New C20 Society book and lecture celebrate Alison and Peter Smithson
We’ve asked The Twentieth Century Society to contribute to our Journal. Here, they share an extract from a recently-published book about Alison and Peter Smithson.
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“Alison and Peter Smithson are probably the most controversial yet widely influential of post-war architectural practices, so it is surprising that an overview of their work has only now been published by C20 Society and Historic England as part of their Twentieth Century Architects series.
“Alison and Peter Smithson helped to forge a new kind of architectural culture in Britain – writerly, artistic-minded, avant-garde and unabashedly intellectual. Like others in the post-war generation they were catapulted into practice soon after graduation, winning their first important commission, for Hunstanton School, in 1950 when they were still in their twenties.
“They were very selective about what they worked on, and their practice was integrated into their home and family life, as recorded in Alison’s diary. Exhibitions, teaching, writing and public discussion formed a large part of their practice and were crucial to their influence. As a result, there are fewer completed buildings than one might expect; almost every building seems like a manifesto, yet their unbuilt designs were just as significant.
“A formative moment for Peter Smithson was his encounter with modernism in an article in the Architects’ Journal about Mies van der Rohe’s new buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago: ‘through it I saw that with perfectly ordinary, affordable things like bricks, old-fashioned cast-iron radiators, rolled-steel sections, steel windows, precast concrete planks, vitreous enamelled industrial fittings – all standard and off the peg – that an architecture was possible.’
“This valuing of common, industrially produced materials had particular resonance to the Smithsons, who were brought up in the industrial north-east. It was around 1953, while they were working on Hunstanton, that the Smithsons invented (or appropriated) the term ‘New Brutalism’, and the school was soon acclaimed as its first monument.
“One of their most famous unbuilt schemes is their competition entry for the Golden Lane Estate. Their entry included distinctive collages which superimposed their new buildings against photographs of the blitzed City of London.
“In the same year, 1956, as they exhibited experimental designs for homes at the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘This is Tomorrow’ show and the Daily Mail’s annual Ideal Home Exhibition, the Smithsons built a house for Derek and Jean Sugden, which subverted the conventional suburban typology with a modernist free plan and free façade. Two years later they designed a weekend house for themselves, the Solar Pavilion or Upper Lawn, a simple box set in the Wiltshire landscape.
“Their next large commission was for the Economist complex (1962-4; now the Smithson’s Plaza) in St James’s, incorporating offices for the Economist magazine, a bank and flats, as well as a new bay overlooking the plaza for neighbouring gentleman’s club Boodle’s. The Smithsons settled early on the idea of three buildings set around a small square and lifted above a car park. All the blocks belong to the same family of forms and are faced in roach-bed Portland stone.
“St Hilda’s College in Oxford wanted to make its mark in the wave of modern college buildings and commissioned a five-storey residence block from the Smithson’s in 1967. The sense that the Garden Building is itself a piece of landscaping, a way of linking older buildings and relating them to landscape elements, was important to the design. Most distinctive externally is the non-structural oak lattice, which was explained as providing a sense of privacy, ‘a kind of yashmak’ for the girls living there.
“Completed in 1972, Robin Hood Gardens, allowed the Smithsons to build the kind of social housing on an urban scale that they had designed and theorised for years. They put an extraordinary amount of research into understanding the urban context and site in Poplar, East London. Their design of two concrete slab blocks, with wide access decks or ‘streets in the air’, shielded a mounded central green space from the busy traffic of the Blackwall Tunnel. Always controversial, Robin Hood Gardens is now being demolished, despite a long-running campaign by C20 Society to save it. Ironically, a representative flat has been acquired by the V&A, and was exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale.
“The cancellation of major projects in Kuwait and Brazil led to a hiatus in their Smithsons’ work in the 1970s. Between 1978 and 1988 the Smithsons were commissioned to design four buildings for the University of Bath, where Peter had been appointed Professor of Architecture.
“The book ends with another late series of projects undertaken with Axel Bruchhäuser, a German furniture manufacturer and designer, in Lauenförde, Germany. These included work on his house, the Tecta factory and the Kragstuhlmuseum or Cantilever Chair Museum, the latter designed by Peter Smithson after Alison’s death in 1993.”
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The above has been extracted from the book Alison and Peter Smithson by Mark Crinson, which is available to buy here.
Author Mark Crinson – Professor of Architectural History and Assistant Dean for Research at Birkbeck, University of London – will be talking about the Smithsons for the C20 Society this Thursday, 25 October at 6.30pm. Tickets available here.
Read more: Open House: siblings Caroline Hillier and Ben Sugden shine a light on life in The Sugden House
Meet the Team: Appraisals Specialist Jake Elliott on the evolution of British Modernism
