Sir Edwin Lutyens: The High Game

The year 2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Sir Edwin Lutyens – and coincidentally the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Lutyens Trust, which promotes the preservation of and research into the work of Lutyens. Knighted in 1918, recipient of the RIBA Gold Medals in 1921 and of the AIA in 1925, Lutyens has been regarded by some architectural historians as Britain’s greatest 20th-century architect. His design for the Cenotaph in Whitehall encapsulates with extraordinary dignity the national sentiment of sacrifice in the cause of freedom that still surrounds the two World Wars and his Viceroy’s House (now the Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi is a universally acknowledged architectural masterpiece. Lutyens’s death and the interment of his ashes in St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1944 was quickly followed by publication of the three large volumes forming the Lutyens Memorial and a canonising biography by Country Life’s Christopher Hussey. Eighty years on, his overall standing is not so clear. Lutyens’s early, Arts and Crafts-inspired houses have continued to gather admirers, but his shift to classicism in his later designs – the ‘High Game’ as he called it – has left his architectural legacy less obvious.

In this respect, Lutyens might be compared with Sir John Soane a century earlier, who died feted but with few immediate followers. In the case of Soane, however, scholars and architects have in the past half century found new ways of appraising and evaluating his work. Is something similar possible for our understanding of Lutyens’s ‘High Game’ as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century? There has been no major exhibition of Lutyens’s work since that of 1981 in the  Hayward Gallery, and such publications as there have been on his later career have tended to focus on his non-UK works.