and the philosopher Lewis Mumford lived nearby. We spent six months there, with the Gabos and their daughter Nina, in this incredible artistic and intellectual milieu, intoxicated by evenings speculating about the future and its possibilities.
Back at Yale, Norman Foster and I began working together closely. Like me, Norman had a scholarship, but his background was as different to mine as could be imagined. He had gone to grammar school before taking a job at Manchester City Council and completing his national service in the Royal Air Force. He managed to persuade Manchester University to take him on as an architecture student, largely on the basis of a portfolio of excellent drawings, and was a star student there.
We instantly struck up a friendship. Norman has a brilliant mind, and an incredibly clear way of explaining and arguing. At Yale, his drawings were already exceptional, while I still struggled, but we connected on a far more instinctive level. For five or six years, we would talk for hours every day, often late into the night, about cities, about architecture, about our practice. It was an intense, verbal love affair, and I don’t think I’d ever had such wonderful intellectual discussions with anyone else. We travelled in Carl Abbott’s VW to New York, and to Chicago, which we thought of as the Florence of the States, where we visited buildings by Wright and Mies, Louis Sullivan and the early modern pioneers.
Our final-year project (see opposite) was a scheme for science laboratories at Yale. Our design clustered round a central spine, with laboratories down the sides of the hillside site. It had service towers and an expressive structure and its spine followed the line of the slope. At the crit – the formal review of student projects that forms a central part of architectural education to this day – Philip Johnson, the don of American modernism, then teetering on the edge of his descent into post-modernism, snapped off one of the service towers, muttering as if to himself, ‘These will have to go.’ Looking back, I can see so many of the roots of our later work in that project – the separation of ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces, the central movement axis, the articulated and expressive towers, the use of prefabrication.
The muscular industrial architecture that inspired us on our road trips across the USA.
Smoke stacks and case studies
After graduating, Su and I decided to head out west. We had read Kerouac’s On The Road, and wanted to feel the expansiveness, the sense of space and possibility that America could offer. We relished the way that architects like Neutra, Meier, Schindler and Ellwood had found the freedom to build houses from scratch, and were swept off our feet by the results. Like many young people, we wanted to find our own spirit, our own language, our own technologies to solve the problems of the day.
In particular, we continued to see as many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as possible. Some architecture, like Le Corbusier’s, can be readily understood through looking at façade, plan and section, but Wright is different. His buildings express place and movement. You have to move through them to understand how they work, how they respond to landscape and light, how the relationship between inside and outside is expressed and resolved, how the play of light and shadow changes, brought to life by the sweeping lines of the buildings. We wanted to develop a language that could respond to Wright’s ideas – about light, landscape and movement – without simply mimicking his particular style or his forms. We preferred his earlier, more contextual work, though his more sculptural later buildings (like the New York Guggenheim Museum) have proved an equally powerful inspiration for architects like Frank Gehry, Amanda Levete, Jan Kaplický and Zaha Hadid.
The other influence from those early road trips was the industrial architecture around Long Island and New Jersey – the pipes, tanks, girders, gantries and towers of the refineries, factories and processing plants that spilled out around the city, the water towers and grain silos that rose from the flat countryside of the Midwest. England had great industrial and technological architecture from the nineteenth century, from Brunel’s bridges to Paxton’s greenhouses, but American industrial structures were on a scale that I had never seen before. They were the undiluted and unornamented essence of functional expression. But they could also be visually exciting and even romantic, lit up at night or shrouded in smoke.
Su and I bought a Renault Dauphine, a wreck of a car with some disturbing habits. On one early journey, we were sitting in the front seats, and had picked up a hitch-hiker who was sitting in the back. We weren’t going very fast, but suddenly we realised the back seat was empty. The engine, at the back of the car, had caught fire, as it tended to do whenever you reached a certain speed (we later realised that the fuel line leaked over the exhaust pipe the more you put your foot down), and the hitch-hiker had opened the door and leapt out.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909 – 11, is one of his finest ‘Prairie School’ houses. Their horizontal lines and organic styling evoke the flatness of the Midwestern landscape.
The Eames House, designed and built by Charles and Ray Eames in Los Angeles in 1949 as part of the Case Study Houses programme, using standardised windows and doors chosen from a catalogue.
The interior with Charles and Ray Eames surrounded by furniture made to their designs, and their collections of art works and folk art.
We travelled across the country, wondering at the sense of space, but also at the poverty and intolerance that persisted in the segregated southern states, where even the smallest gas station would have separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. The discrimination was shocking, and the civil rights movement still in its infancy – it is amazing to think that it would be another 50 years before the USA would elect its first black President.
Somehow, we made it to San Francisco in the Renault without too many fires, where the Federal Housing Authority employed Su, and I took a job with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Being at SOM was an amazing experience, though I quickly came to realise that working in someone else’s architectural practice was not for me. One day, I was on the twenty-seventh floor of their offices and heard fire engines. Looking out of the window, I saw that the car had burst into flames again.
It was the Case Study Houses that drew us to California. The Houses were commissioned from 1945 to 1962 by Arts & Architecture magazine’s editor Esther McCoy as prototypes for post-war family housing, ‘conceived within the spirit of our time, using as far as is practicable many war-born techniques and materials best suited to the expression of man’s life in the modern world’. They were to reflect the spirit of the age.
The Eames House, almost improvised by Charles and Ray Eames and enhanced by their beautiful furniture, was a revelation. But it was Rudolph Schindler and Raphael Soriano who particularly made their mark on me. Schindler had been a student and colleague of Wright’s, and worked on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He took Wright’s design sensibilities and translated them from concrete blocks to a carefully considered mix of materials, including plastic panels and lightweight steel frame constructions.
Soriano was unusual in that he used absolutely standardised components – plywood, I-beams, tin roofs, cork tiling, Formica – in his 1950 Case Study House, and had started his career building cheap housing for workers. He was one of the first architects I met whose design was not just modernist in style, but seemed rooted in the possibilities of the modern industrial age. Where Mies was essentially a superb modern classicist who built scale mock-ups of his buildings and for whom structure was expressive, Soriano, who later became a close friend of mine, simply used components to structure the building; there was no artifice.