even more appalling degradations of commerce, visual pollution on an epic scale - still largely conforms to Lutyen's grand vision. There is a large area of wide avenues and colonial buildings - deliberately contrasting to the tangled laneways of the old city - where nearly everything, from the broad sweep of the urban plan to the street lights, were designed by Sir Edwin "Ned" Lutyen. 

It is unfortunate that most of his grandest buildings in Delhi are now occupied by the various arms of the government of the Indian Republic, and so for security reasons are closed to the public. The great Viceroy's Residence, the 'Rashtrapati Bhavan' - now the residence of the President of India - and its vast formal gardens (designed by Lutyen), are only open to the public for several days in a year. Other nearby structures are occupied by the Indian Ministry of Defense and are permanently out of reach. When the author visited this area in recent days even the famous India Gate - a memorial the Britishers constructed to honour the Indian soldiers who had fought and died for the Empire in the Great War - was closed to public access with all approach roads manned by teams of heavily armed soldiers at road blocks. (You can stop and take photographs for two minutes and are then moved along.) 

It is difficult, therefore, to obtain a full appreciation of Sir Edwin's vision of the city in its totality, and especially difficult to obtain a proper sense of his genius for interior design. For, as well as grand architecture, Lutyen also designed furnishings, lighting and the other trappings of interiors, all the way down to the vegetable racks in the kitchens. His art and his vision was comprehensive and marked by a complete attention to detail. He was a style in and of himself. 

Happily, Lutyen's work is characterised by his rejection of modernism and his embrace of the classical. He is a shining light of sobriety and mathematical integrity in an age of dreadful buildings. His later buildings have a strongly neo-Romanesque solidity - a heaviness of the walls, small windows, domes, round arches. His work falls into two phases, the second of them entailing a detailed exploration of classical (Graceo-Roman, and especially Roman) themes. He devoted his life to the rediscovery of the classic. He loved the purity of the classical order and classical proportions. "When they are right," he wrote, "they are curiously lovely and unalterable like a plant form." Accordingly, modernist critics hated him. He defied the age of the "masses and the machine." Many older books on modern architecture routinely sneer at his work and wrongly dismiss it as "historical pastiche". 

It is an undeniably Imperial architecture that we find in Lutyen's Delhi. In the main structures he chose to build in the local red sandstone, the same stone from which the earlier monuments of the city, especially in its Moghul incarnation, are built - the Jama Masjid, the Red Fort, and so on - and this provides a strong sense of continuity and belonging - and yet in other respects his buildings speak of the British Empire's conscious sense of a reprise of Roman Imperial strength. Lutyen avoids the pointed arch and most other oriental motifs; his buildings are strongly and adamantly occidental: austerity, power, solidity, weight, permanence, endurance, immovability, masculinity. There is some irony in this. His buildings are about the eternal British Empire and of India's enduring place in the British dominions, the jewel in the British crown. 

Some of the author's photographs (on a day of heavy pollution):

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LUTYEN & HEMINGWAY

Lutyen was a great punster with a warm wit. There are many wonderful stories about him. One of the best is as follows:

He was once employed by Ernest Hemingway to build a house in Hemingway's ancestral home of Ilkley, Yorkshire. When accompanying Hemingway around the unfinished building, Lutyen gestured to the place where a black marble staircase would be. Hemingway protested. "I don't want a black marble staircase!" he said. "I want an oak staircase!" Lutyen looked over his round eyeglasses and said, "What a pity." When the house was completed, however, there - sure enough - was a black marble staircase. Hemingway protested again. "I said I didn't want a black marble staircase!" he said. "I know," said Lutyen,"and I said, 'What a pity.'" 

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Below is a representative selection of some of the furniture designed by Lutyen. We can see, especially, his love of the circle (along with, by extension, the octagon) as the basic unit of classical (especially Roman) forms. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black