Prickly architect of Gothic marvels

Charles Saumarez Smith

NICHOLAS OLSBERG, WHO HAS JUST written a handsome monograph on the work of the great Victorian architect, William Butterfield, is an interesting figure. He went to school at Rugby in 1956 and, as he describes it, absorbed not only the pleasures of reading in the school’s Temple Library, designed by Butterfield, and of exercising in Butterfield’s swimming pool and gymnasium, but also some of the intellectual high-mindedness of former pupils of the school, including T.H. Green and R.H. Tawney. He then went to Merton College, Oxford, where the chapel was restored by Butterfield, and one of its student buildings designed by him, before emigrating to the United States where he became the first head of the archives of the History of Art at the newly-established Getty Center, and later director of…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2025

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