Dream, Draw, Work: Architectural Drawings by Norman Shaw, Royal Academy

The Royal Academy's intimate drawings reveal the genius of Robert Norman Shaw: architect of quintessentially victorian eccentricities  

The Royal Academy will showcase its sharp and ornate architectural drawings by the late-Victorian architect Norman Shaw (1831-1912), responsible for (formerly) New Scotland Yard and the Victorian ‘mansion house’ block of flats. ‘Architectural drawings’, ‘Victorian’, ‘flats’; do not worry this will be far more thrilling than it might at first sound.

About the architect...

Shaw threw away many of the proprieties of Victorian architectural design, particularly within the genre of the country house. 

His designs epitomised a cultured late-Victorian attitude to history. Mixing the medieval of the Neo-Gothic (one of Shaw’s heroes was AWN Pugin, designer of the Palace of Westminster with Charles Barry) with an ‘Old English’, almost folksy Arts and Crafts look, Shaw liberally appropriated the past more for comfort than conformity. He provided the wealthy middle classes with a popular domestic hodge-podge, mixing Anglo-Saxon halls with mock-Tudor beams. Shaw dramatically changed the town too; Marylebone and Bloomsbury would look very different had it not been for his block of flats at Kensington Gore. 

Shaw elicited violent censure at the time, and in the annals of Modernism his designs fared no better. Much was demolished. But he deserves a privileged place in any survey of a Victorian culture that is still ubiquitous today, and against which our ‘modern’ world has tried to define itself.

About the exhibition...

There will be rare works on paper from Shaw’s office at the Royal Academy, in which he spent much of his life. Shaw, like John Ruskin, refused a Gold Medal from RIBA, believing the RA to be the proper domain of architectural excellence. A lot of these drawings have frayed edges ingrained with Victorian soot, a nice contrast to today’s computerised plans. One highlight is Shaw’s impossibly elaborate 1883 design for a gigantic chimney-piece at his Cragside House, a Northumberland confection of Sir Walter Scott (if not Disney) fantasy. There is always something exquisite about this kind of Victorian attitude, and the Royal Academy’s intimate exhibition will capture it well. Shaw built much of the world we still inhabit, at the time Oscar Wilde was writing and James Whistler was painting; for an unfairly forgotten man with no written manifesto, these drawings are his monuments.