I went to the second launch of my nephew George’s book, The Romance of Classicism, in which he talked about his work as a designer of new country houses in a self consciously Palladian style, but with an occasional dash of Soane.
I kept on thinking of a famous article by Howard Colvin on ‘Gothic Survival and Gothick Revival’: that is, how much of his approach to classicism is the survival of the tradition and how much a conscious revival ?
He started his talk with an image of his grandfather, Raymond Erith’s, house at King’s Walden Bury, a statement of classicism in 1969. Erith was trained at the AA from 1921 to 1926, so just pre hard-line modernism. He then designed, mostly, in a style of stripped down classicism, as in his Provost’s Lodge for Queen’s College, Oxford and Great House, Dedham.
So, George’s work could be – maybe is – survival, not revival.
