Berthold Lubetkin (1901-1990) and the Tecton group were among the leading practitioners of modern architecture in Great Britain in the 1930s and the years immediately following World War II. Lubetkin is credited with introducing progressive architectural ideals from the Continent into the United Kingdom. Although the firm's influence declined in the late 1950s, its reputation remained intact, having created iconic images of the International Style in England.
Lubetkin was born in Russia (Tiflis, Georgia) in 1901 and received his initial architectural training at the Vkhutemas in Moscow, a leading art and design school of the newly formed USSR. From 1920 to 1922, he studied under Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Alexander Vesnin, absorbing the lessons of their geometric and spatial configurations as well as their revolutionary social ideals. He left the USSR in 1922 and traveled across Europe, working briefly for Bruno Taut and Ernst May. In Paris in 1925, he assisted in the construction of Konstantin Melnikov's Soviet Pavilion for the Exhibition des Art Décoratifs and was exposed to the work of Le Corbusier. While in Paris, Lubetkin established a small practice and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Auguste Perret, where he learned the techniques of reinforced-concrete construction. In 1931, Lubetkin settled permanently in Great Britain, becoming an influential member of an émigré circle that eventually included Serge Chermayeff, Ernö Goldfinger, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn. In 1932, Lubetkin established the firm of Tecton with recent graduates of the Architectural Association, including Lindsey Drake, Frances Skinner, and Anthony Chitty. Although Tecton was intended as a Soviet-style collective, Lubetkin was its principal designer, theorist, and spokesperson.
Tecton's first significant projects were buildings for the London Zoo with programs requiring specialized research into the users' behaviors and habits, which Lubetkin regarded as crucial to a committed modernist practice. In the Gorilla House (1932) and the Penguin Pool (1934), rigorous programmatic analysis (of animal occupants and human visitors) was wedded to precise formal geometry—a two-part, rotating cylinder for the apes and spiral ramps suspended above an oval pool for the birds. The abstract composition of the Penguin Pool has the dynamism of modernist sculpture and evokes the Constructivism of Lubetkin's early teachers. Structurally, the Penguin Pool is a tour de force of reinforced-concrete construction. Engineered by Ove Arup, its 46-foot-long unsupported ramps utilized the most advanced methods then available. Embraced on its completion by both the architectural avant-garde and the mainstream public, the Penguin Pool was one of the first modernist structures in Britain to receive landmark status. It was restored in 1987.
Tecton followed the critical and popular success of the zoo buildings with a series of private houses and apartment blocks, including Highpoint I and II. Highpoint I (1935) was one of the first large-scale British buildings to manifest Le Corbusier's "Five Points of Architecture." It featured all of the elements that would become clichés of the International Style but utilized them with a remarkable degree of functional clarity and compositional sophistication. Lubetkin planned the eight-story building as a double cruciform, providing ample light and ventilation to all 64 apartments. Although Highpoint I was praised by Le Corbusier himself as a vertical garden city, it fell short of Lubetkin's social ideological aspirations, quickly becoming a luxury housing complex with only a few low-rent units.
After Highpoint I, Lubetkin's use of the Le Corbusian syntax became increasingly formalist and mannered, as in Highpoint II (1938), which adjoins the original building. Here, Lubetkin utilized tiles and glazed brick as a contextual gesture and introduced reproduction caryatids in place of piloris (stilts) to support the porte-cochère (carriage entrance). This classical motif has been variously interpreted as an example of bricolage or pastiche (Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter) and as a harbinger of ironic postmodernism (Charles Jencks). Inside Highpoint II, Lubetkin continued to explore Le Corbusian planning with duplex apartments and double-height living rooms. Highpoint II achieved cult status as the home of special agent Emma Peel on the 1960s television show "The Avengers."
Besides working with Tecton, Lubetkin was a founding member of the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group in 1933. Aligning itself with CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) against the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) establishment, MARS promoted the ideals of modernism in the broadest possible technical, social, and economic contexts. Eventually, Lubetkin grew dissatisfied with what he perceived as the MARS Group's unfocused social commitment, especially with the worsening political situation in Europe. In 1935, along with several Tecton members, he founded a more militant group with an explicit socialist agenda. The short-lived Architects' and Technicians' Organization (ATO) dedicated itself to housing and town-planning issues and engaged in direct, although limited, community action and political organizing. For Lubetkin, the ATO provided a forum for his ideas on the social efficacy of architecture and offered an opportunity for promoting the social dimension of Tecton's practice, as in its Finsbury Health Centre (1938), a facility commissioned by the socialist Borough Council of Finsbury for its blight-stricken neighborhood.
As a collective firm, Tecton dissolved in 1948, although several of its members formed new partnerships, including that of Skinner, Bailey, and Lubetkin. Increasingly after World War II, Lubetkin turned his attention to planning, although his attempt to design the Peterlee New Town (project, 1948-50) was ultimately unsuccessful. During the 1950s and 1960s, he designed a number of low-income residential complexes in and around London, including the 16-acre Cranbrook Estates (1955-66), an adroit composition of high-rise towers, low-rise terraces, and detached houses. By the time Lubetkin retired from practice in 1970 to devote himself to farming, his contributions to the British Modern movement had been largely forgotten. He was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 1982, which occasioned his return to public life as a vocal critic of Postmodernist architectural excess. The RIBA award also prompted a scholarly reappraisal of Tecton's work that established the firm's crucial role in the promotion of modernist architecture and ideology in the United Kingdom. Lubetkin died in 1990.
Gabrielle Esperdy
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
