on the future of cities.
My final-year project, which appealed to Peter’s social instincts, was a school for children with special educational needs in Wales, which used locally grown timber, and was designed so that the children could participate in building. The school reflected a budding interest in social architecture, in the process as well as the result of construction. Smithson’s report on my scheme referred to my ‘capacity for worrying about the effect the building will have on people and a concern for shape on the inside’, and awarded me the final-year prize.
Meeting Su Brumwell
I met Su Brumwell in Milan at the end of my third year. She was beautiful, intelligent and sophisticated, and catapulted me into a milieu of left-wing politics and modern art in Britain. Su’s mother Rene was a Labour councillor from a long socialist tradition. Her father Marcus was a remarkable man. He headed an advertising agency (which he said bored him), chaired the Labour Party’s Science and Arts Committee, and had founded the Design Research Unit, the team behind the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain.
Marcus and Rene were strong supporters of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, the potter Bernard Leach, and other artists of the St Ives School. They seemed to have met every other artist who passed through England in the post-war years, from Piet Mondrian to Naum Gabo. One painting, which Mondrian gave Marcus to pay off a £37 debt, was later sold to fund the construction of Creek Vean, one of Team 4’s first projects.
The late 1950s was an exciting time, with the beginnings of the space race and huge technological advances, but also a frightening one. Su and I joined the Easter 1958 Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. It was snowing, and we planned to throw it in after one day’s marching as it was so cold. But the next day we saw the press, which was full of vicious lies about ‘hooligans’ and ‘commies’. This bore no resemblance to the very orderly civilised march we had been on, so we re-joined the march, and returned in subsequent years. I shall never forget the passion of the marchers, or the kindness of the Quaker families who gave us food, lodging and plasters for our blistered feet, any more than I will forget the venom of the press and some of the bystanders.
We moved in together in Hampstead, and we married in August 1960, while she was completing her sociology degree at the LSE. I went to work at Middlesex County Council, designing schools, drawn to work with Whitfield Lewis, a senior architect for the Alton Estate in Roehampton. Every local authority had an architecture department and some of these were huge: in 1956, the London County Council Architects Department had 3,000 employees, and was led by Leslie Martin, the architect of the Royal Festival Hall, a leading modernist thinker, and a friend of the Brumwells, who helped me maintain confidence a few years later when I was worrying whether I was cut out for architecture. A sense of social responsibility made it seem natural for the majority of young architects to work for the state rather than on the private commissions that dominate today. The focus of architectural training and practice was on public and civic buildings – schools, health centres, concert halls, new housing developments. It is time we returned to that socially driven model.
Su and I on 42nd Street in New York in 1961, the year after we married. We were photographed like celebrities by the New Haven local paper on our way to Yale.
We took a cargo boat to Israel during our honeymoon – still a young country and looking like a socialist utopia, creating orange groves out of the desert – where we worked on a kibbutz and met some of the state’s founders. We hitch-hiked back through Syria, Lebanon and Turkey to Europe, finding unbelievable kindness wherever we went, with the poorest being the kindest of all; hearing we were on honeymoon, people plied us with food and drink. It was a real cultural eye-opener. We came back through Paris, where we saw Pierre Chareau’s stunning Maison de Verre, crafted in the 1930s from glass bricks, to allow in light without revealing the view of a blank wall.
New York – The Athens of the Twentieth Century
Louis Kahn in his Yale Centre for British Art Building.
Arriving in New York was one of the greatest shocks of my life. Su and I left Southampton on an autumn day in 1961. As our ship, the Queen Elizabeth, pulled out of the port, we looked down on grey two-storey houses, and men in cloth caps cycling along the quayside of a city still scarred by wartime bombing. Five days later, we woke to see Manhattan towering above us, an urban island with buildings and canyons that dwarfed the ship. That image, and the sheer excitement of seeing those glittering towers for the first time, is still with me. The New Haven local paper had sent a reporter out on the pilot’s boat to interview us, as a young couple arriving fresh in New York, and we felt self-conscious, almost like ambassadors for the youth of Europe.
We were on our way to Yale. I was taking up a Fulbright scholarship to study for my master’s degree, and Su had a scholarship to study city planning. After the AA, I had been torn between applying for a scholarship in Rome, which I knew and loved, and going to America. But I knew deep down that Rome was the past; America was the future. Yale looked close enough to New York, offered a Louis Kahn building even if Kahn himself had moved on, and was on the sea. Or so we thought – the sea was completely blocked off by industry and naval yards. I never even saw it in the year I was there.
New York had an incredible energy, richness and vitality in the early 1960s. It was the Athens of the mid-twentieth century, the epicentre of modern art, of modern architecture, of modern music. We listened to jazz, blues and rock and roll – Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet, Elvis Presley – exciting music that seemed a world away from English jazz or skiffle. We saw works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning – the artists who were changing painting around the world. We read Marcuse’s critiques of consumerism and Adorno on commodified culture. England had only finished rationing a few years earlier, was adapting painfully to its post-colonial future, and felt austere in spirit if not in policy. By comparison, the vigour and prosperity of America, where a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy had just taken office as President, were palpable. The streets were full of people from every country, as London’s are today. It was clearly the capital of the world.
Paul Rudolph, our professor at Yale, standing in front of the rough concrete wall of his Yale Art and Architecture Building.
Rudolph’s 1953 Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island, Florida. Before coming to Yale, Rudolph was a leading light in the ‘Sarasota School’, whose delicate architecture drew me to study with him.
After a few days of being escorted round New York like minor celebrities, we made it to Yale’s campus, where I had two less pleasant shocks. The first was that the campus was designed as a strange pastiche of a Victorian Oxbridge college, with Gothic revival buildings arranged around grassy quadrangles, and strange secret fraternities for the privileged few. This was a complete contrast to the rest of the town, which was a study in urban dereliction, with the worst poverty and drug problems of the east coast. Town and gown seemed to be forever at each other’s throats. It was only when it became clear that the state of the city was pushing faculty and students away that Yale started to embrace rather than ignore its urban setting.
The second shock was delivered by Paul Rudolph, the professor, when I met him on the stairs on my first day. I introduced myself. He looked unimpressed: ‘We are already four days into term. Your first assignment is due in ten days. You need to pass it, or you’re out.’
After the ruminative intellectual atmosphere of the AA, the relentless pace at Yale showed us what hard work architecture could be; 80- to 100-hour weeks, working through the night, grabbing a few hours