Author Description

THE resuscitation of these half-dozen slightly connected essays, which Mr. Blomfield has collected from the Quarterly Review and the Architectural Review, and entitled "Studies in Architecture," results in an informing book which may be perused with profit by any intelligent reader, but especially by the professed student of architecture. Excepting the first essay, it is a book mainly about architects -certain architects as personalities seen through their architecture and their writings. To find the man in his architecture seems, according to the author, to be the problem for the critic. "After all," he says, "the vital interest of architecture is the human interest." To this point he addresses himself, aiming at recalling the fact that "architecture is a difficult art... not a mystery, but an expression of the human intelligence... capable of the same critical analysis as any other imaginative and intellectual effort." For shortcomings in this endeavor he pleads "the limited opportunity possible to a writer whose principal work lies elsewhere."Among the fifty illustrations are ten reproductions of sketches from Mr. Blomfield's own pencil, delightful in drawing and masterly in their handling. Some twenty more of the plates are from photographs, most of them excellent for their purpose. Addressed with more serious intent to architects, as experts in building-work, this book might be put into a higher category altogether; for it contains lessons that need to be driven home to architects in particular, and can be rightly enforced only by the authority of an architect. The first essay, entitled "Byzantium or Lombardy," opens with the remark that "modern architecture seems incapable of progress except in a circle." Having exhausted our classical tradition and got over our devotion to Gothic architecture, we now see men transferring their studies to the obscure period of post-Roman architecture "which preceded the art of mediaeval Europe."