The curse of Palladio: as the Raymond Erith exhibition at the Soane Museum makes clear, the interesting question is not 'classical or modern?' but 'good or bad architecture?

Apollo, Nov, 2004 by Gavin Stamp

Raymond Erith--some of whose exquisite drawings are currently on display in a centenary exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum--has long been the most celebrated of those so-called traditionalist architects who carried on building after World War, despite the active opposition of the ascendant modern movement. Many of his projects remained on the drawing board and most of his work consisted of building or altering country houses, but after he reconstructed the interiors of nos. 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street for the Macmillan government interesting jobs came his way, notably the library at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. This last, at least externally, is like a large, austere Soanian warehouse, and Soane, indeed, was a hero or mentor for the young Erith. Like others of his generation who intelligently recognised an affinity between the abstraction of Soane and the aesthetic of modernism, Erith considered him 'a very rare bird, and unique among the great architects, in being a progressive classicist'.

There seem to me to be two things that matter about Erith. One is that he saw the continuing value of traditional styles and methods of construction, so that his buildings were beautifully made. The other is that he was a good designer. This last consideration is too often forgotten in the tiresomely polarised debate about modernism and classicism which continues to rage. It is a debate in which blinkers tend to be worn on both sides--something encouraged by the Prince of Wales tendency, which naively regards anything with a flat roof as clearly bad and any building with columns as indisputably good. Modernists, of course, adopt precisely the reverse position. What this reveals is merely conventional opinion. It is instructive to note that, when the first modern movement houses were built by Maxwell Fry and Connell, Ward & Lucas in Hampstead in the 1930s, there was ferocious local opposition to these alien intruders spoiling the precious local character. Yet thirty years on, when Erith designed that charming essay in Georgian vernacular, Jack Straw's Castle, the denizens of Hampstead opposed it because it was traditional and not 'modern'.

Intelligent modern architects such as Denys Lasdun and Philip Powell held Erith in high regard, but perhaps this was partly because he was no threat and had a rather specialised practice. Indeed, Erith has become a sort of hero or prophet for those who are committed to classical architecture. This may reflect English snobbery, that is, the undue reverence given to the architecture of country houses, for in truth, despite his early admiration for Soane and his belief in a progressive classicism, Erith's work has less to teach about the adaptability of tradition to modern conditions than that of certain other twentieth-century classicists. There was Lutyens, of course, who expanded and enriched the language of classicism with astonishing originality until his death in 1944. More to the point, there was Sir Albert Richardson who, although he parodied himself as a reactionary Georgian squire, designed Bracken House for the Financial Times in the 1950s - a modern commercial building (since cleverly altered by Michael Hopkins) that showed how the nee classicism of Schinkel and Cockerell could still be appropriate and practical in the City of London.

Above all, perhaps, there was Erith's contemporary Donald McMorran and his younger partner George Whitby, who, inspired by the legacy of Lutyens and that great town hall builder Vincent Harris, rose to the challenge of modern administrative and technical requirements. Their classicism was truly progressive and they designed municipal buildings at Exeter, Bury St Edmunds and university colleges at Nottingham that were both traditional and modern, abstracted but civilised structures that met their users' needs and were intelligently detailed. Most impressive, perhaps, are. two buildings in the City: the police station in Wood Street, which has a stone-faced residential block that is a miniature skyscraper, and the extension to the Edwardian baroque Old Bailey. where the simplicity of treatment and the abstraction of monumental forms creates a grandeur worthy of Vanbrugh. Yet McMorran and Whitby were largely ignored by the architectural press and are little known today.

The tragedy of modern British architecture is that the sane, progressive alternative to doctinaire modernism was undermined by the comparatively early deaths of these men: McMorran in 1965; Whitby and Erith both in 1973. Although this was the very time when the arrogant assumptions of the modernist establishment were beginning to be questioned, these departures left the field empty, with only Erith's younger pupil and partner, Quinlan Terry, to hold aloft the torch of classicism--something he was, I fear, quite unfitted to sustain. Yet ferry went on to build up a hugely successful country house practice, largely for the new money of the Thatcher years. There are two unfortunate things about this earnest and rigid traditionalist. The first is that he has grasped the dead hand of that perennial curse of English architecture: Palladianism. Erith, at least when young, was much more broad-minded, holding to 'the tradition of all western architecture: Greek, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, and all the rest, including the tradition of the great modern engineers. It is the tradition from which architecture ought never to have deviated'. His early designs, inspired by the Regency, were drily witty. Later, however--perhaps under Terry's influence - his work drew more on Palladio, and became more pedantic and boring.