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William Richard Lethaby and the ‘Holy Spirit’: A reappraisal of the Eagle Insurance Company building, Birmingham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Vaughan Hart
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Extract

Few, if any, of the passers-by in one of Birmingham’s quieter back streets might guess that one building embodies in its façade the aspirations of two major architectural and social movements. The Eagle Insurance Company building, Colmore Row, Birmingham (1900), by William Richard Lethaby, despite being central to the development of both the Arts and Crafts and Modern movements, has never received its full recognition, although in 1942 Nikolaus Pevsner hailed it as an early native example of the Modern movement. My purpose here is to reassess the façade of the ‘Eagle’ (Fig. 1), though not in terms of any art-historical style — Lethaby himself rejected the contemporary approach to architectural design based on historical styles — but instead within the context of Lethaby’s own theory of architecture, and his intellectual development. The Eagle façade resulted from a problem Lethaby posed in 1891 in one book, and which he ultimately solved in 1928 in another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 36 , 1993 , pp. 145 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1993

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References

Notes

1 Pevsner, Nikolaus, ‘Nine Swallows — No Summer’, Architectural Review, 91 (1941), 109–12 Google Scholar (p. 109). Pevsner offered two other buildings from 1900, Bulkeley Creswell’s Queensferry Factory in the Dee Estuary and Bateman and Bateman’s printing works for George Jones in Cornwall Street, Birmingham, which, like the Eagle, possessed ‘the spirit of the twentieth’.

2 Rubens, Godfrey, William Richard Lethaby, his Life and Work 1857-1931 (London, 1986), p. 144 Google Scholar, notes that it is claimed that ‘there is a third source for this design and layers of meaning that relate it to the whole tradition of Western architecture and to Near Eastern sun temples. This is a curious claim for a building which has frequently been labelled a harbinger of modern architecture.’ In his conclusion Rubens points out contradictions in Lethaby’s work but without explaining them as part of his development (p. 280). Davey, Peter, in Arts and Crafts Architecture (London, 1980), p. 126 Google Scholar, notes that the Eagle, ‘is also topped by mystic ornament: an eagle surrounded by circles and wavy lines — symbols of the sun and clouds. But below this deep cornice, the building is extraordinarily spare’.

3 Anscombe, Isabelle and Gere, Charlotte, Arts and Crafts (London, 1978)Google Scholar fail to point out the full implications of Lethaby’s Modernism, as does Peter Davey. Alternatively, Pevsner does not mention the Arts and Crafts tradition when categorizing Lethaby’s Eagle with other Modern movement buildings.

4 Lethaby, , ‘The English and French Renaissance’, The Architect, 29 (1883), 434–36 (p. 435)Google Scholar.

5 Adams, Maurice, Building News, 34 (1876), 23–56 (p. 23)Google Scholar.

6 Lethaby on Gimson, in Ernest Gimson, his Life and Work (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1924), p. 29.

7 Lethaby, , Architecture, Nature and Magic (London, 1928), p. 144 Google Scholar.

8 See C. G. Jung: Word and Image, ed. Jaffe, A. (Princeton, 1979), pp. 77–95 Google Scholar.

9 See The Builder, 62 (2 January 1892), p. ix, quoted and discussed along with other reviews by Godfrey Rubens in the introduction to the reprinted edition of Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (London, 1974).

10 Broch, Hermann, ‘Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit’, in Essays, 1 (Zurich, 1945), 43 Google Scholar.

11 Lethaby, , ‘Lecture on Modern Building Design’, The Builder, 69 (1895), 312–33 (p. 312)Google Scholar.

12 Lethaby, , Architecture (London, 1911), pp. 175–76 Google Scholar.

13 See Architecture, Nature and Magic, p. 146, where in conclusion Lethaby quotes from chapter 3 of Worringer’s, Wilhelm Form in Gothic (London, 1927 ed.)Google Scholar, ‘The Science of Art as Psychology’: art ‘reveals to us the actual psychology of mankind’.

14 See Rykwert, Joseph, The Necessity of Artifice (London, 1982), p. 68 Google Scholar.

15 For a discussion of symbolist art see Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (London, 1985), pp. 16–17 Google Scholar; see also Chasse, Charles, Le Mouvement symboliste dans l’art du XIX’ siècle (Paris, 1947)Google Scholar.

16 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, pp. 144-45.

17 Rykwert, Necessity of Artifice, p. 68.

18 Ibid., pp. 68-69, 93.

19 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, p. 146.

20 Quoted in Rubens, Lethaby, p. 89.

21 Muthesius, Hermann discussed the Eagle in vol. 2 of Die Englische Baukunst der Gegenwart (Leipzig and Berlin, 1900), p. 100 Google Scholar.

22 In Architecture (1911), p. 227, Lethaby notes on architectural proportion, ‘But all such ideas necessarily break down where buildings are more complex and are conditioned by other needs than that of attaining a sort of sacred perfection’.

23 Bound up with Lethaby’s expression of inability to cope with technical demands is a somewhat bitter rejection of the study of history itself, noted in Architecture (1911), p. 234, ‘It has been a wasteful system, too regardless of results, or too regardful of wrong results. It is absurd, for instance, that the writer should have been allowed to study cathedrals from Kirkwall to Rome and from Quimper to Constantinople. It would be far better to have an equivalent knowledge of steel and concrete construction’. Lethaby noted at the 1917 RIBA Conference that, ‘Modern architects have to deal with very complex and technical matters, the building in congested sites of great hotels, railway stations, factories, business premises, and the like, and for this it is clear to me that there must be highly organised scientific training.’ In ‘Education of the Architect’, RIBA Journal, 24 (1917), 110-252 (p. 252).

24 Lethaby, , ‘The Architecture of Adventure’, RIBA Journal, 17 (1910), 469–78 Google Scholar (p. 472), reprinted in Form in Civilization (London, 1922), p. 62.

25 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, p. 147.

26 A political theme can be identified in Lethaby’s later comments on ornamentation in Architecture, Nature and Magic, p. 145: ‘This is no small matter of choice and taste. I feel in my bones that it ministers to national decay.’

27 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, p. 147.

28 Ibid., p. 145.

29 Lethaby, ‘Education of the Architect’, p. 252.

30 Lethaby, ‘Architecture of Adventure’, p. 469.

31 Ibid.

32 Lethaby, Manifesto, The Modern Architecture Constructive Group (1923), point 5, reproduced in Rubens, Lethaby, Appendix A, pp. 295-97.

33 Lethaby, , ‘A National Architecture’, The Builder, 115 (1918), 213–441 (p. 261)Google Scholar.

34 Ibid.

35 Corbusier, Le, Towards a New Architecture, transl. Etchells, Frederick (London, 1927), p. 89 Google Scholar.

36 Lewis, Percy Wyndham, The Caliph’s Design (London, 1919), p. 23 Google ScholarPubMed.

37 Lethaby, Form in Civilization, p. 46.

38 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, p. 15.

39 Gill, Eric, Autobiography (London, 1940), p. 136 Google Scholar.