Nashdom and Great Maytham represent a side of Lutyens’s mature talent that follows rather directly from Webb’s Smeaton Manor of the seventies (Plate [102A]). The work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and above all that at Delhi, represents another side. On the one side he had a few worthy rivals: Leonard A. S. Stokes (1858-1925)[[532]] was a more adventurous architect than he around 1900, with some leaning towards the Art Nouveau; Shaw’s pupil Newton was almost as competent at Neo-Georgian work. Those who tried to rival him on the other side, however, Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), a pupil of Norman Shaw, and Sir Herbert Baker (1862-1946), a pupil of Ernest George, hardly deserve mention, even though their work bulks very large on the London scene.

Blomfield’s watered-down version of Shaw’s quadrant façade of the Piccadilly Hotel, carried out in the twenties, has been mentioned. Better examples of what may be called in W. S. Gilbert’s terms his ‘not too French, French’ academicism face Piccadilly Circus. But his pretensions to cosmopolitanism, although based on a very considerable knowledge of French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture, did not serve him as well as Lutyens’s purely English background in continuing along the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ line of Shaw’s late work.

Baker’s outrageous rape of Soane’s masterpiece, the Bank of England, carried out over the years 1921-37, has also been mentioned; it was literally a fate worse than death. Despite a half-hearted decision to preserve a good deal of the relatively unimportant exterior, the Tivoli Corner was pointlessly stripped of its idiosyncratic crown, presumably in the name of Baker’s superior ‘taste’. His South Africa House of 1935, moreover, all but ruins Trafalgar Square.

Lutyens’s Midland Bank of 1924, near the Bank of England in Poultry, like Baker’s bank almost a skyscraper in size if not in height, at least required the destruction of no earlier work of distinction and is undoubtedly more consistently and personally designed. Yet the cliff-like massiveness of its walls, with even less evidence of the underlying structural skeleton than in office buildings of this period by American architects, is almost as anti-urbanistic as Baker’s Bank of England. Because of the very narrow streets of the area, the filling up of the City of London with such structures, very few of them even of this degree of intrinsic interest, was a tragedy of the twenties that even bombing did not put right. The superiority of Corbett’s Bush House, not in the rather flat detailing but in the exploitation of the fine site at the foot of Kingsway, and even in the politeness of the plain foil it offers to the Baroque elaboration of Gibbs’s St Mary-le-Strand, is very notable.

Lutyens’s other big Midland Bank buildings, one of 1928 in Leadenhall Street in the City and one of 1929 in King Street in Manchester, are not much of an improvement over that in Poultry. However, his elegant little Midland Bank of 1922 in Piccadilly in front of Wren’s St James’s is a rich and inventive exercise in the vein of Wren built of brick and stone. Anachronistic as such a design must be considered, the verve of the pastiche nevertheless has a distinct appeal, like a plausibly realistic setting on the stage.

Lutyens’s most successful big business building is doubtless Britannic House of 1924-7. This profits from its site between Finsbury Circus and Moorgate Street, the curve of the Circus giving to the eastern front a certain major Baroque drama that is echoed in the versatile play with seventeenth-eighteenth-century motifs in the detailing. But one may well prefer the massively mock-Egyptian effect of Adelaide House by London Bridge, built by Sir John Burnet & Tait in 1924-5. This, at least, makes some approach to the new ideals of the Continent in these years. Burnet, moreover, had been for decades one of the most competent British practitioners in a local version of the international Beaux-Arts mode, as his King Edward VII wing of the British Museum of 1904 notably illustrates. Three years later Tait was the first English-born architect[[533]] to attempt to build in the International Style, as has been mentioned earlier. The closest Lutyens came to the Continental modes of the twenties was in his public housing.

Public housing in England between the wars was generally rather routine in design despite the statistical importance of its social achievement, lacking either the drama of the Dutch or the restraint of the Scandinavians. On the one occasion when Lutyens turned his attention to this field, on the Grosvenor Estate in Westminster in 1928, he succeeded beyond all expectation. The bold device of chequering all the façades of his blocks of flats in alternate oblongs of brickwork, plain stucco panels, and windows is somewhat inhuman in scale but notably effective. The contrast is striking to the work of the twenties by the London County Council Architect’s Office. In that a type of design not unsuited to semi-detached houses in middle-class suburbs was spread thin over vast many-storeyed masses.

Lutyens, one feels, in a different time and place—a generation earlier in England, say, or a generation later—might have been a greater architect. But even as his career actually worked out, he is not unworthy to occupy the place given him here as the ‘last traditionalist’. Since his death there has not been, either in England or elsewhere, any traditional or even semi-traditional building of consequence, unless one wishes to consider Perret’s work at Le Havre in the latter category.

The traditional architecture of the first third of the twentieth century in Italy and France, headquarters in so many ways of the major architectural traditions of the western world, is disappointing beside that of the countries discussed so far. In the case of France, the situation is confused by the modulation of Perret’s style towards a semi-traditional Classicism which, by the thirties, official and academic taste was ready to meet half-way. In Italy Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960), the son of the architect of the Academy of Fine Arts in the Via Nazionale in Rome, always had more vitality than the French of his generation other than Perret. From the new città bassa of Bergamo, for which he won the competition in 1907 and which was executed in 1922-4, through his general responsibility for the Terza Roma, Mussolini’s vast project for a new capital between old Rome and Ostia which was to have opened with an exhibition in 1942, there is a certain assurance and amplitude of scale lacking in most contemporary work in France. Mussolini, in the middle years of Fascism, was not averse to modern architecture, as we have seen. When, under German influence, he began to turn against the International Style the choice of Piacentini to set a neo-imperial pace was as natural as Hitler’s return to the modes of twenty years earlier in Germany. Moreover, from the public buildings of Bergamo through the ‘New Towns’ below Rome—Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, etc., mostly destroyed during the Second World War—to the arcaded cube of La Padulla’s Palace of Italian Civilization at the Terza Roma, nicknamed by Italians the ‘Square Colosseum’, fine materials, clean if familiar proportions, and excellent craftsmanship provide certain lasting qualities not unworthy of Italian national traditions. Where Fascist work is interpolated in an earlier urbanistic scheme, as along the Via Roma in Turin between the Piazza San Carlo and the Piazza Carlo Felice, the new buildings of 1938—here by Piacentini—fit as well with the seventeenth-century buildings of the one as with the nineteenth-century ones of the other. For all their obviousness, moreover, the colonnades of the Via Roma, all of polished granite monoliths, have a truly Roman scale and dignity. Even the Square Colosseum has a Chirico-like obsessive force, like something out of a dream; while the big unfinished structures around it, only now being completed, are not altogether without virtues to balance the mid century conventionality of those that have lately risen beside them.

To pursue the subject of traditional architecture further would be merely to explore what can now be seen to have been not so much a cul-de-sac as a road without a goal. The standards of traditionalism—standards of ‘taste’, of ‘literacy’, of ingenious adaptation—were still on the whole nineteenth-century ones. Yet down into the thirties, traditional buildings were the big trees in the forest of twentieth-century architecture; with the rise of a new range of giants in the forest, the seedlings from which they grew seem now to have been more significant: Asplund’s Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and his Crematorium there of 1935-40 tend to obscure our vision of his earlier Library, although that is perhaps finer considered absolutely. So also the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society skyscraper of 1932, so clearly the immediate ancestor of those built in the last decade, draws attention away from the Woolworth Building. In England continuity has been so completely broken that it is hard to realize how much the ‘Mannerist’ façade-treatment of Drake & Lasdun’s tall housing slabs of 1946-56 on the Paddington Estate has in common with Lutyens’s chequered Grosvenor Estate blocks of thirty years ago. However the future may evaluate the achievements of the traditional architects of the early twentieth century, the chapter is now closed.