In 1857 an anonymous article appeared in The Builder magazine under the title Architectural “Follies”. The author used the word ‘architectural’ to distinguish from examples of folly in literature and art: he thought there were far too many books with an eccentric choice of subject, and that there were many follies ‘perpetuated on canvas’. Sadly, he failed to develop this theme, and the reader is left wondering what exactly he had in mind (the Flâneuse is making the assumption that at this date a journalist writing for a building trade magazine was almost certainly male). Happily, he was a little more forthcoming when he moved on to follies of the built variety.
Tag: Kew Gardens
Modern Architecture meets The British Folly
In 2006 the Royal Mail issued a set of commemorative stamps featuring ‘Modern Architecture’ in England and Scotland. Benham of Folkestone, the ‘independent collectables retailer’, spotted a link between these new buildings and some structures that might have been thought just as radical in their own day – follies. The company issued a set of first day covers juxtaposing the Modern Architecture stamps with examples of The British Folly.
‘Towering Dreams’ at Compton Verney, Warwickshire.
A new exhibition has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire: Towering Dreams: Extraordinary Architectural Drawings explores how architects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘understood the world around them and the ideas and cultures that inspired them’. The majority of the wonderful drawings in the exhibition are on loan from Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and the subjects include structures we would know today, as well as extraordinary designs that never made it off the drawing board.
Agatha Christie’s ‘Dead Man’s Folly’
In 1954 Agatha Christie wrote a novella which was intended to raise money for her local church. Upon completion she was so taken with the story that she decided to develop it into a full novel, and submitted a different story to the fundraising effort. The work she had originally written was called Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, and this work was expanded and eventually published in 1956 as Dead Man’s Folly.