Fearless protest: Robert Byron, born a hundred years ago, was an architectural critic and polemicist whose passionate invective is needed today more than ever

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Gavin Stamp

Robert Byron, who was born a century ago this month, died in February 1941, when the ship taking him to Persia to be a war correspondent was torpedoed in the north Atlantic. Had he survived, it is highly unlikely that he would be around today to celebrate his 100th birthday, but he probably would have become better known, together with those other remarkable writers of his brilliant generation--John Summerson, James Lees-Milne and John Betjeman--who did so much to encourage interest in British architecture after the war. As it was, his achievement was largely forgotten and he was for long best known as a travel writer because of his remarkable book The Road to Oxiana, describing his journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34. Only now, since the publication in 2003 by John Murray of James Knox's splendid biography, can the productive richness of Robert Byron's short life be fully appreciated.

There are at least two good reasons for remembering Byron today--other than for his frequent walk-on parts in the well-documented, incestuous saga of the Evelyn Waugh circle. One is the power and vitality of his writing in conveying the character of great architecture, whether the monasteries of Athos, the ancient brick burial towers of Persia or the modern buildings of Edwin Lutyens. It was, indeed, the special number of the Architectural Review devoted to New Delhi--published in January 1931 and entirely written and illustrated by Byron--which really inspired me to visit India and see the Viceroy's House for myself.

He recognised that, far away from home, something extraordinary had been achieved--and so uncharacteristic of official architecture in its imaginative excellence: 'Here is something not merely worthy, but whose like has never been. With a shiver of impatience [the traveller] shakes off contemporary standards, and makes ready to evoke those of Greece, the Renascence, and the Moguls.' Lutyens--whom Byron considered 'the genius of our age'--had 'accomplished a fusion between East and West, and created a novel work of art.' Unfortunately, 'The majority are deaf to all but the "rights of man"--whether to give or to withhold them. They forget that one of those rights is beauty. This at least the English have given. And for this at least the English will be remembered.' In that, he may have been more percipient than he could have realised at the time.

Byron's view of Lutyens as a 'humanist' was strongly coloured by Geoffrey Scott's defence of the Classical tradition, and of Italian baroque, in his 1914 book The Architecture of Humanism. But it is important also to appreciate that Byron saw Lutyens's interpretation of the classical language as conspicuously modern. Viceroy's House is not a composition of flat walls ornamented with traditional detail--the simplistic Georgian manner which so many of our New Classicists today fail to get beyond--but a dynamic composition of massive horizontal layers, each given a slope, or 'batter'. The whole building is composed on what Byron called 'a faintly pyramidal principle' that creates a 'feeling of movement in mass'. In this extraordinary building, he thought, 'we behold this dynamic quality, while enfleshed with sufficient severity and on a sufficient scale to make it effective, combined with a scenic employ of colour, a profound knowledge of shadow-play, and the most sensitive delicacy of moulding, pattern and ornament ... The Viceroy's House at New Delhi is the first real justification of a new architecture which has already produced much that is worthy, but, till now, nothing of the greatest.'

This 'new architecture', of course, was very different from the planar, continental modernism that was already making strong inroads in Britain. Byron was not a crude 'traditionalist' but he questioned the claims of this new movement. In his 1932 book The Appreciation of Architecture he illustrated an ancient brick wall at Merv, now in Turkmenistan, which 'might almost be mistaken, at a casual glance, for a modern smelting-works instead of a mediaeval fortification. Not that this need imply any particular merit. But it may prove to those whose admiration for industrial forms amounts to mania that the architectural excellence in such forms (when it exists) is not so exclusively the gift of machinery as they imagine.' A few years later he pointed out in The New Statesman the real nature of so-called functionalism, about which, even today, so many architects and critics remain in denial: that it was not an inevitable, absolute response to social conditions and structure: 'Of course the modern architect has a style ... A more pronounced style ... never decorated the earth.'

The second good reason for remembering Byron is for his skill and effectiveness as a polemicist. He was a master of passionate invective--something we need more of today, when most architectural critics do little more than paraphrase press releases and so encourage the pernicious cult of the architectural superstar. The reputation of Sir Herbert Baker has never really recovered from Byron's repeated assaults, not least his dismissal of the pierced stone screens on the Delhi Council Chamber as 'though fixed by clothes pegs on a line. Here are not only pants, but petticoats, camisoles, night-dresses, and even tea-gowns.' Byron's masterpiece in this vein was his pamphlet--which began as an article in the Architectural Review--on How we celebrate the Coronation (of George VI). It was a catalogue of destruction, cynicism and barbarism, and he caused outrage by naming the villains: 'The Church; the Civil Service; the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; the hereditary landlords; the political parties; the London County Council; the local councils; the great business firms; the motorists; the heads of the national Museum--all are indicted, some with more cause than others, because of some more decency might have been hoped for, but all on the same charge. These, in the year of the coronation, 1937, are responsible for the ruin of London, for our humiliation before visitors, and for destroying without hope of recompense many of the nation's most treasured possessions; and they will answer for it by the censure of posterity.'