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Béla Lajta is a name little known outside Budapest and, frankly, one not that well known there either. While other figures from the fin de siècle – Gaudí, Mackintosh, Loos, Wagner, Hoffmann – have been beatified and transformed into tourist icons, Lajta (1873–1920) languishes as a central European curiosity. Yet this architect was, without doubt, […] More
There was, as she intended, a combative note in Minnette de Silva’s idiosyncratic scrapbook of an autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. It took the last ten years of her life, and emphasised her role as a nerveless pioneer and professional, instigator of what became known as ‘regional modernism’. Yet for […] More
In 1905, the Architectural Review stated that ‘the architectural historian of the distant future may well be excused if he formulates a theory that there were two Decimus Burtons’. Literally speaking, this was remarkably prescient, for today we associate Burton’s name not only with various inventive classical revival buildings around Regent’s Park and Hyde Park […] More
The Alton Estate in Roehampton, perhaps the most important complex of 20th-century housing in Britain, is under threat from proposals to demolish the centre of the estate and replace it with a very large, very clashing new development. If it goes ahead the estate, and views from Richmond Park, will be changed for ever. The […] More
There are many architects to whom an old or beautiful building should not be entrusted. Work on such structures requires a certain reticence and modesty, characteristics not often found with very successful practitioners. In the 19th century, that dreadful amateur, Sir Edmund Beckett, aka Lord Grimthorpe, the despoiler of St Alban’s Abbey, is an obvious […] More
The procedure for protecting buildings of historic or architectural interest is now 70 years old. What are the flaws of the current listing system and how can it be improved? England’s listed building system celebrated its 70th anniversary this year (the system varies across the UK) with a clutch of additions, such as a London […] More
The history of a nation, a city, or a culture, is written in stone in its cemeteries, and a society may be judged by the way it treats and remembers its dead. In England we have the churchyard – all too often these days with once-handsome headstones stacked irreverently around the perimeter – and the […] More
The homes of great men and women can sometimes tell us much more than words. Over the last two centuries, many have been deliberately preserved and have become shrines, open to the public and to worshippers. Above all, writers and poets have enjoyed this treatment, what with Burns’s cottage, Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, the ‘birthplace’ of […] More
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