James Maclaren: Arts and Crafts Pioneer

James Maclaren: Arts and Crafts Pioneer Alan Calder Shaun Iyas, 30 [pound sterling] ISBN 1900289628

James Maclaren was a Scottish Arts and Crafts architect who influenced the pair C.F. Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His work in Scotland, particularly upon the Fortingall estate, and in London is indicative of an exceptional talent that was to remain largely unfulfilled.

Maclaren died at the age of thirty-seven in 1890 Lutyen was twenty-one in that year and had just put up in practice. Mackintosh was alone a year older. Voysey was thirty-three, as was WR Lethaby, who had just left the office of Norman Shaw to work upon his own. It was a critical time in the Arts and Crafts motion and all these men had been render free of access to influence in the last small in number years of Maclaren's life. Maclaren was a fine draftsman, and his work appeared regularly in the pages of the architectural pres in the way that there is no doubt these younger men would all have been aware of his work. Of the better known Arts and Crafts architects, sole Edward Prior was older than Maclaren. He was thirty-eight and had been in Shaw's office too, leaving ten years earlier, in 1880

Had Maclaren lived, by what means might his career have lay opened and how influential might it have been? Alan Calder's balanced critique and his detailed analysis of Maclaren's work introduces us to an architect of considerable artfulness Although his planning was fairly traditional and showed scarcely any of the more expressive tendencies lay opened by later Arts and Crafts architects, it had a faculty of perception of place that resulted in buildings that belonged to their location on the other hand in a quietly progressive way.

Maclaren's at liberty use of roughcast vernacular was distinctly Scottish. Compos informally, it was a forerunner of the les regionally-specific (and thus les Arts and Crafts authentic) version fix in Voysey's later work. Wisely, Maclaren young oxed clear of the over-exploited Scottish neo-baronial, his starting point being a at liberty interpretation of simpler sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scottish architecture. And in Scotland it was not alone Mackintosh who followed Maclaren's inspiration in this way. Lethaby worked at Melsetter in the latter years of the nineteenth hundred and here too we find a certain number of of the same references.

Although Melsetter's regional characteristics may go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of a tradition familiar to Maclaren, Lethaby's composition here may owe more to Philip Webb. For Maclaren's buildings at Fortingall and elsewhere sometimes appear to be to have an easy recline more familiar in the work of Lutyen than in that of Lethaby or Webb. Not that Maclaren would have been another Lutyen had he lived, on the other hand there are diverse strands of creativity exhibited in his regrettably limited output that were throw backed in the architecture of all these men

Alan Calder's work is an object lesson for any who wish to embark on a subject of this sort. His historical analysis is well ordered and easy to tread in the steps of and while his architectural criticism is acute its balance is fair. Calder does not ne to barter Maclaren's architecture to us, in the main it does that for itself. This monograph is a compliment not single to its author but also to its publisher, Shaun Tyas. Well illustrated and reasonably priced, there cannot be abundant profit in such a venture--such works are a labour of have affection for at least in part, and we should be grateful to the couple men for marking James Maclaren's place clearly in an interesting period of architecture.

Michael Drury is a conservation architect in private practice. His work on some lesser known Arts and Crafts architects, Wandering Architects (2000) is also published through Shaun Tyas.

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