Tyringham House (now Tyringham Hall)
Newport Pagnell
Sherington
Buckinghamshire, England
MK16 9ED
Lutyens’s garden scheme around Sir John Soane’s house for the Theosophist banker Koenig included a bathing pavilion and, above all, the Temple of Music—his beloved, near‑faultless humanist sanctuary with organ concealed in a crypt so sound rose through the floor, anticipating his later Liverpool Cathedral arrangement.
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Description
Lutyens created a garden around a house by Sir John Soane, ‘for the recreation of spirit and body’, with a bathing pavilion and a Temple of Music. The Koenigs were Silesian bankers interested in Theosophy, and Mr Koenig paid for the ivory cradle in the Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in 1921. Lutyens’s Temple of Music is one of the finest expressions of his architecture of humanism: he indeed thought it faultless and loved to sit in it alone. The organ was in the crypt so that the sound rose from a grille in the floor, rather like the arrangement later devised for Liverpool Cathedral. Up to pediment level the building is local yellow rubble stone – above all is concrete. (Amery et al, 1981, Cat no.264)
Bibliography
Amery, C., Richardson, M. and Stamp, G., (1981) Lutyens, the Work of the English Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944): Hayward Gallery London, 18 November 1981 – 31 January 1982. London: Arts Council of Great Britain., Pevsner, N., Brandwood, G.K. and Williamson, E. (2003) Buckinghamshire. Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England.. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
HUSSEY, C., 1929. COUNTRY HOMES GARDENS OLD & NEW: MODERN GARDEN ARCHITECTURE AT TYRINGHAM, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE–I. Country Life (Archive : 1901 – 2005), 65(1688), pp. 740-746.
HUSSEY, C., 1929. COUNTRY HOMES GARDENS OLD & NEW: MODERN GARDEN ARCHITECTURE AT TYRINGHAM, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE–II. Country Life (Archive : 1901 – 2005), 65(1689), pp. 780-786.