Life
Lay was born in the village of Aldringham, near Leiston, Suffolk, the son of the village schoolmaster (from a seafaring family) and his mother of agricultural family origins. His father was competent at drawing. Discouraged from mixing socially with the children of the village school, and given a private tutor, Cecil was next sent to the Ipswich School where he was a weekly boarder. He wished to become an artist, but was trained (at first in Ipswich) as an architect, being elected as an associate of Royal Institute of British Architects in 1912. He then travelled in Belgium and the Netherlands for a while, studying painting, and became a close friend of Frank Brangwyn, and also corresponded with Ezra Pound.
After service during the Great War he returned to Suffolk and seldom left it again. As an architect, he designed a series of innovative buildings, mainly large private dwellings, incorporating motifs from traditional Suffolk architecture in ways which were modern for their time. Most of these buildings are in the neighbourhood of Aldringham or Aldeburgh, including the house called Raidsend at Aldringham (an early work), a hall of late Art Nouveau style, with 'elongated Dutch gables, tall narrow windows and subtle pargetting'. He was elected Fellow of the R.I.B.A. in 1925.
Cecil Lay died in 1956 and was buried near his parents in Aldringham churchyard.
Read more about this topic: Cecil Howard Lay
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Had I but died an hour before this chance
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There’s nothing serious in mortality.
All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)