| Alison and Peter Smithson were, until 1993, principals of their own London-based architectural practice and together were responsible for some of the most influential writings and buildings in 20th-century British architecture. Their work is characterized by the breadth of their projects, which range from city planning to furniture design. Their involvement with the Pop art movement in 1950s London and, later, as cofounders of the influential Team X group that grew out of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), established their place within modern postwar architecture in Britain.
The firm built their early reputation on a winning competition design, the Hunstanton School (1954) in Norfolk, inspired by the early Chicago School buildings of Mies van der Rohe. This rectilinear pavilion in brick, steel, and glass became the first built landmark of a new movement known as the New Brutalism (or simply Brutalism) in England. The Economist Building (actually three buildings around a raised plaza built in concrete but faced in Portland stone) followed in London in 1964. The Smithsons then designed two buildings in disparate settings: student accommodations for St. Hilda’s College, Oxford (1970), in essence a scaled-down version of one of the earlier Economist “towers” but sensitively contextualized, and the housing at Robin Hood Gardens (1970), sandwiched between highways in the east end of London and itself a fragment of their influential competition project for Golden Lane (1952).
A number of competition entries from the early 1950s established the Smithsons among a new avant-garde of architects eager to transcend the limits of the International Style without betraying the rationality and rigor of modernist principles. The Smithsons’s solution was radical although contradictory: on the one hand, their work made reference to anthropological patterns of human association and settlement, and on the other, advocated the embrace of new industrial technologies.
The Smithsons’ involvement with a movement of British Pop artists known as the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) provided an opportunity to present their work to an audience of avant-garde artists, curators, critics, theorists, and other architects. The multimedia exhibitions “A Parallel of Life and Art” (ICA, 1953) and “This is Tomorrow” (Whitechapel Gallery, 1956) included the Smithsons’ work. The latter included a primitive hut surrounded by a sand-covered protected territory, accompanied by a symbolic collection of relics, or “found objects”—reminders of human activity as well as machine-age technologies. The concept of the house as the focus of post-war domesticity and commodity fetishism provided the theme for the Smithsons’ “House of the Future” entry constructed for the Ideal Homes Exhibition in London (1956). The Smithsons organic styling and built-in furniture, using molded plastic and fiberglass construction, produced a startling contrast to the traditional brick-and-timber palette of the prevailing residential architecture.
Other projects diverted from the individualism of the home to consider large-scale movement patterns in city centers. Like Golden Lane, the Smithsons’ project for the Sheffield University competition (1953) used pedestrian circulation as its major ordering device. This strategy was extrapolated in the Berlin Haupstadt competition (1958), in which an elevated pedestrian network bridges the existing roadways. This project represented the desire to imagine a new scale of urban architecture, one more suited to the increased speed of movement and the loss of engagement between inhabitants and their immediate surroundings. These goals dovetailed with the work and concerns of Team X, a group that included other European architects such as Ralph Erskine, Giancarlo di Carlo, and Aldo van Eyck. As editor of the Team X Primer (published initially in Architectural Design in 1962), Alison Smithson articulated statements of theory alongside diagrams and drawings of architectural projects that analyzed the crucial nature of architectural context and the continuity of historic living patterns. Nonetheless, the Primer illustrates proposals, such as the London Roads Study (1959), that appear to disregard existing buildings and topographies.
By the 1970s, a shift in the Smithsons’s work acknowledged these earlier contradictions, most clearly manifest in the campus buildings at the University of Bath. The Smithsons defined the Bath architecture as Team X structures—through what they termed “mat-building”—with blocks arranged along a raised pedestrian deck above a ground-level service road. The inherent incompleteness of this extendable structure provided a challenge to the Smithsons’s sensibility, demanding that they create at least a suggestion of stability and closure to an otherwise infinite system. The Bath buildings presented new themes not previously seen in their built work: the notion of “conglomerate ordering,” referring to volumetric masses wrapped in a unifying skin; the building as “climate register,” expressing its relation to the external environment; the concern for the sensory pleasure to be gained from concrete materials; and the sensitivity to inhabitation, making the building exquisitely appropriate to its function. All these notions find built expression, having been briefly outlined in their earlier writings, and thus, the Bath buildings represent a culmination of a long career of challenging and thoughtful practice.
JONATHAN A.HALE
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
