Classical grammar.

RADICAL CLASSICISM: THE ARCHITECTURE OF QUINLAN TERRY

By David Watkin, with a Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales. New York: Rizzoli. 2006. $60

Quinlan Terry has ploughed a lonely architectural furrow in an era during which the West largely repudiated its history in favour of spiritual emptiness, pseudo-sentimental supposedly 'caring' attitudes, vulgarity, and self-advertisement. In the world of architecture, a totalitarian ideology has dominated everywhere since 1945, and still prevails, despite the painfully obvious fact that the ghastly environments it has created are unsustainable and widely detested. The fact that Terry has consistently resisted this ideology is greatly to his credit.

Terry has designed well-crafted buildings that have weathered gracefully, which is more than can be said of Modernist work approved by the Establishment, yet he and his architecture are hated by those for whom grace, respect for the genius loci, and a coherent architectural language mean nothing. His work is often referred to in discourteous and ignorant terms, despite the qualities of some designs (for example, the Lunkewitz House, Frankfurt [1991--a building owing much to precedents by the great Schinkel], and the Grosse Prasidentenstrasse, Berlin [2002--influenced by Gentz]). Terry himself has sagely noted that Classical architectural grammar remains neutral, like the paint on an artist's palette, so what his disparagers detest is clearly the mere existence of any grammar at all.

In this magnificently illustrated book, Terry is correctly identified as a Radical Classicist, who uses a rich and infinitely adaptable language of architecture (as opposed to the monosyllabic grunts favoured by his enemies), and is capable of the utmost sensitivity, as in his remodelling of the Church of St Helen, Bishopsgate, London, following the damage it sustained after two explosions caused by the IRA in 1992-3: it was a commission that Terry himself said gave him more satisfaction than any other, and the robust Classical doorcase in the west wall of the south transept demonstrates the radicalism to which Watkin refers in his apt title.

Among Terry's most felicitous designs are the Ionic, Veneto, Gothick, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Regency Villas in Regent's Park, the details of which have evolved from intense study. The interiors of the House in Knightsbridge are fine by any standards, and there can be no doubting the success of buildings such as the Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College, Cambridge (which fits happily with Wilkins's architecture), Ferne Park, Dorset, and Richmond Riverside, Richmond-on-Thames, Surrey (which has worn well and compares favourably with Modernist solutions of similar size in almost every way). Terry's Howard Building at Downing has been adversely criticised, a fact not ducked by Watkin, although the late John Summerson approved of it: however, to the eye of this reviewer it does not sit easily in Wilkins's severely Grecian campus, unlike the later Library.

In David Watkin, Terry has a sympathetic interpreter: his consideration of much deeply-felt and serene architecture (for example, Highland Park House, Dallas, TX [2000-4]) is impressive. It is symptomatic of the times that Terry has been more honoured in the USA than has been the case here: this marvellous, stimulating, and elegant study is a great tribute to his life's work.