Charles Herbert Reilly

British architect (1874–1948)

Sir Charles Herbert Reilly (4 March 1874 – 2 February 1948) was an English architect and teacher. After training in two architectural practices in London he took up a part time lectureship at the University of London in 1900, and from 1904 to 1933 he headed the University of Liverpool School of Architecture, which became world famous under his leadership. He was largely responsible for establishing university training of architects as an alternative to the old system of apprenticeship. Reilly was a strong and effective opponent of the Victorian Neo Gothic style, which had dominated British architecture for decades. His dominance also ended the briefer popularity of the Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil movements in Britain, earning him the enmity of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, an exponent of the latter. For many years Reilly favoured a form of Neo Classicism strongly influenced by developments in American architecture. Later in his career, he embraced the principles of the modernist movement, and of town planning for social and aesthetic improvement. As a practising architect, Reilly was responsible for few well known buildings. His influence on British architecture came through the work of his pupils, who included Herbert Rowse, Lionel Budden, William Holford and Maxwell Fry. Among his students were future professors of architecture and heads of architectural colleges in Britain, Canada and Australia; buildings were commissioned from Reilly pupils throughout the British Empire and beyond.

Reilly was born on the Seven Sisters Road in Manor House, London, the son of the architect and surveyor Charles Reilly (1844–1928) and his wife Annie, née, Mee. Whilst Reilly was still very young, the family moved to a large Regency period house, just nearby on Woodberry Down. His family remained in the same house for the next two decades He was educated at a preparatory school in Hove between the ages of nine and 13, and then at Merchant Taylors' School, London, and Queens' College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate he helped to found the Cambridge branch of the Fabian Society;

In 1898, Reilly became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Reilly, on the other hand, was more interested in design than in the mechanics of construction. In 1902, Reilly applied unsuccessfully for the chair of architecture at University College, London. His proposed design was in the English Neo Classical style, with a large central dome in the tradition of Wren's St Paul's. The assessors of the competition were G F Bodley, a leading exponent of the Gothic style, and Norman Shaw. Reilly's design was one of eight highly commended entries that failed to gain inclusion in the final shortlist of five; it was the only classical design among them. Giles Gilbert Scott's Gothic design was the eventual winner, but Reilly had made influential contacts in Liverpool, where much of his career came to be centred. In an attempt to offer an alternative route into the profession, the University College of Liverpool, the forerunner of Liverpool University, set up a degree course in architecture in 1894. The first professor was Frederick Moore Simpson, a proponent of the Arts and Crafts style of building, which Reilly regarded as "a partial but insufficient remedy for Victorian failure." The main building of the university, in which Reilly was at first based, was designed by his bête noir, Waterhouse. Reilly described it as having "glazed tiles the colour of curry powder".|group= n

With Lever's encouragement and generous financial backing, Reilly persuaded the University to establish a Department of Civic Design within the School of Architecture. The University authorities accepted Reilly's recommendation that the first Professor of Civic Design should be Stanley Adshead, a fellow classicist and friend from his days in Belcher's practice. The importance of the work of the Liverpool School was quickly recognised within the architectural profession. Reilly was invited to join the RIBA's Board of Architectural Education in 1906, and he was elected to the Council of the RIBA in 1909. In 1911, Reilly and Adshead led the opposition to a plan by Norman Shaw and the sculptor W Goscombe John to remodel the south front of St George's Hall in Liverpool. Shaw and John proposed to install a grandiose flight of entrance steps, flanked by equestrian statues in tribute to the recently dead King Edward VII. Reilly regarded the plan as an Edwardian Baroque subversion of the hall's "pure and sublime neo classical concept".|

Fashion in British architecture changed rapidly in the first quarter of the 20th century. Victorian Gothic was rejected, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh found his Scottish version of Art Nouveau outmoded. The architectural historian Gavin Stamp writes:
blockquote|[A] taste for American classicism, for grand, steel framed palazzi by McKim, Mead & White or Carrere & Hastings, brought the fashion for Mackintosh's own Scottish brand of the Jugendstil to an end, resulting in personal collapse, the termination of his partnership with Honeyman and Keppie, and exile from his native city. By the 1920s, former students of the Glasgow School of Architecture were designing large banks and insurance buildings which would have been suitable for the streets of Montreal or Detroit." Despite Mackintosh's animadversions, Reilly was willing to find merit in architectural work of other styles than his own. In a 1931 volume, Representative British Architects of the Present Day, he devoted chapters not only to kindred spirits such as Adshead, but to a Gothic revivalist, Walter Tapper, and an Arts and Crafts advocate, Guy Dawber; others included were Herbert Baker, Blomfield, Clough Williams Ellis, Edwin Lutyens, and Scott. The Times Literary Supplement observed, "No praise can be too high for the way in which the special aptitudes of the particular architects are brought forward and illustrated from their works."

By 1938, in the view of The Times Literary Supplement, the Liverpool School of Architecture was "possibly the most important centre of architectural education in the world." Later in his career, Reilly moved away from an exclusive classicism. Advances in building techniques and materials and the construction of taller and wider buildings in cities made neo classicism unsustainable. Reilly's pupil Maxwell Fry recalled being dismayed in 1928 at seeing classical stone facings being hung on the steel frame of a huge block in London, to which Reilly was consultant architect. He was appointed Vice President of the RIBA in 1931. In 1934, after his retirement, he was appointed Emeritus Professor at the University of Liverpool. He was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1943 and in 1944 was knighted. As a practising architect, Reilly was responsible for only a handful of buildings. They include cottages at Lower Road, Port Sunlight, for Lever (1905); Liverpool Students' Union (1909); the Church of St Barnabas, Shacklewell, London (1909); and war memorials at Accrington (1920) and Durham (1928). Of these, Reilly's professional colleagues regarded the Students' Union building as his most characteristic work,