Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain's Greatest Architect?

As the first title in a new series from Triglyph Books, Clive Aslet has written a short biography of Sir Edwin Lutyens, among the greatest of British architects.

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the great architects of the twentieth century. His Edwardian country houses, surrounded by rhapsodic gardens, beguiled clients with their romance and wit. After 1918, the war memorials that he created symbolized a grieving nation’s sense of loss. In the new capital of the British Raj, New Delhi, the Viceroy’s House or Rashtrapati Bhavan had a footprint bigger than Versailles. His unfinished Liverpool Cathedral would have rivalled St Peter’s in Rome.

Intensely shy, Lutyens hid his personality behind puns and jokes - and yet he could be called ‘part mystic’, a reference to an inner profundity. Rich in stories, this entertaining and stylish short biography is a major new study incorporating fresh research which shows this most charismatic of architects in a new light.

Clive Aslet is a visiting professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge and the publisher of Triglyph Books. For many years he worked at the magazine Country Life, where he was editor from 1993 until 2006.

Since publishing The Last Country Houses with Yale University Press in 1982, he has written over 30 books. His titles for Triglyph include Old Homes, New Life: The resurgence of the British country house and Living Tradition: The Architecture and Urbanism of Hugh Petter. In 2021 he became chair of the Lutyens Trust. He is also a trustee of INTBAU and for a decade he was the founding honorary secretary of what is now the Twentieth Century Society.

Married with three children, Clive lives in London and Ramsgate.

Introduction; The Surrey Hills; Oh Amy It’s Splendid; Boom It Like Everything; Tiger, Tiger; What Fun It Would Be; The High Game; Indestructible, Severe and Magnificent; Byzantine-cum-Nedi; Wren Could Never Have Done This; Known Unto God; I Don’t Know What You Mean By ‘About’; The Biggest Dome In Christendom; Why Not Ask Me; Envoi; Chronology; Endnotes; Further Reading; Picture Credits; Index