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| Moorcrag |
C.F.A. Voysey is a British Architect whose work I turn to for inspiration time and again. His works straddle the turn of the Century from late the 19th to the early 20th. Exhibiting more restraint and austerity than the works of Richard Norman Shaw, Voysey's buildings seem to be a calculated departure from the mainstream Arts and Crafts movement. His unmistakable preference for taut, unadorned surfaces and cleanly modeled geometries is noteworthy for its time. In his work you can glimpse roots of the Modernism that would appear after the turn of the Century. Some historians have credited Voysey and his contemporary Charles Rennie Mackintosh as being early and important influences on the development of the Modernist aesthetic.
I'm less interested in academic distinctions than in the beauty of his buildings. I'm drawn to Voysey's works because of the comfortable blending of the traditional styles of his day, vernacular elements, and fresh ideas. In Voysey's hands this blend seems monumental and inviting at the same time. Recognizing this achievement- an Architecture that comes across as both grand and intimately-scaled is important to me. I feel that many times this is what people seek... design that fulfills their desire to make a public statement without any sacrifice of comfort, functionality, or appropriate human scale.
