Metiendo Vivendum: ‘By Measure We Must Live’

Convinced that his father's work was arranged around an underlying structure, Robert Lutyens, in 1944, posed the challenge that ‘…someone will someday discover my father's system of applied geometry’. Drawing on an analysis of the ground floor plans of 40 English country houses designed by Edwin Lutyens between 1889 and 1913, this paper considers Robert Lutyens's ‘Armature of Planes’, a theory which he closely associated with the development of his father's work. The analysis reveals Edwin Lutyens's consistent use of ratios to structure his work.