In Victorian and Edwardian England architects did not get themselves murdered. They weren’t playboys, they didn’t have it off with their clients’ wives, they were in no way fashionable even if designing for fashionable people.They were solid members of the professional classes. Lutyens, with his grand marriage and his socialising, was an exception, but his Peter-Pan philanderings with Lady Sackville in the 1920s pale beside the stormy sex life which brought Frank Lloyd Wright into the headlines in 1909.
No English architects inspired a novel or a film; a Secret Life of William Butterfield would be unthinkable; John Galsworthy’s Bosinney had no model in real life. But Ayn Rand went to Chicago architecture to make Louis Sullivan the hero and Daniel Burnham the villain in her lurid bestseller The Fountainhead. Stanford White is not short of biographies, and there was a film in 1955, The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing, with Joan Collins as a beautiful chorus girl; reading Mosette Broderick makes one see why.
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