Journal of a Nobody

carved from clay

from alabaster

from regrets

and disasters

never spoken of

in front of company

so no loss of pride;

because your bruises

nikki.cruz

where does the dark go

when light pushes it away?

it hides in your heart

The Architectural Review called him „a singular talent of a neglected period“: Edward Schroeder Prior (1852-1932), architect of the second Arts and Craft generation, art historian, critic, teacher and author. A gifted all-rounder, Schroeder after leaving Cambridge University in 1874 became a pupil of Norman Shaw, a highly considered architect of country houses and commercial buildings, and in 1880 established his own practice in London. Together with former colleagues from the Shaw office he also founded the St George’s Art Society that greatly influenced the architecture of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Among his most important works are The Barn (1896) in Exmouth, a seaside house that was later praised by Hermann Muthesius in „The English House“, Home Place (1903-05) in Kelling and St Andrew’s church (1905-07) in Roker, all of them examples of Prior’s sophisticated Arts and Crafts style. These as well as many other buildings are included in David Valinsky’s monograph „The Architecture and Writings of E.S. Prior: Challenging the Arts and Crafts“, recently published by Lund Humphries: Valinsky, who has already published an edition of Prior’s writings, in the book joins his research on both Prior’s architecture and writings to paint a differentiated and comprehensive portrait of a polymath whose work is incredibly many-layered. But thanks to Valinsky’s intimate knowledge of Prior’s oeuvre they are not only transferred into a grand narrative but also contextualized and embedded in his personal network of friends and colleagues. 

A particularly interesting aspect of Prior’s work is his adoption of architectural novelties: as Valinsky shows, the architect experimented with reinforced concrete, addressed Classicism at the turn of the 19th century and unconventionally approached his teaching by using his own works as examples. Curiously, in his own writings he did not reflect this awareness of contemporary developments in architecture.