Baillie Scott: The Artistic House.

Voysey was one of the greatest architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement and it is surprising that there has not been a full-length biography until now, particularly as there is a strong case for arguing that he was the most influential British architect who has ever lived. Once he had found his mature style in the early 1890s, he was copied endlessly both at home and abroad. His long, low houses with rows of mullioned windows in white rendered walls under great swooping pitches and gables of slate and tile seemed to his contemporaries (as they do to us now) the epitome of tranquillity, gentleness and elegant kindliness. These are of course attributes not highly valued by the avant-garde, and Voysey's reputation slumped in the middle decades of the century, particularly when as an old man in 1934 he attacked the Modern Movement for making (among other things) 'windows lying down on their sides. Like rude children we have broken away and turned our backs on tradition'. The young men of the AR: John Betjeman, J.M. Richards and Nikolaus Pevsner, had tried to make him into a pioneer of the Movement and he would have none of it.

Both sides were right. Though he scarcely worked abroad, Voysey's work had made impact on the buildings of architects as different as Josef Hoffmann and J.J.P. Oud, who as Hitchmough quotes, wrote to the English master in 1936 to congratulate him on the award of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal: 'You are one of the most admired examples out of my youth and I am still admiring you in the same degree up to now.' In Britain, Voysey inspired designers as different as Mackintosh and the draftsmen of the developers who built the suburbs of the 1930s in endless echoes of Voysey's roofs, bays and white harled walls.

But as Wendy Hitchmough points out in her splendid account, he remained a devoted disciple of Pugin, and towards the end of his architectural life just before the First World War, he began to design with overtly Gothic detailing as a humane (and religious) riposte to the increasing taste for authoritarian and imperial Classicism in various guises.

Hitchmough carefully covers the life and work, using much previously unpublished material (mainly from the John Brandon-Jones collection) to draw a definitive portrait. Much about his personality and career is now made more clear: for instance his early life and antecedents, and his life post-architecture, when he continued (as he had started) to make more money than has often been thought as a designer of fabrics and papers. His work is extensively shown, with really excellent new photographs by Martin Charles of some of the best houses.

As a reader of the manuscript, I am quoted on the dust-jacket as saying that 'this is undoubtedly the Voysey book that we have been waiting for'. It is certainly so (and I am touched that Wendy has taken in some of the suggestions I made a year ago). But she deserves a better product from her publishers.

Phaidon have built up a well-deserved reputation of producing big and well-illustrated books on historical and contemporary issues in architecture. This book is one. Yet its design, superficially splendid as it is, trivialises the work displayed. Anyone who wants to understand Voysey's buildings in detail is subjected to the stupid task of looking at the beautiful photographs (Martin's new ones are normally grouped at the end of chapters) and then trying to find the plans and sections that show how the buildings were made. The drawings may (or may not) be there. They are almost always shown in the version that Voysey made in his presentation offerings to his clients, and the buildings were often rather different. The presentation drawings are very pretty but are usually produced in this book at a scale in which they cannot be read.

One of the great problems of trying to present three-dimensional architecture on two-dimensional pages is to relate drawings and photographs. Any architect can immediately see if the publishers have hired a designer who looks at a drawing as just another image, or whether there is an understanding of the necessity of interaction of plan, section, photograph and words. Phaidon have sadly muffed the challenge here. We must hope that a second edition of Hitchmough's excellent text and Charles' stunning photographs will be more intelligently put together.

Academy Editions do much better, in this respect, with Diane Haigh's study of Baillie Scott. James Kornwolf's magisterial account of Hugh Mackay Baillie Scott's work, published in 1972 remains a milestone in Arts and Crafts architectural studies. Haigh adds more. Baillie Scott can easily be written off as a Voysey follower and a person who was ready to bend with the wind of fashion. Yet he explored the potential of the open plan at least as early as Frank Lloyd Wright (though, at the time, he lacked the opportunities offered by Wright's very rich young Chicago banker clients).

His work is geometrically analysed in drawings, text and modern photographs with great inventiveness. The buildings selected as case studies are properly shown, with new plans and details as well as powerful new colour photographs. My only quibble is that the key to the plans is printed on one page only, so you have to keep turning back and forward to see what the numbers on the drawings mean - still, that's much better than having to stumble through the Phaidon fog.