#quinlan terry

[oceancentury]

Kilboy House, Tipperary, Ireland. Built on the remaining basement of the original house. Completed 2015. Designed by Quinlan Terry. Owned by members of the Ryan family, founders of Ryanair.

[thefollyflaneuse]

Agatha Christie's 'Dead Man's Folly'

In 1954 Agatha Christie wrote a novella which was intended to raise money for her local church. Upon completion she was so taken with the story that she decided to develop it into a full novel, and submitted a different story to the fundraising effort. The work she had originally written was called Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, and this work was expanded and eventually published in…

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[blackswaneuroparedux]

Architects tend to think if it’s popular, there’s something wrong.

- Quinlan Terry

To those in the architecture industry, Quinlan Terry is a divisive figure. While the philosopher Roger Scruton hails Quinlan Terry as ‘our greatest living architect’, the architectural critic Gavin Stamp brands Terry ‘pedantic and unimaginative… a victim of that perennial curse of English Architecture: Palladianism.’ But there is no question that Quinlan Terry’s mission and clarion call to design buildings that last and are easy on the eye have caught the popular imagination. Terry’s work has been seminal in the revival of classical architecture since the 1960s, a grassroots revolution led by a couple of mavericks at their drawing boards.

As a scholar, he was expected to bow at the drawing boards of the likes of Le Corbusier. He worked on placement for modernist behemoth Jim Stirling (of No 1 Poultry fame) and rubbed shoulders in class with Richard Rogers. And yet his sketchbooks were full of details of country churches, symmetrical façades, and the monuments of classical Western architecture. He was told that if he didn’t design a modernist scheme, he would fail his finals. He swallowed a bitter pill of compliance.

‘I prepared a design of an ugly asymmetrical high building in steel and glass, which wasn’t difficult,’ he recalls, ‘and my tutors were delighted. They thought they had a convert.’

Terry spent a year working for a modern architect, during which he created some of his least recognisable buildings: steel and glass office blocks in Victoria Street. ‘I became deeply depressed at the thought of making this beautiful world uglier,’ he says, and considered giving up all together.

But then he met Raymond Erith, who at the time was almost the last surviving classical architect. Erith was responsible for the rebuilding of 10, 11, and 12 Downing Street, and some college buildings in Oxford, and he was a Royal Academician, but he was also a pariah in the architectural world. Terry says Erith was ‘a lone voice in the wilderness’ because he shirked the egomaniacal, modernist dogma of the day in favour of buildings that looked like they had always been there. Erith wrote to Macmillan in 1955 of his Downing Street scheme: ‘I do not intend to leave my mark on Downing Street, but I shall carry on as best I can in the way the neighbouring buildings were built.’

Erith took Terry on in 1962. ‘That was my apprenticeship,’ he says. ‘He had four daughters and no son, and I think he looked on me as a son. He really taught me.’ When there was a lull, Erith encouraged Terry to go to Rome for four months on a scholarship. This was a time when, sleuth-like in a five-piece tweed suit, Terry clambered over the pediments and architraves of the Pantheon taking measurements.

Erith died in 1973, and Terry took on the office. There was little work and he had three young children and a dog to cater for. A few small projects kept him going, including an enormous Doric column for Lord McAlpine, supported on a pedestal bearing a Latin inscription that translates as: ‘This monument was built at great expense with funds which — sooner or later — would have been taken away by tax collectors.’

Terry’s fortunes improved in 1984, with a commissioned for Richmond Riverside. Scruton wrote of the scheme that ‘this harmonious collection of classical buildings, rising on a knoll above the Thames, illustrates Terry’s principles; to use an architectural language that puts a building into relation with its neighbours and with the passer-by.’

The jobs kept coming - from Brentwood Cathedral to Royal Hospital Chelsea and private mansions in Dallas, Terry took the classical revival head-on. He became known as Prince Charles’s favourite architect for his work at Poundbury, among other projects. He was awarded a CBE.

[davidbrussat]

Ben Pentreath, Driehaus laureate

A house designed by Ben Pentreath in Moscow. (Ben Pentreath Ltd.) I believe I first heard of architect Ben Pentreath from a video called “Three Classicists” in which he, along with George Saumarez Smith, and Francis Terry drew, in 2010, a classical scene on the walls of the Kowalski Gallery, in London. It was videotaped in stop action, or time-lapse, shrinking the time of drawing to about three…

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[livesunique]

Wolverton Hall’ Folly, Stoulton, Wychavon, Worcestershire, England,

Quinlan Terry Architects,

Photographs by Paul Highnam

[wrathofgnon]

“We are not designing cars or aeroplanes or armaments which have to be replaced every 20 years to keep up with our competitors. We are designing permanent homely places where people want to dwell in our towns and countryside. Is it not about time we began to think the unthinkable, to reject the whole Modernistic system of building and begin to realise that the only way forward is to look back and rediscover what our forefathers handed down to us. Only then will we have any chance of producing an environment which will be sustainable and worth passing on to our grandchildren.” — Quinlan Terry

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Modern man fears no God and has no hope beyond technology.

- Quinlan Terry

No other architect had influenced King Charles III as much as Quinlan Terry when as the Prince of Wales he was a thorn in the side of the pro-Modernist British architectural establishment.

Quinlan Terry, born in 1937, is a British architect well known for his use of Classical architecture throughout Britain, United States, and the Middle East. Despite being educated at the Architectural Association in the Britain in modernism, Terry rejected Modernism, explaining that with Modernism “the ability to design and build beautiful buildings has ceased.”

Terry was awarded the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture in 2005, a prize which rivals the Pritzker Prize, which was typically seen as a Modernist prize. Having only been established a mere two years before Quinlan Terry’s victory, the Driehaus Prize was largely established because of Terry, as his contributions to Classical architecture helped push forth the movement in both Britain and the United States, which eventually led to him expanding his influence out to even Germany, solidifying him as one of the the greatest Classical architects of the time.

Apart from this, by deviating so heavily from the accepted norm and making a name for himself and his style, Quinlan Terry, with the help of several others such as his mentor Raymond Erith, formed and maintained a movement away from Modernist architecture and towards more Classical roots with moderate success, exemplifying precisely how important Terry was to architecture as it now stands.

Terry would go on to work alongside the late Sir Roger Scruton on the UK government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

[livesunique]

Ferne Park Donhead St Andrew, Wiltshire, UK 

Quinlan and Francis Terry Architect