By Gavin Stamp; 2009 (reissue); 192 pp.
Random House; Hardcover

Like his American contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, British architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944) began his career in the 1890s designing in the Arts and Crafts style, skillfully adapting traditional vernacular forms to 20th-century requirements. Shortly thereafter, however, he moved toward Classicism, with results stunningly represented by his 1912 design for the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, India – although here, too, he continued to adapt the local vernacular, installing a dome inspired by a Buddhist Stupa (or commemorative mound) atop a Classical rotunda. In 1889, Luytens’s friend, renowned garden designer Gertrude Jeckyll, had fortuitously introduced the young architect to the founder of the great British magazine, Country Life; as Lutyens’s career flourished, the influential periodical published photographs of almost every building he designed. In this study, two hundred beautiful full-page black and white images from the magazine illustrate 22 country houses, selected by architectural historian Gavin Stamp to represent the full range of Lutyens’s talent. Stamp’s informative text provides an outstanding complement to the photographs.