Alexander Ashworth

DPhil Research Topic

Authenticity and Architecture: Client Influence on Design and Restoration in Edwin Lutyens’s Vernacular Revival Houses, 1896-1933

Supervisors: David Frazer Lewis and William Whyte

Current scholarship in the fields of architectural history and cultural heritage has underestimated the influence of clients on Edwin Lutyens’s design process and restoration approach in his vernacular revival domestic architecture. That some clients insisted upon historic and archaeological authenticity of detail is important because it challenges both the conventional understanding of Arts-and-Crafts architecture as rich in imaginative eclecticism, and the emerging conservation movement’s opposition to like-for-like reinstatement. There were at least three conflicting cults of authenticity operating in parallel in the period.

The client-initiated quest for authenticity has been overlooked in the historiography as has an evaluation of the wider contribution to historic building conservation practice made by one of Lutyens’s clients Nathaniel Lloyd (1867 – 1933). My research sets out to correct the critical neglect by building on my masters level dissertation at Oxford which undertook the first detailed reconstruction of the design and restoration process at Great Dixter (1910-1912) and revealed an intriguing series of parallels between Lloyd’s quest for authenticity at Lutyens’s last vernacular house and the influence of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) at Lutyens’s first fully developed expression of his vernacular style at Munstead Wood (1896-1897) an insight overlooked in the vast literature devoted to Lutyens’s career from first to last.

My other interests include Anglo-Saxon scholarship in Tudor England in relation to law, liberty and prerogative; architectural and design semiotics; the moral dimension of architecture; and the genius loci as a sophisticated response to landscape and setting.

Following a career in graphic and architectural design, I returned to academia in 2023.