William Richard Lethaby

William Richard Lethaby was an English architect and architectural historian whose ideas were highly influential on the late Arts and Crafts and early Modern movements in architecture, and in the fields of conservation and art education. Lethaby was born in Barnstaple, Devon, the son of a fiercely Liberal craftsman and lay preacher. He found work in London in 1879 as Chief Clerk to architect Richard Norman Shaw. Shaw quickly recognized Lethaby's talent as a designer and Lethaby was to...See more

William Richard Lethaby was an English architect and architectural historian whose ideas were highly influential on the late Arts and Crafts and early Modern movements in architecture, and in the fields of conservation and art education. Lethaby was born in Barnstaple, Devon, the son of a fiercely Liberal craftsman and lay preacher. He found work in London in 1879 as Chief Clerk to architect Richard Norman Shaw. Shaw quickly recognized Lethaby's talent as a designer and Lethaby was to contribute significant pieces of work to major Shaw-designed buildings such as Scotland Yard in London and Cragside in Northumberland. Lethaby became involved in the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which campaigned to preserve the integrity and authenticity of older buildings against the Victorian practice of "improving" them to the point of almost completely rebuilding and redesigning them. Through this he became a personal friend of Arts and Crafts Movement pioneers William Morris and Philip Webb, becoming a significant and influential member and acting as co-founder of the Art Workers Guild in 1884. From 1889 Lethaby worked only part time for Shaw and increasingly practiced independently, designing a wide range of products exploring the mystical symbolism of medieval and non-European design and architecture: themes he was to elaborate in his first and most famous book "Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth", the first major work of architectural theory to treat architecture as a system of symbols with identifiable philosophical meanings, rather than as abstract systems of aesthetic principles. Lethaby left Shaw's practice in 1892 after the completion of his first major independent architectural project. The next decade was Lethaby's most productive in terms of built works as his contacts in the Birmingham area, where the ideas of the arts and crafts movement were particularly well received, led to series of commissions for buildings in the Midlands. In 1901 Lethaby was appointed the first Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art. This, coupled with his appointments as Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1902 and as Surveyor of Westminster Abbey in 1906 meant that he was increasingly devoted to the academic study of the theory and history of architecture and design. Lethaby remains widely recognized as a figure of pivotal significance in the transition between the architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See less