NOTES OF BRITISH ARCHITECTURAL CULTURE 1945-1965

The abstract, white architecture of the inter-war British avant garde comes to a decisive end with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. As a result the postwar period emerges somewhat divided as to what should become the new architecture of the moment with which to accommodate the needs and express the values of a newly progressive society. Although the allocation of certain stylistic tropes to different, socio-cultural situations was not so categorical as in the pre-war totalitarian societies, there were nonetheless comparable semantic inflections in British architecture over the twenty-year period which followed the end of the war. This is perhaps first evident in the prefabricated, lightweight modular building systems adopted for both emergency housing and school building; respectibely, for the accommodation of the bombed out population in the first instance and for the production of some 2500 schools in the second, most of which were built over the fifteen years between 1945 and 1960 as a consequence of the Education Act, put in place by the socialist government in 1946. Emergency housing needs were met by the minimalist, single story, prefabricated Portal house which was extensively built on vacant sites in major cities after the end of the war. The equally modular, prefabricated school system developed by the Ministry of Education came into being initially through the architect's department of the Hertfordshire County Council, under the direction of C. H. Aslin. In both instances what one effectively encountered was a lightweight, steel panel system, bereft of any recognizable iconography apart from the fact the internal walls of the schools were finished in primary colors and were furnished with stackable Scandinavian wood and metal furniture plus indoor plants; the whole often being set in diminutive picturesque landscape. However this modular lingua franca could not be extended to the domestic environment. Here the heritage of the Garden City movement, dating back to the turn of the century, was pressed into service in a discretely modified form to constitute the two-story housing stock that made up the bulk of the residential fabric in the fourteen new towns established by the Labor government after the War as a result of the New Towns Act of 1948. This accounts for the single and semi-detached houses that became the vehicle so to speak, to which the so-called 'peoples detailing' was to be applied. This last comprised a repertoire of shallow-pitched, tile roofs, load-bearing, cavity walls in brick, along with casement opening lights and fixed picture windows in either steel or wood, which were invariably painted white. This amiable, unchallenging, anti-street, garden city aesthetic accessed through winding roads invariably engendered a somewhat informal site layout which, together with the detailing, came under the rubric of 'contemporary' as opposed to the received prewar idea of a severely abstract modern architecture. This conciliatory everyday style was favored by the left-wing architects of the London County Council who occupied mid-level positions within this 300 man architects department. I have in mind such figures as Oliver Cox and Graham Shank land both of whom were very influenced by the socially democratic architecture of the Swedish Welfare State. However this low-rise heimatstil principle of 'people's detailing' would be modified in the case of high-rise housing since flat roofs were deemed to be more appropriate for the capping of such forms. As it happens the preferred high-rise type was also of Swedish origin; namely, a 10-story tower block with a square footprint and a central access core, serving four apartments per floor, as this type occupy a large sector of the LCC Roehampton Estate dating from 1958. The influence of local authorities at this time was very pervasive given that almost half of the registered architects in the country were employed by local governments and the remainder who were in private practice received most of their commissions from the same source. As Reyner Banham would observe in his canonical study The New Brutalism of 1966, Cox and Shank land had close personal contacts with Sweden at the time, moreover as he reveals the term 'brutalist' originated as a qualifying adjective in Sweden. Banham cites a letter from 1956 written by Hans Asplund to Eric de Mare of The Architectural Review. In January 1950 I shared offices with my esteemed colleagues Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm. These architects were at the time designing a house at Uppsala. Judging from their drawings I called them in a mildly sarcastic way 'Neo-Brutalists'. (The Swedish word for 'New Brutalists'!) The following summer, at jollification with some English friends, among whom were Michael Ventris, Oliver Cox and Graeme Shank land, the term was mentioned again in a jocular fashion. When I visited the same friends in London last year, they told me that they had brought the word back with them to England, and that it had spread like wildfire, and that it had, somewhat astoundingly, been adopted by a certain faction of younger English architects. It is hard to imagine something more ironic than that the categorically anti-Swedish British Brutalist line should have at least part of its origin as a style in Sweden itself. Despite the eclipse of the abstract British "international style" a certain vestige of a pre-war Neo-Corbusian syntax was carried over into the postwar period, most notably in the work of Lubetkin and Tecton, particularly as this applied to the rather formalistic medium-rise apartment blocks that the firm designed for the East End of London between 1945 and 1955. Typified by their Spa Green Estate built in Finsbury in 1956, this ornamental manner could hardly be more removed from the aforementioned 'peoples detailing'. The Tecton slab blocks were invariably animated by syncopated faience screens running across the balconied face of each block. Lubetkin's syntax was also evident in the plan articulation and detailing of the Royal Festival Hall realized under the direction of Leslie Martin who was then chief architect of the LCC and designed by Peter Moro who had worked for Tecton prior to the Second World War. A second figure, from the prewar era, was David du R. Aberdeen, who also seems to have cultivated a 'baroque' Neo-Corbusian manner as we find this elaborated in his Trades Union Headquarters built near Bedford Square in 1951 and faced in polished stone. This New Monumentality apres la lettre could hardly be made to jibe with the pitched roof populism of the New Town vernacular or with the lightweight modular manner of the prefabricated schools. In many respects 1951 is the annus mirabilis of postwar recovery as far as British architecture is concerned, for this not only sees the realization of the Festival of Britain and the Royal Festival Hall, but also the Coventry Cathedral Competition for which Alison and Peter Smithson submitted a totally radical shell concrete form encompassing the entire plan of a diamond ecclesiastical space. It is clear that the inspiration behind the Festival of Britain was the social democratic Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 which under the direction of the architect Gunnar Asplund and the critical intellectual Gregor Paulson would effectively inaugurate a new egalitarian middle class culture, closely linked fields of architecture and industrial design. As far as the propagation of popular good taste was concerned the Festival of Britain followed Stockholm to the letter with its playful tubular metal chairs, in primary colors designed by Ernest Race and the popular slogan of Black Eyes and Lemonade which summed up the playful spirit of the occasion. Like Stockholm, the Festival conveyed a mixed message as far as received taste in architecture was concerned in as much as both exhibitions celebrated Constructivist architecture as a built manifestation of a newly emergent techno-scientific society. I have in mind in the case of Stockholm Asplund's stressed skin control cabin elevated on stilts and capped by a latticework publicity mast while the parallel engineering rhetoric in the Festival was patently the Skylon; a latticework, cigar-shaped pylon stayed by wire cables designed by Powell and Moya in collaboration with the engineer Felix Samuely equally dematerialized stressed-skin dome of the Dome of Discovery by Ralph Tubbs supported at its rim by steel latticework struts as a kind of tethered flying saucer. Overall however what Alvar Aalto wrote about the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 could have been applied just as easily to the Festival of Britain twenty years later, to the effect that: . . . This is not a composition of glass, stone and steel, as a visitor who despises functionalism might imagine; it is a composition of houses, flags, floodlights, flowers, fireworks, happy people and clean table cloths. Be this as it may, a discernible schism emerged not only between the left wing 'peoples detailing' of the low-rise domestic architecture such as find in Frederick Gibberd's Harlow New Town, but also between those who would look to pure engineering technique as the source for a new unprecedented tectonic language as this is attempted in the shell concrete Brynmawr Rubber Factory designed by the Architect's Co-partnership in 1952 in collaboration with the engineer Ove Arup. The main alternative was to look for an authentic form of expression in the street culture of the then still extant British working class. This split is already discernible in the early work of Alison and Peter Smithson which served to oscillate between heroic engineering form on the one hand as we find this in the competition entries for their Neo-Miesian Hunstanton School Norfolk of 1949 and their Nervi-like Coventry Cathedral of 1951 and, on the other, the as found sociological 'otherness' of the nineteenth century two-story worker's row housing which, comprised of brick walls and slate roofs, made up the fabric and provided the setting for everyday life in the Bye Law streets of Bethnal Green. The Smithsons first experienced this culture through visiting the Bethnal Green home of Nigel and Judith Henderson; the one a photographer and the other a sociologist and where the one captured the street life of the arena on film, the other studied its kinship structure. The Lore and Language of School Children published in 1959 by the sociologists lona and Peter Opie documented the role played by the culture of the street in the evolution of this society. That Henderson and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi were crucial to the evolution of the sensibility of the Smithsons would be borne out by the patio and pavilion which made up their joint contribution to the seminal White Chapel Gallery exhibition This is Tomorrow of 1956. This 'anti-consumerist' reworking of the Abbe Langier's primitive hut plus a double spread image of all four of them incongruously seated in the middle of Limmerson Street in London, running across the spiral binding of the catalogue, eloquently summed up their l'art brut approach. This ethos was reinforced by a poetic inscription in 'child-like' script asserting the anti-idealistic ethnographic archaism of the content. Patio & pavilion represents the fundamental necessities of the human habitat in a series of symbols. The first necessity is for a piece of the world the patio; the second necessity is for an enclosed space the pavilion. These two spaces are furnished with symbols for all human needs. The head for man himself his brain and his machines. The tree for nature. The rocks and natural objects for stability and the decoration of man-made space. The light box for the hearth and family. Artifacts and pin ups for his irrational urges. The frog and the dog for the other animals. The wheel and aeroplane for locomotion and the machine. Although James Stirling and the Smithsons would rival each other throughout the trajectory of their separate careers it is of the utmost significance as far as Brutalism is concerned that they would both cultivate a 'smokestack' aesthetic in their varied iterations of a native brick vernacular irrespective of whether the location was urban and rural. This mutual sensibility surely accounts for the similarity between a number of 'degree zero' works projected and realized by these separate practices during the first half of the 50's. I have in mind as far as the Smithsons are concerned the small warehouse-like four-story infill terrace house in brick and concrete projected for the Soho area of London in 1952. Of this work they wrote: "had this been built, it would have been the first exponent of 'the new brutalism' in England". And equally primitive syncopated exercise in load-bearing brickwork also characterizes the remarkable housing projects realized by Stirling and Gowan in 1955 and 1957; respectively, their 3-story Ham Common flats built on a verdant site in Richmond in 1955 and the 3 to 4 story terrace housing built as a fragmented block in Preston, Lancashire in 1957. The overall cultural intention informing the latter sets forth even more explicitly than any text by the Smithsons the common sensibility of the moment as far as their mutual essays in low-rise, low-cost housing was concerned. Thus we read: In 19th century industrial 'by-law' towns you pass perhaps twenty or more front doors before coming to your own, with children playing in the roads, parents chatting on the pavement and sitting in doorways, and the old peering through windows. This horizontal approach through the neighborhood to get to your house seems to be a reason for the friendliness and sense of community which exists in these work towns and the 19th century solution seems more dynamic than the latter planning solutions for urban mass housing . . . In the initial oeuvre complete published in 1975, Stirling and Gowan make it clear that this 'nostalgia for the slums' was a broad postwar British sensibility that extended well beyond architecture and could be found in artists as diverse as the novelist Somerset Maughan, the painter L.S. Lowry and George Orwell for his 1945 working class epic On the Road to Wigan Pier. This was also the environment that the Smithsons wished to evoke in their 10-story 'street-in-the-air' Golden Lane Housing competition entry of 1952, the span-deck access of which would be realized at a more exposed scale in the Parkhill Housing built to the designs of Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith for the Sheffield City Council in 1961. This achievement proved at a larger, more windswept scale, the truth of the cryptically critical observation that: "above the 6th floor it can be accepted that the old forms of contact with the ground are no longer valid". This mutual nostalgia for a declining 'vernacular' would also have its rural version in the work of both of these practices in the early 50's as we may judge from Stirling's village infill housing prototype exhibited at the CLAM X congress at Aix-en-Provence in 1953 which was inspired by Thomas Sharp's 1945 study The English Village. A more or less identical theme expressly designed for the same occasion made up the substance of the Smithsons' 'fold houses' ostensibly designed for West Burton in Yorkshire of which they wrote in Uppercase 3 of 1955. The new is placed over the old like a new plant growing through old branches -or new fruit on old twigs. The fold is a windbreak. Each house has its back to the prevailing wind. Instead of the 'housing Manual' type of house, sent down from the suburbs -a barrow boy on the fells. Sixty years later the oblique references in this statement may be easily missed (i.e. the contempt of the authors for the bureaucratic imposition of petit bourgeois) for what is conjoined in their predilection for 'barrow bow' street culture as a means for revitalizing the existing rural vernacular of the Yorkshire hills. In a resume of the "Parallel Life and Art" exhibition staged by the Smithsons, Paolozzi, and Henderson at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 1953, the Smithsons openly acknowledge how both themselves and Stirling & Gowan were equally involved with the so-called 'brutalist' ideology emerging out of the Independent Group that met at the ICA in the early 50's, comprising such figures as Reyner Banham, Theo Crosby, Colin St John Wilson, Richard Hamilton and Laurence Alloway, this last being the critic/curator of the exhibition This is Tomorrow. Two canonical buildings of the mid 60's respectively already suggest how these two practices will evolve from their mutual beginnings over the next decade as we may judge from the Smithsons' Economist Building realized in St James Street, London in 1963 and Stirling and Gowan's Engineering Faculty Building, Leicester University completed in 1964. Although both buildings comprise medium-rise towers with The Economist topping out at 17 stories and Leicester rising for 11 floors, the first inserted into dense urban fabric is unequivocally Sittesque and Neo-Miesian in character, while the second is a free-standing, Neo-Constructivist work. By this date quite different positions seem to have been established with the Smithsons opting for modular tectonic pieces having latent classical affinities and Stirling going for more strenuously organic assemblies with partial references to Louis Kahn and Alvar Aalto, with last affinity coming more fully into its own with Stirling's dormitories for St. Andrew's University in Scotland also realized in the 60's. The British 19th century engineering tradition is present as a key expressive element as far as the Leicester Engineering Building is concerned (shades of the Crystal Palace and Brunel) while in St. Andrews while we are witness to a concrete and glass essay surprisingly reminiscent of the Smithsons in their Sheffield University competition entry of 1953. At the same time there are faint traces of the Gothic Revival evident in both Leicester and The Economist. In the first instance, on Stirling's own admission, Leicester makes an allusion to William Butterfield's All Saints Margaret Street, London of 184959, while in the case of the Economist Gothic is latent in the structural mullions of the building which step back like attenuated buttresses in order to express the diminution of the load as they rise upwards as in the stepped piers of Mies van de Rohe's Promontory Apartments of 1949. As opposed to The Economist which, as fate would have it, brought the Smithsons' building career to a virtual close in terms of achieving works of comparable status and size, the Leicester Engineering Building gave Stirling and Gowan a run of university commissions culminating in leading to what has more recently recognized as the Red Trilogy on account of the fact that they were all faced in red brick and tile, namely in sequence after Leicester the History Faculty Building at Cambridge University (1964) and the Florey Dormitory at Queen's College, Oxford (1966). All of these major works by the Smithsons and Stirling involved the creative participation of the brilliant structural engineers Ron Jenkins of Ove Arup and Partners in the case the Hunstanton School in Norfolk of 1949-54, and Frank Newby of Felix Samuely and Partners in the case of the Red Trilogy and St Andrews University. With the appointment of Leslie Martin to the professorship of architecture at Cambridge University in 1956the creative patronage of the 'brutalist' sensibility shifted from London to Cambridge and with this change in leadership and focus the so-called movement entered its maturity. However before turning to the exceptionally fertile studio set up in Cambridge by Martin and Colin St. John it is necessary to comment in passing on the importance of certain training offices on the London scene in the 50's and the 60's above all the practice of Lyons Israel and Ellis which served as a proving ground for the next generation, namely, John Miller and Neave Brown, both of whom worked closely with Tom Ellis; in the first instance on an annex to the Old Vic Theatre (1958) and in the second on a stacked lecture theatres in fair-faced, reinforced (white) concrete, for the Wolfson Institute at Hammersmith Hospital (1961). Patrick Hodgkinson was the third architect of exceptional talent from the same year at the AA School. As it happens Hodgkinson would play a seminal role in the development of a normative modern Aaltoesque brick aesthetic appropriate to the British climate as this would issue from the Martin/St. Wilson Studio from 1956 onwards; most notably in terms of Hodgkinson's direct involvement, load bearing brick 3-story terrace housing projected for St. Pancras, London in 1959 and the student hostel for Caius College, dating from 1962. That Hodgkinson was the decisive behind these works is testified to by the house in Burrel's Field, Cambridge that Hodgkinson realized for the retiring master of Trinity College, Lord Adrian, in 1964. Hodgkinson would assert his ultimate prowess as an independent architect with his monumental urban set-piece known as the Brunswick Centre under development and re-development between 1965 and 1973. It is possible to argue that the Brunswick Centre is an ultimate Neo-Brutalist work at an urban scale since executed throughout in beton brut establishes itself as a city-in-miniature, that is as a micro-cosmic city with the city, one which breaks totally within the traditional Georgian square and street patter by which it is confronted on the Marchmont Street side. It has the problematic character of being conceived in section rather than in plan in as much as it comprises two stepped five-story housing blocks facing each other across a central promenade axis, flanked with shops throughout its length plus a cinema at the point of a monumental transverse axis lead to a nearby park. Like Hodgkinson Miller was also working in the Martin/St. John Wilson in Cambridge before opening up his own practice with Alan Colquhoun in 1960 with a commission to design a secondary school in Stratford in East London which is completed in 1964. Like Caius College, it is significant that this two story, load-bearing structure occupies a perfect square in plan from into which voids are 'excavated' as it were in order to produce the figure of the school which in its turn is wrapped a central square double-height assembly hall. It is obvious in retrospect that the plan of this school is closely related to the interlocking square top-lit reading rooms that Martin and St. John Wilson designed for the new Oxford University library complex under construction from 1959 to 1979. It is possibly fair to say that that the British 'neo-brutalist' sensibility much influenced by Aalto plays itself out in the work of Martin and his colleagues, throughout the 70's in what was one final effort to create a normative modern architecture for the British Isles to be executed primarily in brick.