Ed Kluz: The Lost House Revisited

The artist Ed Kluz has a fascination for the sites of lost buildings. Once-celebrated grand houses that were abandoned to ruin, burned or deliberately destroyed have become the haunting subject matter of his distinctive collages. Kluz studies old engravings, plans and descriptions in order to build a full mental picture of a house; he compares the act of creating a collage to that of model-making, with each architectural element meticulously cut from paper and pasted, layer upon layer, on a background of inks. His lost houses conjure up the vanished buildings in all their pomp, existing not in the re-created landscape, but rather illuminated by theatrical lighting. In his introduction to the book, Tim Knox describes Kluz’s views of houses as heirs to the highly finished perspective drawings produced by architectural artists in centuries past; he also draws parallels with the bold graphic tradition of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. Among the English houses featured in depth are the Tudor palace of Holdenby House, the magnificent mansion of Hamstead Marshall, Vanbrugh’s Eastbury Park, and the grandiosely Gothic Fonthill Abbey. Each house is introduced by Olivia Horsfall Turner, who details its history and fate.