Waugh Cited in Architectural Satire Article

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928) has been cited in an article on architectural satire. This appears in the online edition of the magazine Building Design. The classic British book in this style, according to the article, is H.B. Cresswell’s The Honeywood File published in 1929, the year after Waugh’s novel appeared, and still in print:

Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 Decline and Fall had already introduced his readers to the world of “ferro-concrete and aluminium”. The matchless Professor Otto Silenus was an “extraordinary young man… not yet very famous anywhere” who had caught the attention of his patron, Mrs Beste-Chetwynde, with a (rejected) design for a chewing-gum factory glimpsed in “a progressive Hungarian quarterly”. Now she wanted a country house in that idiom.

The result was to replace Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s Tudor country house King’s Thursday with a Bauhaus-style design by Otto.  Other novels containing examples of this rather esoteric genre are Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936) and, more recently, Will Wiles’ The Way Inn (2014).