{"title":"J Mordaunt Crook","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"architect-s-secret-book-jmordaunt-crook-9780719560576","title":"The Architect's Secret","description":"What is the secret of beauty in architecture? Critics have puzzled over that conundrum for centuries, not least the architectural writers of the Victorian period. This book focuses on four Victorian critics - George Aitchison, Benjamin Webb, Beresford Hope and Coventry Patmore - and charts their responses to one of the eternal problems of art: the enigma of architectural form. None of these critics has been studied before in any detail. All four were widely read and widely listened to: two were Presidents of the RIBA. George Aitchison may be forgotten now; but his lectures give him a place in the folk-history of early modernism. Benjamin Webb, editor of The Ecclesiologist, was perhaps more influential: he acted as spokesman for one of the ablest of Victorian architects, William Butterfield. Beresford Hope - the doyen of architectural pundits - was both politician and critic; he popularized the notion of Progressive Eclecticism, the clue to late-Victorian architectural fashions. And Coventry Patmore - better known of course as a poet - is here revealed as an architectural critic of extraordinary perception.Alone in his generation, he saw through the fog of eclectic forms to the eternal principle which underlies great architecture at all times and in all places: the expression of gravitational thrust. Detailed bibliographies complete this illuminating study of Victorian thinking.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49546028843281,"sku":"GOR001987331","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0719560578.jpg?v=1751074016"},{"product_id":"bedford-college-book-jmordaunt-crook-9780902194427","title":"Bedford College","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49590564552977,"sku":"GOR003816201","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0902194429.jpg?v=1751298669"},{"product_id":"william-burges-and-the-high-victorian-dr-book-j-crook-9780711233492","title":"William Burges and the High Victorian Dr","description":"William Burges (1827-81) was arguably the greatest of all Victorian architects. But he was more than just the creator of a modest number of fabulous, and fabulously expensive, buildings. He dreamed of hundreds more, designed dozens, and in addition created some of the most remarkable furniture and jewellery of all time. He was an art-architect. Rich, clever, well connected and short lived, he was uncompromising, profoundly learned, skilled in every process of design and explosively inventive. A brilliant talker, pungent critic and hilarious companion, he was one of Victorian London's great eccentrics and networkers, though he was bewitched by the Middle Ages. The great buildings that he completed include Cork Cathedral, Cardiff Castle and the even more eccentric Castell Coch, the great Yorkshire churches of Skelton and Studley Royal, the magnificent country houses of Knightshayes in Devon, and Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute, and his own astonishing Tower House in Kensington. His furniture, fabric and jewellery designs and his unrealised projects were also hugely influential, and the former are now enthusiastically collected. This book was a landmark in Victorian studies when first published in 1981 and is now completely revised and re-illustrated substantially in colour.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50023825146129,"sku":"GOR010811541","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51701135474961,"sku":"GOR006968398","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0711233497.jpg?v=1751168384"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-j-mordaunt-crook.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}