Lifetime achievement

摘要

It was seeing Amyas Connell's house at Amersham, High and Over, when still a schoolboy that determined Patrick Gwynne to be a Modern architect. He served articles with John Coleridge, a traditionalist, before engineering an introduction to Wells Coates through mutual friends. Then, equally precociously, he designed his parents a house. They had invested the proceeds of selling their small Welsh estate wisely and, said Gwynne, let their son have his head in the belief that 'anything new was good' When completed in 1938, the house -The Homewood - was jointly credited to Coates, who helped source materials like the big sash windows, while a fellow assistant, Denys Lasdun, suggested the oval shape of the terrace pond. But the house was Gwynne's design. He acknowledged the influence of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House -hence those broad windows and a marble screen-wall; and, like the Tugendhat, The Homewood commands its site, looking south over beautiful grounds, landscaped by Gwynne and his father, from a single great living room set at first-floor level. It is clearly a young man's building, full of quirks and ideas, and Gwynne went on to embellish it during the next 50 years, But following the restoration by John Allan and Fiona Lamb of Avanti Architects on behalf of its new owner the National Trust, it can be seen how successfully the composition hangs together, especially of the main room. The associations with the Tugendhat House read still more strongly.