The Architecture and Writings of E.S. Prior: Challenging the Arts and Crafts – by David Valinsky
Edward Schröder Prior (1852-1932) is not easily labelled. His reputation as an Arts and Crafts architect is well-earned but his output is much broader and more complex, offering a fascinating window into the debates surrounding English architectural and design culture around the turn of the 20th century.
The Architecture and Writings of E.S. Prior: Challenging the Arts and Crafts by David Valinsky brings together the various strands of his work to present a far more complex, holistic understanding of his particularly rich and insightful thinking and his creative approaches.
A contemporary and close friend of C.F.A. Voysey and W.R. Lethaby, as well as C.R. Ashbee and Ernest Gimson, Prior was perhaps most famous in his lifetime for his writings, including his books and articles on English medieval art, and as Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University, where he set up the first architecture course. In subsequent decades, his writings have been upstaged by his original, innovative and varied architecture, with his best-known building, St Andrew’s, Roker (Sunderland), dubbed the ’cathedral’ of the Arts and Crafts movement.
When taken together, Prior’s writings and architecture demonstrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in his work, as well as contemporary and visual cultures. The topics which were at the heart of his work – the conflicts between architecture as a creative process, a profession and a business; the translation of design intentions through a project; the challenge of representing architecture to clients and the public; the position and treatment of architecture students in practices; the nature of work in ‘historic’ buildings – make fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in architectural and visual culture, then and now.
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To celebrate the book's launch, author (and photographer) David Valinsky has put together some extended captions about 4 key projects:
The Barn
The Barn in Exmouth, Devon, (1896-7) was a testing ground for many of the ideas about architecture and architectural practice that Edward Prior had been developing during the 1880s and 1890s.
It was constructed from brick and concrete but clad with what Prior called a garment of texture, created from blocks of stone quarried less than a mile away, together with rounded stones collected from the cliffs and beach. For Prior, texture was the voice of architecture.
The house was built without a contractor, as Prior tried to bring the architect’s designing hand closer to the craftsmen’s making hands, and to allow the design to develop under these making hands. Arts and Crafts architects often waxed lyrical about the importance of craftsmen and of the value of work to them, but Prior was almost unique in going beyond words and evolving a design on site with those making it.
Prior argued for architecture to be designed as ‘sculpture in the round’ rather than considered as plans and flat elevations. The Barn was originally thatched, which united the distinct forms of the house beneath an embracing sculptural roof. Prior usually preferred to allow forms to crash awkwardly into each other and The Barn was no exception, but the symmetry of the overall form, creating welcoming arms to the street and a sheltered terrace to the garden was new.
Prior developed the design for The Barn from a model exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1895 that caused a sensation.
Architectural modelling was generally something done for large public projects, by specialists model makers following the drawn designs of an architect.
Prior turned all this on its head, making the model himself out of card, wax, sand, and all sorts of store-cupboard ingredients, as a means of developing a design. Arguing that drawing was deceptive to both the architect and the client, not to mention responsible for the flat, lifeless architecture that he saw all around him, he insisted that architectural design should be done through model-making.
In a climate where the Baroque revival was becoming ever more popular, the stone columns on the terrace encapsulate Prior’s attempt to fuse the exaggerated primitivism that he so enjoyed with the idea of Architecture. They are Dartmoor granite monoliths, suggestively prehistoric, yet carved into beautifully shaped classical column shafts. The extremely rough surfaces recall the ‘tool’s struggle with the material,’ as Prior recommended.
Cambridge Medical School
Edward Prior’s career was far more complex than the label of ‘Arts and Crafts architect’ can express. Two years after completing The Barn, his experimental house in Exmouth, he began working on designs for a medical school in Cambridge (1899-1904) to provide laboratories, lecture theatres, a library and a museum for the university to train doctors.
Located on Downing Street in the centre of the city, the building reveals Prior to have been an adept urbanist despite having little previous experience. The Humphry Museum is expressed as a separate form at a road junction, twisted to look along Downing Street. It is, however, united with the rest of the building beyond by the rusticated and battered based of the building, which cheekily continues as a boundary wall between the two blocks.
Prior produced at least four designs for the principal elevation to Downing Street, developing the design amongst changing demands and constraints. The essential composition remained intact, however, with three bays rising above the building’s rusticated base and topped with gables.
These bays structure the long elevation. Though they only project a little from the general wall surface, they are articulated with horizontal bands of rustication that become incrementally narrower as the building rises, increasing the apparent height.
This rustication continues at the corners of the building and around the Museum, uniting the whole design.
The interior of the medical school could not have been more different. Prior insisted that the modern brief required a return to first principles and the development of an appropriate means of building out of needs and available materials.
Allowing the demands of lighting and hygiene to lead the design, Prior made windows as large as possible and placed many of the labs directly below roof lights to provide constant flat light for microscope use.
He revelled in the details, explaining how solid concrete floors, rounded junctions between floors and walls, and white wipeable surfaces discouraged the build-up of dirt and germs, while making dirt easily seen and easily cleaned away. Drains were cast directly into the floors of the labs with removeable covers, so that they could also be cleaned easily.
The Humphry Museum is filled with a particular quirk of Prior’s designing – the use of the hexagon. The trapezoidal bay that looks along Downing Street is the outward expression of the hexagonal bay at the end of the museum, held up on six Ionic columns, which themselves have hexagonal capitals – a possibly unique adaptation of this classical form. A hexagonal chimney and lantern rise above the roof of the Museum.
Prior never explained his use of hexagonal geometry here or elsewhere. Perhaps at Cambridge it was a reference to its use as a symbol for wisdom, but its widespread use at Voewood – a large country house in Norfolk – suggests that Prior may simply have enjoyed the geometry as an escape from rectilinear planning. In this Prior was not the first nor the last, whether it be the architects of the Piedmontese baroque,Frank Lloyd Wright, or countless other twentieth-century architects.
Along with the taught abstract planes of the main elevations, hexagonal planning and hexagonal details help to create a distinctly mannerist classicism at the Cambridge Medical School.
Voewood
Voewood (1903-05) is an expansive country house near the north-Norfolk coast, conceived by Edward Prior as a grand experiment in building and architecture.
Viewed from the garden the house is an explosion of forms, colour and pattern. Like The Barn, it is clothed with a garment of texture, here formed from the intricate patterning of stones, pebbles and tiles, developed with the craftsmen on site.
These stones and pebbles were taken directly from the site itself, as part of the transformation of a field into an extensive garden. To the south of the house, the garden was dug out to a depth of 2 metres to provide building materials.
Also taken from the site were the large amounts of sand required for the concrete from which the house’s walls and floors are made.
Before work began on the house, Prior and his site architect Arthur Randall Wells, together with various craftsmen, worked on various outbuildings and cottages around the site to test and develop the techniques they would need to make the house. As at The Barn and other projects, no contractor was employed, allowing for direct communication and the flow of ideas between Prior and Wells, and the men making the buildings.
Compared to the explosive garden side, the entrance at Voewood is relatively reticent. Though it is on the side of one of the wings, the symmetrical elevation, tall walls to both sides, and a formal avenue of trees opposite all give the impression of a strong central axis that should give on to the centre of the house.
In fact, after being drawn up a narrow stair from the small hexagonal vestibule by the light beyond, the visitor finds themselves looking out onto the garden from a corner of the plan with enticing rooms, a stair and the terrace beckoning from all sides.
It is a masterful witticism in a house that set out determinedly to demonstrate how collaboration and experiment could create a living architecture, designed three-dimensionally and arising from the ground without reference to the forms or details of past styles.
St Andrew’s
St Andrew’s church in Roker, Sunderland, is undoubtedly a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture, in which Prior’s preoccupations with experiment and collaboration as the driving forces of architecture are fully expressed.
Working without a contractor or an engineer, nor with one of the many patented systems of reinforced concrete then emerging, Prior worked again with Randall Wells to create a composite structure of reinforced concrete and stone to span the huge nave.
Always deeply interested in what concrete could do for architecture, Prior and Wells combined ancient Roman techniques of concrete construction with modern reinforcement, setting the reinforcement up between self-supporting walls of stone before pouring the concrete between to bind everything together.
The thickness of the walls is exaggerated for effect by the deeply splayed window reveals that elide with the great arches. Light from the large windows, filled with Prior’s own irregular wobbly glass, plays across expanses of roughly-hewn stone from a nearby quarry, selected for its texture. Primitivism and precision are held in perfect balance.
The brightly-painted chancel at the east end draws the eye immediately from the monochrome nave and across the deeply shadowed transept. Like the rest of the church it is filled with art, furniture and fittings by friends, colleagues and local organisations, making the church a truly collaborative creation.
Despite Prior’s arguments for model-making as a means of design development, he explored the design for St Andrew’s through drawing. This drawing from early 1905, held in the RIBA Drawings Collection, shows the nave much as it would finally appear. However, the prominent tower that today stands at the east end of the church is completely absent from this design.
The prominent tower that Prior added to the church unusually sits above the chancel, whose walls can be seen narrowing below the arches half way up the tower’s sides. Unlike The Barn and Voewood, where the exterior expression was formed by a garment of applied texture, the walls of St Andrew’s are taut expressions of a hewn form. The windows sit within the depth of the wall and nothing projects from its surface.
This architectural flatness allows the material texture to dominate, unifying interior and exterior as individual stones blend into a solid mass.