James Maclaren: Arts and Crafts Pioneer

Apollo, Sept, 2004 by Michael Drury

James Maclaren: Arts and Crafts Pioneer Alan Calder Shaun Iyas, 30 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1900289628

James Maclaren was a Scottish Arts and Crafts architect who influenced both C.F. Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His work in Scotland, particularly on the Fortingall estate, and in London is indicative of an exceptional talent that was to remain largely unfulfilled.

Maclaren died at the age of thirty-seven in 1890. Lutyens was twenty-one in that year and had just set up in practice. Mackintosh was only a year older. Voysey was thirty-three, as was W.R. Lethaby, who had just left the office of Norman Shaw to work on his own. It was a critical time in the Arts and Crafts movement and all these men had been open to influence in the last few years of Maclaren's life. Maclaren was a fine draftsman, and his work appeared regularly in the pages of the architectural press, so there is no doubt these younger men would all have been aware of his work. Of the better known Arts and Crafts architects, only Edward Prior was older than Maclaren. He was thirty-eight and had been in Shaw's office too, leaving ten years earlier, in 1880.

Had Maclaren lived, how might his career have developed and how influential might it have been? Alan Calder's balanced critique and his detailed analysis of Maclaren's work introduces us to an architect of considerable subtlety. Although his planning was fairly traditional and showed few of the more expressive tendencies developed by later Arts and Crafts architects, it had a sense of place that resulted in buildings that belonged to their location but in a quietly progressive way.

Maclaren's free use of roughcast vernacular was distinctly Scottish. Composed informally, it was a forerunner of the less regionally-specific (and thus less Arts and Crafts authentic) version found in Voysey's later work. Wisely, Maclaren steered clear of the over-exploited Scottish neo-baronial, his starting point being a free interpretation of simpler sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scottish architecture. And in Scotland it was not only Mackintosh who followed Maclaren's inspiration in this way. Lethaby worked at Melsetter in the latter years of the nineteenth century and here too we find some of the same references.

Although Melsetter's regional characteristics may follow a tradition familiar to Maclaren, Lethaby's composition here may owe more to Philip Webb. For Maclaren's buildings at Fortingall and elsewhere sometimes seem to have an easy repose more familiar in the work of Lutyens than in that of Lethaby or Webb. Not that Maclaren would have been another Lutyens, had he lived, but there are diverse strands of creativity exhibited in his regrettably limited output that were reflected in the architecture of all these men.

Alan Calder's book is an object lesson for any who wish to embark upon a subject of this sort. His historical analysis is well ordered and easy to follow and while his architectural criticism is acute its balance is fair. Calder does not need to sell Maclaren's architecture to us, in the main it does that for itself. This monograph is a compliment not only to its author but also to its publisher, Shaun Tyas. Well illustrated and reasonably priced, there cannot be much profit in such a venture--such books are a labour of love, at least in part, and we should be grateful to both men for marking James Maclaren's place clearly in an interesting period of architecture.

Michael Drury is a conservation architect in private practice. His book on some lesser known Arts and Crafts architects, Wandering Architects (2000), is also published by Shaun Tyas.