CFA Voysey

THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF

C.F.A. VOYSEY E N G L I S H P I O N E E R M O D E R N I ST ARCH I TECT AND D ESI G NER

D AV I D C O LE

C.F.A. Voysey was one of the most influential British architects and designers practising during the two decades spanning the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. As an architect, he designed over sixty houses throughout England, almost all of which survive; these range from small cottages and gate lodges to suburban houses and substantial country house commissions. As a designer, he developed an eclectic range of objects, from wallpaper to cutlery, textiles to furniture, and war memorials to bookplates. C.F.A. Voysey is universally regarded as a preeminent figure of the Arts and Crafts movement, and one of the pioneers of the international Modern movement of architecture and design.

INTRODUCTION

As his practice flourished during the early 1890s through to the years leading up to the Great War, Voysey attracted considerable fame within the international design community in Britain and Europe. His influence also spread across the Atlantic to the next generation of American Arts and Crafts architects and early Modernists, notably Greene & Greene, Bernard Maybeck and Frank Lloyd Wright. Fundamental aspects of his design approach, including his unique style, were embraced by the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in Germany in the 1900s, the Dutch De Stijl group during the 1920s and, eventually, by the German Bauhaus movement. His influence as a pioneer Modernist, together with the legacy of his built work, designed objects and published design philosophies all survive to this day.

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was born in Yorkshire in 1857 and died in Winchester in 1941. Voysey’s formative design influences – that were to abide with him for a lifetime – included John Ruskin, who influenced him to look to nature for inspiration, and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, from whom he derived a dedication to Reductionist architecture whereby ornament and decoration were confined to the structural necessities of a building. His life spanned that remarkable period from the high Victorian age, through the prosperous glory days of Edwardian London, to the darker years of two World Wars and economic depression.

As an architect and designer he bridged the gap between the traditional Victorian movement and the future Modern movement of international architecture. In the case of Voysey’s architectural work, there is just cause to argue that in the history of English architecture, of all architects with a significant body of built work, C.F.A. Voysey was one of Britain’s most original architects.

This book concentrates solely on Voysey’s architectural work and, specifically, on his watercolour drawings. Over recent years many books have been published on Voysey,

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each analysing and illustrating his pre-eminence as a pioneer Modernist architect, and his career as the ‘complete designer’ of furniture, decorative material and objects. All have featured some reproductions of Voysey’s architectural drawings and provided insights into his design visions as they first appeared on paper. As yet, however, there has been no publication dedicated to the presentation of his drawings in detail, although Joanna Symonds’ Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects: C.F.A. Voysey, published in 1976, provides a complete record of all of Voysey’s drawings in the Royal Institute of British Architects Collection. The vast majority of Voysey’s surviving drawings are owned and held by the RIBA to whom, towards the end of his life, Voysey stipulated the donation of his own substantial collection. The drawings reproduced in this book are from that collection, with the kind permission of the RIBA. The case for Voysey as a pioneer of modern design was first made widely, late in Voysey’s own lifetime, by one of the most revered English and international design writers of the time, Nikolaus Pevsner, in his landmark book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, published in 1936. Ironically it was an earlier book, Das Englische Haus, published in 1904 and written by a German, Hermann Muthesius – a cultural attaché to the German Embassy in London and of a generation more contemporary to Voysey – who first published an expansive opinion of Voysey’s brilliance and originality to a German readership. Today, many decades after the claims and observations of Pevsner and Muthesius, and with the benefit of a knowledge of the course of Modern architecture, a broader appreciation of the aspects of Voysey’s work that mark him as a pioneer may be formed. The first of these aspects is that Voysey was one of the earliest architects to take on the design of all things in the home as well as the design of the house itself, and thus he regarded himself as a complete artist-architect-designer. The second aspect was his call to architects for design ‘simplicity’ and ‘individuality’, which he practised in his own work. The third aspect lies in his built forms and architectural language, particularly the basic rectangular built form, devoid of superfluous ornament, and its plain white wall surfaces pierced with horizontal bands of windows – all elements that were subsequently embraced as founding principles of Modern architecture.

C.F.A. Voysey has been said to have single-handedly invented an entire style of English domestic residential architecture.

In this sense he may justifiably be regarded as more of an ‘inventor’ than an ‘innovator’. Voysey’s style was to become, if not a blueprint, a form of ‘pattern book’ for the proliferation

of countless thousands of suburban white-painted houses built between the World Wars throughout Britain and, to a lesser extent, the USA (in particular California), as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In a way, Voysey created a pattern book for himself by repeatedly using a series of distinctive architectural motifs that would become his trademark. Early in his career Voysey drew up his inventory of architectural devices, which he steadfastly used and reused in subtly different arrangements and combinations. Despite this repetitive architectural vocabulary, his work attained an extraordinary degree of freshness and individuality in each commission. Voysey’s design approach began with the simplicity of the built form – usually a plain rectangular plan with minimal subordinating projecting elements; he also adopted simple L-shaped forms, and U-shaped or courtyard plan forms, depending on the functional imperatives. Popular conceptions of Voysey’s trademarks focus on his details – delicately curved iron eaves brackets, battered wall buttresses, sweeping slate roofs and expansive white rough cast walls pierced with smooth-sawn honey-coloured sandstone blocks, surrounding gridded horizontal bands of vertical casement windows hooded with bright orange terracotta stringcourses.

It is a palette invented by Voysey and one that has been much imitated. There is both reassuring order and deliberate asymmetry, and a contrast and combination of colour, tone and texture that is stark and subtle. Voysey’s masterful composition of his own inventory of architectural devices is the very essence of his manner. The presentation of this manner, through his drawings, is the essential purpose of this book.

Voysey’s drawings are meticulous and precise (as was the man himself), yet despite this precision, they simultaneously possess a soft aura and lightness of being. The character of a Voysey watercolour is as distinctive as the aesthetic of a Voysey house – this relationship and recall between drawing and built work resounds as strongly in Voysey’s work as it does for any other architect.

It is Voysey’s individuality and career-long consistency of style that give justification to the claim that Voysey is one of Britain’s most original architects. Of Voysey’s contemporaries, only Charles Rennie Mackintosh displayed a similar level of originality (although, unfortunately, Mackintosh had nowhere near the same output as Voysey).

There have been numerous great British architects who have been more prolific, more intellectual, and indeed more brilliant – of his contemporaries, conspicuously

RIGHT C.F.A. Voysey, photographed in 1930

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ABOVE Houses, Whitwood, Yorkshire, 1905. Voysey designed a street of terrace housing for the owners of the colliery Henry Briggs Son & Co. It was built to provide accommodation for the employees of the company. The above design illustrates Voysey’s use of repeating modules in an a-b-b-a rhythm.

Edwin Lutyens and previously Richard Norman Shaw. There have been architects who have embraced new technology and construction techniques to a greater degree than Voysey; there have been many more architects who have been richer and more diverse in their architectural catalogue than Voysey. Few, however, could be said to have matched Voysey for originality. Even considering the genius of Wren and Hawksmoor, their own great originality remained largely subordinate to the precedents of the European Baroque and its own incomparably original exponents.

To appreciate Voysey’s work, one must also appreciate the nature of the man, and the formative influences that

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shaped him. These began in childhood with his private tuition education by his Church of England minister father who, before Voysey was twelve years of age, was expelled from the Church for arguing against eternal damnation which, together with his extensive reading of Pugin and Ruskin, forged a deep sense of moral truth in Voysey and in his design philosophies. Throughout his career he strived for fitness in his designs in the Gothic Revival traditions of Pugin, and he practised a holistic approach where every part of the building and its contents were designed to create a unified whole. Notwithstanding the moral convictions of his work, from very early in his career in private practice,

may be drawn between Voysey and each of these exceptional architects. Although Voysey’s originality surpassed theirs, it is undeniable that he trailed these architects in some other respects. Few architects of any era could match Lutyens for both, paradoxically, the sheer delight of his architectural witticisms and the eloquent intellectual references in his work.

Both Webb and Lethaby applied and employed uniquely local materials and craftsmanship in their designs to a greater degree than was apparent in Voysey’s more consistent style, although it is perhaps in Webb’s philosophy of design that Voysey may most closely be aligned as an Arts and Crafts kindred spirit. Baillie-Scott’s work, although influenced heavily by Voysey in its external rendering treatments and internal motifs, attained a remarkable level of ingenuity and innovation in its space planning, and in its consideration of the occupant’s lifestyle. Compared with the best of his contemporaries, Voysey’s work may be said to have lacked flair. Indeed, his architectural designs and textiles have been said to possess a certain naive quality; this is perhaps a consequence of his quest for the simple and the pure, together with his Ruskinian tendencies, that resulted in a reverence of nature and moral truth. It is easy to see the ‘Voysey house’ as epitomising the archetypal child’s drawing of a cosy family house – with its stout smoking chimneys, gridded windows and wide welcoming front door. Nevertheless, the playfulness of some of his architectural devices does appear naive in comparison to the architectural games of his great contemporary Edwin Lutyens, which were played out on an altogether higher intellectual plane. Whereas Lutyens explored political metaphor and Renaissance proportioning systems in his work with wit and panache – such as in his great houses Marshcourt and Heathcote – Voysey confined himself to decorative quirks, such as caricaturising his client’s head as a gargoyle or sundial profile.

Voysey was an extremely adept self-publicist and marketer of his work, whereby he was able to successfully ingratiate himself to a number of publishers and editors of the architectural and general design press who supported his ambitions. Two magazines were crucial in initially gaining the young architect a profile, The British Architect, and in particular the new magazine at the time, The Studio.

Throughout his professional life Voysey had parallel careers; he was both an architect and a decorative designer, although it would be fair to say that his priority was architecture. He started designing textiles and wallpapers early in his career while still articled to J.P. Seddon, and later to George Devey,

and for the first few years of his architectural practice; he then resumed his decorative design work much later during the twenty-five-year period that followed the decline of his architectural practice, beginning in the years leading up to World War I. Voysey was a supremely talented and prolific decorative designer, whom Pevsner characterised in Pioneers of the Modern Movement as the 20th-century successor to William Morris. Many of Voysey’s decorative fabric and wallpaper designs are still produced to this day.

Voysey’s most notable Arts and Crafts architectural contemporaries were Philip Webb, William Lethaby, Edwin Lutyens and Mackay Hugh Baillie-Scott. Particular parallels

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Voysey’s practice was extraordinarily prolific from 1890–1905, with some fifty major commissions built over this period. Yet this flowering of architectural fame and success was to be short-lived, as public taste for the Arts and Crafts evaporated almost overnight, and with it much of Voysey’s ongoing client base. Despite this shift in public taste to a grander, more Classical style of architecture – and in part because of it – the last ten years leading up to the outbreak of the Great War were boom years for Britain’s residential architecture; but not for Voysey, at least not to the same degree as the previous ten years. It has been suggested that Voysey became incapable or unwilling to adapt his style to changes in public taste (towards a more Classical style), or to compromise his trenchant Gothic Revival philosophies for which he had long crusaded

The Art and Architecture of C.F.A. Voysey

English pioneer modernist architect and designer David Cole C.F.A. Voysey is regarded as one of the pioneers of the Modern movement of architecture and design, and one of the most influential and important of all the 19th and early 20th century British designers. He designer over 60 houses throughout England, from small cottages and gate lodges to suburban houses and substantial country house commissions.

Voysey was the ‘complete designer’ – he designed all manner of objects, from wallpaper to cutlery, textiles to furniture, war memorials to stained glass windows, and bookplates.

As a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain his fame and influence extended to the United States to the next generation of American Arts and Crafts architects and early Modernists, notably Greene & Greene, Bernard Maybeck and Frank Lloyd Wright.

In Europe, fundamental aspects of Voysey’s design approach were embraced by the Dutch De Stijl group; during the 1920s, and eventually also by the German Bauhaus movement.

Voysey was renowned also for his beautiful watercolour drawings. He retained the vast majority of his own drawings throughout his career, and late in life arranged for these to be donated to the Royal Institute of British Architects.

David Cole is a specialist in the design of large-scale and mixed-use projects. His projects include the No.1 Martin Place redevelopment of the Sydney GPO, the Melbourne Park Hyatt Hotel, Channel Seven in Melbourne’s Docklands, the Christchurch Art Gallery, LaLaport Shopping Centre in Yokohama, and a number of Melbourne residential apartment towers including Victoria Point Docklands, Quay West and Lucient St Kilda Road. David is currently leading the design team on the commercial office and retail AomiQ project, currently the largest project under construction in Tokyo, Japan. Other current projects that David is leading include the new 5-star hotel and residential apartment tower at 27 Little Collins Street Melbourne, and the new Silver Leaf and Richmond Gardens residential developments in Melbourne. David Cole has been an avid follower of the life and work of C.F.A. Voysey. His passion has translated into an exceptional, informative publication that includes a spectacular selection of Voysey’s original watercolour illustrations and current photographs of the houses.

ISBN 978 1 86470 604 8 Format 289mm x 376mm Binding Oxford hollow Frenchfold Pages 256 Illustrations Full colour In bookstores January 2015

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