Lutyens and the Modern Movement

Book excerpt: In the exclusionary world of high modern architecture, it is curious to discover that two icons of the movement both admired the work of Sir Edwin Lutyens - an architect who had little or no interest in modernism. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright created buildings that are very different, and the two men did not even like each other, but they shared a fascination for Lutyens' distinctively non-international style architecture. This polemical text is an account of why this occured. By exposing common aesthetic and structural themes in the architecture of these three giants, including the cities of New Delhi and Chandigahr, in India, the author explains why Wright and Le Corbusier may have had more in common with Lutyens than with many of their modern peers. The primary text in the book was written in 1967 and was published in a student journal in the U.S. with a small circulation. It has remained an underground classic since then - perhaps because its contents are so disruptive of our current views of 20th century modernism.