Cyril Farey

Cyril Farey: Design for an Art Deco Office building Architectural perspective

1932

Cyril Farey was popularly acclaimed as the greatest architectural draftsman of his age and indeed possibly of the 20th century. He observed of his clients that rather than the building “It’s the trees and buses they pay for.” Wanting a fine picture to hang afterward in the boardroom, or a picture that would render the dullest of architecture an improvement to its surroundings, a commissioning architect would call for Farey’s services. Aware of his ability to turn the mundane into the spectacular, he noted that the architecture should nonetheless be accurate with the impressionistic rendering applied only to the trees, people and landscape. Born in London, he was at prep school at St Aubyns, East Sussex. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association, being awarded a traveling scholarship in 1909. Farey ran a successful architect’s practice, latterly with his associate Adams, but was and is far more famous for producing splendid drawings for the works of other architects, many of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy. Indeed so many of his works were exhibited there that the RA architecture rooms became known as Fareyland. Lutyens when entering the room once exclaimed “What ho the Farey Glen.”