Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist Buildings in St James’s, London. The stone-clad buildings and piazza are emphatically but quietly modernist, engaging in a careful dialogue with the surrounding gentlemen’s clubs and historic buildings.
By the mid-1950s, the modernist edifice was starting to crack. A new generation was stepping away from a rigidly utopian attitude, sensing that modernism was itself becoming a codified style (the much-criticised ‘international style’). Reyner Banham, who later became a great friend, began to unpick the idea of a modernist style, divorced from function and from the zeitgeist. In Italy, my cousin Ernesto Rogers was imbuing his modernist towers with a sense of context and historical continuity, and in England Alison and Peter Smithson were mounting their own challenge to the clean-lined utopianism of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.
The Smithsons’ two best-known London schemes could hardly be more different. The 1964 Economist Building in St James’s is one of London’s greatest modern buildings, standing in an elegant piazza, a delicate insertion into a historically rich context. Robin Hood Gardens, their housing scheme in Poplar completed in 1972, was in an uncompromising location alongside the urban motorway that leads to the Blackwall Tunnel. There, in the heart of east London, they introduced the radical concept of ‘streets in the air’ – designed to replicate the street life of east London, rather than the dark, dingy internal corridors then common in blocks of flats (their earlier unbuilt scheme for Golden Lane, a social housing scheme on the edge of the City of London, adopted the same language).
Cedric Price, whose radical ideas and projects inspired my architecture, and those of a generation of architects.
Hunstanton School in Norfolk, which the Smithsons completed in 1954, was a huge breakthrough. It was a rough building, owing plan and section to Mies van der Rohe, but taking a harsher, deformalised, more personal and reductive approach. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but looking back I can see the link between the honesty of Hunstanton, the Californian Case Study Houses’ celebration of standardised factory-produced components, and the architectural language that Norman Foster, Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman and I would later develop as Team 4.
Together with other members of MARS (the Modern Architecture Research Group – a younger and more radical English version of the modernist Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) – the Smithsons attacked the increasingly formalised international style adopted by the old guard, but also tore into the new contextualism espoused by Ernesto; there was heated correspondence between Ernesto and Reyner Banham, and one of my essays at the AA provoked a frosty response from Peter Smithson for discussing the role of history in modern architecture.
Another challenge to modernism was emerging from the conceptual thinking of Peter Cook, who would become one of the founders of Archigram, and Cedric Price. Cedric was a subtle, radical and considerable thinker, who overlapped with me at the AA. He saw architecture as a way of responding to the rapid changes of a post-industrial society, teaching a generation to challenge the brief and question what clients really wanted, while trying to find new ways to bring delight, learning, arts and culture to everyone’s doorstep. He devised the Fun Palace in the early 1960s with theatre director Joan Littlewood (who had scandalised the establishment by staging the First World War satire Oh! What A Lovely War at Stratford East), a mobile home for arts and sciences constructed of moveable and modular plug-ins. Cedric’s Thinkbelt project for the declining Potteries area would be a university on wheels, travelling along disused railway lines. Peter Cook’s Archigram projects also had a futuristic optimism, in love with the potential of technology and the fast-changing shape of the future, though they had less interest in social or political issues.
The Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in east London, a magnificent housing scheme completed in 1972 that has been allowed to deteriorate and is now scheduled for demolition.
The Smithsons’ unrealised 1952 design for Golden Lane, central London, showing the sociability and spaciousness of their ‘streets in the air’.
Alison and Peter Smithson at work.
Architectural Association – Meeting the Modern in Bedford Square
When I arrived at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1954, after a year at Epsom Art School (where I argued about philosophy as much as I studied art), it was the only school of modernist architecture in the UK, and the most important in Europe. Robert Furneax Jordan, my first-year tutor and a former head of the school, had a discursive style, a cosmopolitan and humanistic outlook, and a belief in architecture as a potent force for social and economic change. He invited architects from across Europe, including Ernesto as well as Bauhaus refugees from Nazi Germany and Constructivist exiles from Soviet Russia, to teach and lecture at the school.
The students were almost as impressive as the teachers. Philip Powell and Jacko Moya, designers of the Festival of Britain’s Skylon and the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, had left a few years before I arrived, and the year above me included Peter Ahrends, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek, who would go on to design the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Keble College, Oxford, extension. One of the finest talents was Ed Reynolds, whose radical forms were far ahead of their time, but who never had the chance to develop his talents, as he died of cancer at the age of thirty-two. They were in their final year when I arrived and were already developing groundbreaking plans for social housing, reflecting the generally leftist and socially engaged atmosphere at the school. Intellectual and political debate was the lifeblood of the AA. Many nights at Epsom Art School had been spent debating how to change the world with Brian Taylor, a good friend and brilliant artist, my girlfriend Georgie Cheesman, and her sister Wendy. So this ambience of debate and discussion at the AA’s Bedford Square premises seemed like a natural progression.
Georgie Cheesman (later Wolton), my first great love. We met at Epsom Art School and studied together at the AA, where she helped rescue many of my drawings.
Georgie and I had met at Epsom, where we became inseparable. She started at the AA the year after I did, despite opposition from her father, a Lloyd’s insurance underwriter who absolutely loathed me, threatening to sue me and chasing me out of his house on multiple occasions. She was a great intellectual influence, and her help with my drawings was probably the only thing that stopped me from being thrown out of the AA (and was not the last time she would rescue my career). She was vivacious and intelligent, with a wild spark. After highs and lows, we separated at the end of my third year at the AA but stayed friends; she worked briefly at Team 4, and later on the landscaping outside the River Café and on the roof terrace at Royal Avenue.
My initial reports at the AA were dreadful. My drawing had failed to improve, and my ability to express myself in writing was poor. I had to repeat my fourth year. Reports from Michael Pattrick, head of the school, acknowledged my enthusiasm, but gave me little basis for believing that I could succeed as an architect. He even suggested that I move to furniture design – ignoring the fact that draughtsmanship was as important for a furniture designer as it was for an architect, if not more so.
But by my last year, something changed, or several things did. Peter Smithson was my tutor, and became very supportive (once he had got over my endorsements of Ernesto’s belief in historical continuity), alongside other excellent teachers like Alan Colquhoun and John Killick. There was also the sense that the post-war cultural freeze was finally thawing. We were inspired by This is Tomorrow, the 1956 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition that featured the Smithsons, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. My drawing