Charles Herbert Reilly
His dominance also ended the briefer popularity of the Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil movements in Britain, earning him the enmity of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, an exponent of the latter.
His influence on British architecture came through the work of his pupils, who included Herbert Rowse, Lionel Budden, William Holford and Maxwell Fry.
[6] In 1900 he applied for the chair of architecture at King's College, London; he had not seriously expected to be successful and was surprised and pleased to reach the final shortlist of three.
[3] The successful candidate, Ravenscroft Elsey Smith, appointed him to a part-time lectureship and introduced him to Stanley Peach, who specialised in designing power stations.
He detested the Victorian Neo-Gothic style, describing the work of a leading proponent, Alfred Waterhouse, as having the "colours of mud and blood".
Giles Gilbert Scott's Gothic design was the eventual winner,[11] but Reilly had made influential contacts in Liverpool, where much of his career came to be centred.
The first professor was Frederick Moore Simpson, a proponent of the Arts and Crafts style of building, which Reilly regarded as "a partial but insufficient remedy for Victorian failure.
[9] He successfully manoeuvred to have his department moved to the spacious Bluecoat Chambers, an outstanding Queen Anne building in the heart of Liverpool.
[8] New American neo-classic architecture at that time derived in large measure from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Stamp characterises it as "rooted in the classical tradition [but] essentially modern.
[17] With Lever's encouragement and generous financial backing, Reilly persuaded the University to establish a Department of Civic Design within the School of Architecture.
[18] The University authorities accepted Reilly's recommendation that the first Professor of Civic Design should be Stanley Adshead, a fellow-classicist and friend from his days in Belcher's practice.
In 1911, Reilly and Adshead led the opposition to a plan by Norman Shaw and the sculptor W Goscombe John to remodel the south front of St George's Hall in Liverpool.
[20] Shaw and John proposed to install a grandiose flight of entrance steps, flanked by equestrian statues in tribute to the recently dead King Edward VII.
"[20] Shaw enlisted the support of Aston Webb, John Belcher, Hamo Thornycroft and Reginald Blomfield, but Reilly and Adshead won, and the scheme was abandoned.
The architectural historian Gavin Stamp writes: [A] taste for American classicism, for grand, steel-framed palazzi by McKim, Mead & White or Carrere & Hastings, brought the fashion for Mackintosh's own Scottish brand of the Jugendstil to an end, resulting in personal collapse, the termination of his partnership with Honeyman and Keppie, and exile from his native city.
"[16]Mackintosh blamed Reilly for this: "Nor will there be any daylight until it is impossible for pompous bounders like a well-known (at least well advertised) professor at Liverpool to have any say in architectural education.
In a 1931 volume, Representative British Architects of the Present Day, he devoted chapters not only to kindred spirits such as Adshead, but to a Gothic revivalist, Walter Tapper, and an Arts and Crafts advocate, Guy Dawber; others included were Herbert Baker, Blomfield, Clough Williams-Ellis, Edwin Lutyens, and Scott.
[22] The Times Literary Supplement observed, "No praise can be too high for the way in which the special aptitudes of the particular architects are brought forward and illustrated from their works.
They include cottages at Lower Road, Port Sunlight, for Lever (1905); Liverpool Students' Union (1909); the Church of St Barnabas, Shacklewell, London (1909); and war memorials at Accrington (1920) and Durham (1928).
