The architect as religious teacher

‘He stands out for austere highmindedness combined with a rich sense of decoration

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The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his times Nicholas Olsberg (Lund Humphries, £60)

THE architect William Butterfield (1814–1900) has always divided opinion. He stands out among the leaders of the Gothic movement in the Victorian period for austere high-mindedness combined at times with a rich sense of materials and decoration. He was a deeply religious man, whose clients were devoted to the improvement of society through Christian worship and projects for education and health. His best-known buildings, All Saints, Margaret Street, in Marylebone, London W1, Keble College Oxford and Rugby School, Warwickshire, show his pleasure in using coloured brick, set in geometrical patterns, inside and outside. They were seen by later critics as examples of the incomprehensible otherness of the Victorians, even as a form of architectural sadism, although this interpretation was challenged by Paul Thompson in his monograph of 1971.

Another half-century was to pass before the next Butterfield book appeared and Nicholas Olsberg has revisited this fascinating figure in a study based on meticulous research, written in graceful and approachable prose and full of previously unpublished photographs and drawings. The author, a former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, whose career has been spent largely in North America, opens by describing how he arrived as a pupil at Rugby in 1956 where, ‘after five years turning through his concrete stairs, lining up in his cloister, playing fives in his courts, jumping in his gym and sitting under the brilliant windows of his chapel, classrooms and library, they achieved their purpose as character-shaping agents’. He also credits the school library for books discovered there which have shaped this magnum opus, from Engels and Hegel to the philosopher of art and history, R. G. Collingwood.