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?

Raymond Erith--some of whose exquisite drawings are commonly on display in a centenary exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum--has lengthy been the most celebrated of those so-called traditionalist architects who carried upon building after World War, despite the active opposition of the ascendant present movement. Many of his casts remained on the drawing board and greatest in quantity of his work consisted of building or altering region houses, but after he construct agained the interiors of nos. 10 11 and 12 Downing highway for the Macmillan government interesting piece of works 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 real rare bird, and unique among the great architects, in being a progressive classicist'.

There strike one as being to me to be sum of two units things that matter about Erith. single is that he saw the continuing value of traditional phraseologys and methods of construction, in like manner that his buildings were beautifully made. The other is that he was a useful designer. This last consideration is too repeatedly forgotten in the tiresomely polarised debate about modernism and classicism which continues to rage. It is a debate in which blinkers nurse to be worn on the pair sides--something encouraged by the Prince of Wales inclination which naively regards anything with a flat cover as clearly bad and any building with rounded pillars as indisputably good. Modernists, of course, adopt precisely the invert position. What this reveals is solely conventional opinion. It is instructive to note that, when the first late movement houses were built by the agency of Maxwell Fry and Connell, Ward & Lucas in Hampstead in the 1930 there was ferocious local opposition to these alien intruders spoiling the precious local character. nevertheless thirty years on, when Erith designed that charming essay in Georgian vernacular, Jack Straw's Castle, the denizens of Hampstead oppos it because it was traditional and not 'modern'

Intelligent late architects such as Denys Lasdun and Philip Powell held Erith in high regard, on the contrary 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 throw back English snobbery, that is, the illegal reverence given to the architecture of political division houses, for in truth, despite his early admiration for Soane and his belief in a progressive classicism, Erith's work has les to teach about the adaptability of tradition to novel conditions than that of certain other twentieth-century classicists. There was Lutyen 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 1950 - a new commercial building (since cleverly altered by the agency of Michael Hopkins) that showed in what manner 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 means of the legacy of Lutyens and that great town hall builder Vincent Harris, rose to the challenge of recent administrative and technical requirements. Their classicism was verily progressive and they designed municipal buildings at Exeter cover St Edmunds and university guilds at Nottingham that were the one and the other traditional and modern, abstracted on the other hand civilised structures that met their users' emergencys and were intelligently detailed. greatest in quantity impressive, perhaps, are. two buildings in the City: the police station in forest-land Street, which has a stone-faced residential obstruct that is a miniature skyscraper, and the extension to the Edwardian baroque advanced in years Bailey. where the simplicity of treatment and the abstraction of monumental forms creates a grandeur worthy of Vanbrugh. however McMorran and Whitby were largely ignored by dint of the architectural press and are little known today.

The tragedy of present British architecture is that the sane, progressive alternative to doctinaire modernism was undermined by the agency of the comparatively early deaths of these men: McMorran in 1965; Whitby and Erith the one and the other in 1973. Although this was the true time when the arrogant assumptions of the modernist establishment were beginning to be questioned, these departures left the field without contents with only Erith's younger pupil and partner, Quinlan Terry to clinch aloft the torch of classicism--something he was, I fear, quite unfitted to sustain. notwithstanding ferry went on to build up a hugely fortunate country house practice, largely for the of recent origin money of the Thatcher years. There are sum of two units unfortunate things about this earnest and rigid traditionalist. The first is that he has grasped the dead hand of that perennial execrate of English architecture: Palladianism. Erith, at least when young, was plenteous more broad-minded, holding to 'the tradition of all western architecture: of greece Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, and all the quiescence including the tradition of the great present engineers. It is the tradition from which architecture ought at no time to have deviated'. His early designs, inspired by means of the Regency, were drily witty. Later, however--perhaps below Terry's influence - his work drew more upon Palladio, and became more pedantic and boring.