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C.F. Annesley Voysey : the man and his work
INDEX OF PARTS
Part 2, 4th February 1927
Part II (The Architect & building news, 4th February 1927, pp.219-21)
When Voysey in 1884 set up in practice on his own account, he being then – to be exact – in his twenty-fifth year [sic, should be twenty-sixth], he did so in the blind faith that has justified many others in taking that step, bolstered by one small commission. This was for a little house. It was never built, because the builder’s estimate was too high, or, possibly, because the architect’s was too low. At any rate, the proposal fell to the ground, and I have to exhibit a young architect, newly married, with no work nor any prospect of work to come, who, according to his own accounts, had no definite architectural ideas to market, no sense of any individual point of view or of anything within him which clamoured, or even reached out, to express itself. He had at that time designed no fabrics or wallpapers, nor had it ever occurred to him to engage in such work; and he had, with the one abortive exception above mentioned, designed no house or other building, all such attempts having been directed to assimilating the ideas of those who employed him, which is a very different matter from finding your own ideas and accepting responsibility for your own discretion. One active step only did he take to establish himself in practice, and I mention it because, so far as my knowledge or imagination can inform me, no other architect in the history of the world has even taken that particular step: he intervened to restrain his father from writing to family friends and well-wishers in the interests of his newly-constituted architect son. This is exactly the kind of tangential action his friends are never surprised at in Voysey; but there was nothing Quixotic in the step he took: he had his usual logical reason for what he did informed by a deeper wisdom than directs the conduct of most young men, or of old ones either, for that matter. Voysey’s sense of the position would be that it is the Almighty who rules, and not Man, and that it was his part, as an architect, to take his chance, perform to the best of his ability what he was called on to do, and abide by the good or bad fortune which came to him. That would be his wisdom; his logic would show him that a client chooses his architect because he likes the man and his work, and has confidence in his taste and discretion, and that being so, he will be likely to accept the advice given him and be satisfied with the results; but if he has his architect thrust upon him, or employs him to favour a friend, or as an act of patronage, he will be likely to challenge his opinion on all points, and view the finished work only as a storehouse of regrets.
Thus, then, we have a very young man of seven years’ experience as pupil and assistant, with no work done or to do, no connection to look to, no proof of any special capacity to express architectural ideas nor of ideas to so express, with a wife, an office, and the stark necessity of earning a living facing him. What result is to be expected? Such a case is of general interest, for there are at any time thousands of young men tempting Providence in the same kind of way, or spurring their courage to the adventure. I do not know what Voysey expected – he is not the sort of man who lives in anticipations; but he certainly never dreamed that in five years he would find himself with his whole energies absorbed in a considerable practice, and fast approaching the time when he was to do his biggest and most important works with a rapidly increasing vogue, a growing fame spreading even to the Continent, and known as a man whose work signalised, not merely new ideas, but new principles and angles of view, and who was exerting a profound influence upon the designs of the younger generation of architects; yet this is precisely what happened. And how did it happen? The facts seems to me remarkable.
As he had no work, Voysey entered for a competition. In this he had no such success as has marked the career of his son, Mr. Charles Cowles-Voysey. The competition was that for the Admiralty Buildings behind Whitehall. Voysey made the whole of the drawings himself, and the award was given to Messrs. Leaning & Leaning, whose design, translated into relatively imperishable brick and stone, now sets off the less prodigious, though not generally less esteemed, frontage of the Horse Guards; and that was that! It was then he was led by a quite accidental circumstance to turn his attention to wallpaper and woven fabric design, but of this matter I shall speak in another place. He almost at once obtained commissions for such designs, and it was this work that kept him on his legs during the first few years, and has employed him, in some degree, to this day. His first architectural design was of a castle in the air: a small house for himself. This house was never built, but the drawings were published in “The British Architect,” and their publication led to a first commission – a private house in Warwickshire. That work led to other commissions for houses, and they in turn to others, and thus from his first executed design nearly the whole of his early practice derived.
It is very unusual in architecture for a man of thirty to hold first place in his own particular field of activity, and, so far as I know, quite unprecedented when due, not to any one signal achievement, but to recognition of individuality in design and originality in thought. To find a parallel we have to turn to instances of early literary eminence, which is more common because the vehicle of expression in literature does not depend, as does architecture, upon a special and elaborate technical education. Like Kipling and Dickens before him, Voysey dropped plumb upon new ground which he had entirely to himself, and which would seem to have been standing vacant until he occupied it. Thirty-five years ago, and for long afterwards, any number of the technical journals which contained one of Voysey’s designs was a memorable number which was eagerly passed from hand to hand among those in whose care the future of architecture reposed, and who were, as it happened, the designer’s contemporaries. Mr. A.G. Penty, in a recent article, paid tribute to the force of Voysey’s initiative and the fruition of his ideas in the present day vernacular of domestic architecture; and Mr. George Drysdale, in an address delivered by him a short time ago on Leonard Stokes, told his hearers that the minute attention to details which characterised that architect’s work was due to his admiration for Voysey’s methods. I do not refer to those acknowledgments to laud Voysey, but to remind those readers who are not old enough to remember the day when Voysey burst upon the scenes, that the thing which distinguished his designs was no mere matter of variations in the features and vogues of building at that time exploited by architects, but a new, comprehensive idea; a new address to the subject, a new spirit, a new impulse. Those who can look back will recall not particularly the picturesqueness and the engaging sentiment and simplicity which distinguished Voysey’s domestic design in comparison with what others were then doing but rather the freshness of the whole thing, the freedom from conventions, the closeness to reality, the intimate sentiment of home and of English domestic life. The neat logical forethought shown in the plans was concerned not with what people had learnt to expect in a house, but with the practical needs of those who were going to live in it. Voysey himself disclaims that there were any directive principles which guided him to these results. He declares that he had none. He regards himself merely as a product of his times; what he did was, he holds, the result of solving practical problems in the light of the general needs of the time and the particular requirements of his clients. He does not say, but leaves it to me to point out, that he signalised himself by discerning what those needs were and in dissociating himself from habits of thought and conventions of arrangement which enthralled others. The fact that Voysey denies any directive principle in his work, and holds himself to be only the product of his times, does not alter the fact that the directive principle was there, and that if Voysey was a product of his times, his times, as exemplified in the architecture of small houses, were a product of Voysey. The directive principles involved were, in fact, Voysey’s own unconquerable and most unaccommodating prejudices; and it is because the directive principles were thus an instructive impulse, and not assumed, that he is unconscious of them: the thing that it was natural for him to do appears to him to belong to his times because it was the result of his reaction to the times; but the thing it was natural for Voysey to do was very different from what it was then natural for others to do who were facing the same problems, and who also were products of their time. The fact that a large number of Voysey’s architectural ideas and devices, and the whole body of the teaching which his work represents, have been assimilated into the daily practice of architects throughout the country, and has established with them an intimate relation to detail which previously did not exist, does not mark Voysey’s ideas as being so much a product of his time as instructive and reformative of his time. This is not to say the characteristic features of Voysey’s designs have been perpetuated; his individuality is so strong that any attempt to imitate him is to produce a work which will at once be challenged as a reproduction, and it is in the much more important matter of fundamental principles that his influence reigns. An exception has, however, to be made in the case of a firm of London upholsters and furnishers, who caused a model of one of Voysey’s houses to be made from published drawings, and set up in their showroom to enforce a tempting offer to customers to build, to the esteemed order of any of them, a “Voysey house.” I will mention that this matter has been in my knowledge for many years, and was not referred to by Voysey when I pumped him for the purpose of these articles. In the next number I will say something of small house design as Voysey found it, and as he left it.
Combe Down, Bath
[Now known as Lodge Style. Designed in 1909 for T.S. Cotterell.]
Moor Crag, Windermere
[Designed in 1898 for J.W. Buckley.]
No.24 Old Bond Street, London
[Alterations and additions to existing shop for J. & E. Atkinson in 1911; interiors since stripped out.]