In today’s sober world, the whole idea of building a folly seems to have gone by the wayside. This charming practice of creating buildings with little purpose other to entertain or amuse, stretches back to the ancient Romans. In Tim Knox’s introduction to Follies of Europe, Architectural Extravaganzas, he explains that “Roman gardens were often liberally sprinkled with miniature temples, niches and loggias, ornamented with statues and fountains.” The custom was revived over a thousand years later by the Renaissance Popes and Italian princes in the sixteenth century, fantasy gardens much admired by travellers and documented in engravings of the period. Knox traces the evolution of the folly to the rest of Europe and England. “Nowhere did follies catch on more than England, where long periods of peace and political stability under the Hanoverians, and the growing wealth and power of the landed classes, encouraged the building of increasingly ambitious country houses.”
The book is divided into four main chapters. The first, Allegory & Fan-tasy, focuses on the allegorical and fantasy gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth–centuries, and takes us on a tour of Europe, featuring the majestic gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy, Orsini’s Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo near Viterbo, and the seventeenth–century pavilions at the Herrenhausen in Hanover.

Classicism & Grandeur takes us further into the eighteenth–century, inspired by the triumphs of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and the later vogue for neoclassicism. Stowe, in England, contains over thirty follies, including bridges, a castle, grottoes, monuments, alcoves, ruins, baths and arches. Included also is the Chinese pavilion at Jardines de Aranjuez, near Madrid, one of the most beautiful small buildings in Europe, once owned by the Spanish royal family. Over in Scotland, however, is the incomparable Dunmore Pineapple- with its roof built as an immaculate stone pineapple, commissioned by John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore, in 1771, to mark his return to Airth from duties as the last British Governor of Virginia.
The author, Caroline Holmes, steers us into the nineteenth–century with the next chapter, Romanticism and Innovation, where we see another stunning collection of follies. She writes that “..the squire of Brightling Park in East Sussex was entertaining guests in East London and offered a wager that the spire of Dallington church was visible from his country house. Squire Jack Fuller was mistaken: a small ridge obscured the view. Unable to move the obstruction, he constructed a sham spire near Woods Corner so as to not lose his winnings.” Now that’s a folly!

Brighton Pavilion was observed by the writer Nigel Nicolson as though “..the pleasure domes of Xanadu were transported to an English seaside town.” This Oriental fantasy was a big dazzling folly, inspired by the British imperialism of the time, and built by the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, in the early nineteenth century.
Sadly The last chapter, Modernism and Individualism doesn’t live up to the others. Certainly it is not the fault of the authors, but more a reflection of the lack of architectural imagination of the present day patrons and landowners. While we no longer have an aristocracy, there are certainly captains of industry today who possess the wealth, taste and inclination to express themselves architecturally. But perhaps it is the sobering influence of Modernism that is to blame. The least attractive building in the book is the Pavilion at Oare House near Marlborough—designed by I M Pei. It has all the excitement of a solar powered greenhouse. Luckily, they also included the poetic Parc Guell by Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, built in 1914 out of trencadis or broken tile, and Charles de Beistegui’s Chateau de Groussay, where he created many beautiful out–buildings. His Pyramid and Shell Grotto, built in 1968, is on the cover of this wonderful book.