Design Culture in Liverpool 1888-1914 : The Origins of the Liverpool School of Architecture

Founded in 1895, the Liverpool School of Architecture was the first national institution to offer degrees in both architecture and urban planning.

By 1914 the School exerted a profound influence on the course of English architecture and by the 1930s it was the most famous Britsh school of architecture in the world.This work looks at the origins of the architectural and design ideas that formed the Liverpool School.

Rather than enumerate the art and architecture of Liverpool, the author discusses the attitudes to design held by patrons, practitioners and theoreticians within the city.

He maintains that past research led to a lopsided view of the School's development.

Important though the Arts and Crafts legacy was, emphasis upon it has completely subsumed early Liverpudlian interest in American architectural education.

Two cultural poles can be identified in the city at this period: the gradual institutionalization of Arts and Crafts attitudes, and their subsequent decline in status, followed by the beginnings of the replacement of that style and its concerns with a new design approach.

This was substantially based upon the French Beaux Arts practices used and given currency by the contemporary American Schools of Architecture.

Both are linked identifiably in Liverpool.Liverpool can be seen as a microcosm of the national dilemma faced by contemporary practitioners of an Arts and Crafts aesthetic.

The dialogue between architectural style and ideological motivation, the dialogue between the Arts and Crafts and the Beaux Arts as they emerged within the city's cultural life, and the expression of their ideas in its architecture, is the substance of this book.