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The Art and Architecture of C F A Voysey: English pioneer modernist architect and designer . By Cole David . 289mm. Pp 256, many ills, mostly in col. Images Publishing , Mulgrave, Victoria , 2015. ISBN 9781864706048 . £50 (hbk).
Reviews
The title of this book makes the spirits sink, and they sink even lower when, in the Introduction, we are told that Voysey 'is universally regarded as ... one of the pioneers of the international Modern movement of architecture and design'. He is not so regarded: he himself said that the Modern Movement was 'pitifully full of such faults as proportions' that are 'vulgarly agressive [sic], mountebank eccentricities in detail, and windows built lying down on their sides. Like rude children' we have 'broken away and turned our backs on tradition'. To him, this was 'false originality, the true originality having been for all time the spiritual something given to the development of traditional forms by the individual artist'.1Obviously Voysey did not see any connection between his long ranges of windows, the lights separated by plain stone mullions, and the 'windows lying on their sides' so favoured by those Modernists who lifted images from pre-1914 ocean-going liners of the Titanic...