Berthold Lubetkin's Highpoint II and the Jewish Contribution to Modern English Architecture

Deborah Lewittes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351124362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

In 1935, the Russian-born Jewish architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton designed Highpoint, a block of flats in London, which Le Corbusier called 'revolutionary'. Three years later, Lubetkin completed a companion design. Yet Highpoint II felt very different, and the sense that the ideals of modernism had been abandoned seemed hard to dispute. Had modern architecture failed to take root in England?

This book challenges the belief that English architecture was on hiatus during the 1930s. Using Highpoint II as a springboard, Deborah Lewittes takes us on a journey through the defining moments of modern English architecture – the 'high points' of the period surrounding Highpoint II. Drawing on Lubetkin's work and his writings, the book argues that he advanced influential, lasting theories which were rooted in his design for Highpoint II.

Lubetkin's work is explored within the context of wider Jewish emigration to London during the interwar years as well as the anti-Semitism that pervaded Britain during the 1930s. As Lewittes demonstrates, this decade was anything but quiet. Providing a new perspective on twentieth-century English architecture, this book is of interest to students and scholars in architectural history, urban studies, Jewish studies, and related fields.

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1 Building Highgate

High rises and uprisings

. . . suppose [an architect] to set up the marble statues of women in long robes, called Caryatides, to take the place of columns . . .

(Vitruvius, Book One, The Ten Books on Architecture)

We return, now, to the Highpoints. A mere three years before receiving the commission for the first Highpoint, Lubetkin and six recent graduates of the Architectural Association (AA) formed the collaborative firm Tecton. Lubetkin had met the architect Godfrey Samuel, one of the six, through his roommate in Paris, and Samuel in turn introduced Lubetkin to a group of students who had gravitated toward each other at the AA, mainly in joint opposition to the still-prevalent Beaux-Arts leanings of the AA’s educational program, in spite of the growing presence of vanguard voices. The name of the group derives from the Latin (by way of Greek) word “architecton,” meaning carpenter or builder,¹ though certainly for Lubetkin, the name held additional significance; “Tektonika” was used by Russian Constructivists to refer to a merging of the ideological tenets of communism with the proper and functional use of industrial materials, and Lubetkin, we will discuss later, grew up amidst the heated years and street protests of his Constructivist countrymen.² But there is still another reference, to architectural tectonics; as discussed by Stanford Anderson:

“Tektonik” referred not just to the activity of making the materially requisite construction . . . but rather to the activity that raises this construction to an art form . . . The functionally adequate form must be adapted so as to give expression to its function. The sense of bearing provided by the entasis of Greek columns became the touchstone of this concept of Tektonik.³

The tectonic, then, is the poetic expression of structural function, a concept that will have resonance throughout our discussion of both Highpoints as well as Lubetkin’s later work. The most significant cultural implication of the firm, though, was not the etymology of its name, but rather the fact that Tecton was a collaborative architecture firm with shared, collective credit for its work, an unusual model for an English architectural practice during this time period. In England in the thirties, there was still a bourgeois air that surrounded the profession of architect; the organization of one’s firm was not typically a site for experimentation. An architect trained and apprenticed according to set rules, so Tecton’s approach was a strong rejection of the prevailing system.⁴ Much later, in 1946, Walter Gropius founded TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative), a move that inspired the title of Sigfried Giedion’s 1954 book Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork, but the convergence of the London-based Tecton architects in 1932 into a non-hierarchical cooperative was a new and different standard for the architecture world, typical of Lubetkin’s desire to challenge the establishment.⁵

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Highpoint – at the time of the initiation of the project, there were no plans for a second structure – originated when a wealthy Jewish industrialist, Sigmund Gestetner, commissioned Lubetkin to design communal worker housing for his employees in Camden Town, a crowded, fairly rundown neighborhood north of Regent’s Park.⁶ When the only appropriate site Gestetner could find was located in quiet, affluent, leafy Highgate, he altered the original program and asked Lubetkin to design flats to rent to middle- and upper-class tenants on the open housing market. The site chosen was accompanied by a set of zoning regulations, including a height limit on the street façade, which faces North Hill Road northeast of Hampstead Heath, and a restriction on developing the land to the building’s rear. The resulting residential block, engineered by Ove Arup, is a symmetrical double-cruciform plan that rises seven stories on the street front and eight stories on the rear, garden-view side. A columned, curved porte-cochère faces the street, and the entire central bulk of the structure is raised on reinforced concrete pilotis; the upper residential floors each contain four two-bedroom flats and four three-bedroom flats. Ribbon windows in each flat are designed so that they can completely fold to the side, accordion-style, much to the chagrin of Lubetkin’s engineer, allowing for a clear opening in the façade and melding indoor and outdoor spaces, thus “re-establishing contact with the garden in an off-the-ground flat.”⁷ A rooftop garden with its screen walls frames views and at the time, because of the building’s hilltop location, was the tallest point in London. A radio aerial was placed on the roof, and although it is now altered, the original was modeled after the Vesnin brothers’ 1923 design for the Palace of Labor, a deliberate Constructivist reference. Lubetkin, in fact, had studied with the Vesnins.

A series of communal spaces lead from the front entrance out to the rear garden. Most of the exterior of the structure is the neutral, seamless, near-unbroken white we have come to associate with the international style, what Le Corbusier called le couleur-type,⁸ though there are elements that offer expressive relief. Curvilinear balcony walls, for instance, echo a curving wall of a ground-floor winter garden, and a curved ramp slopes down to the garden; Lubetkin inserted many sculptural elements such as these into his design, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s interpenetration of curves and diagonals into the modernist cube of Villa Savoye in Poissy (1929–30). The curves also call to mind Constructivist sculpture, as well as Lubetkin’s own Penguin Pool, completed the previous year, which will be discussed later (Figure 1.1).

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The exterior of the winter garden as well as the wall surrounding the front entrance are both faced in brown brick, a material that will be echoed in Highpoint II’s cladding, and certainly refers to the curved stone wall of Le Corbusier’s Pavillon Suisse in Paris (1930–2); Lubetkin, it must be said, was a master at absorbing and recontextualizing the design idioms of his day.

Figure 1.1 Highpoint I exterior: arabesque balcony parapets and curved exterior wall. Used with permission from RIBApix.

In what would become typical of Lubetkin’s manner of presenting his work, every aspect of the design was explained in an extended series of drawings; the ones for Highpoint I were exhibited in 1934 at the Contemporary Industrial Design Exhibition. A group of architecture students had planned to come to the construction site, and Tecton wanted the rationale behind the design choices to seem clear, non-arbitrary, and scientific. Although much of Highpoint’s design truly did make use of rational, detailed analyses to maximize sunlight, views, and cross-ventilation within each flat, this was also largely a polemical exercise, in that the flats featured custom-designed fittings, far from Existenzminimum-influenced accommodations around which much modern architecture discussion of the day, at least on the continent, revolved. Furthermore, Highpoint included ground-floor flats for maids and porters, and a contemporary discourse on flats suggested that a lack of exterior access balconies marked it as more upscale than a block of workers’ flats, the original undertaking, would have been.⁹ Those who ended up living in Highpoint were “intellectual pace-setters,” described by Howard Robertson of the AA as

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[t]hose who, for want of a better term, are anti-bourgeois, not politically but socially . . . artists, professional men, and generally those who through taste and education . . . enjoy the sensitive severity and restraint of a building such as ‘Highpoint’ . . . [and its] definite aesthetic intent.¹⁰

A year after Highpoint was finished, Gestetner hired Tecton to design a companion residential block on the adjacent site. The final structure, separated from Highpoint I by only six feet, is rectangular in plan and contains twelve two-story, four-bedroom residences. Despite the overall rectangularity of the footprint and the building, it is clearly delineated into three sections: a central block flanked by two symmetrical wings. As opposed to the generally unified, seamless surface of Highpoint I and the early machine aesthetic, the elevations of Highpoint II are more varied and expressive, reflect structural and functional differences, and emphasize the overall horizontality of the rectangular block, in spite of vertical accents. Tecton again collaborated with Arup, who devised the structural system. The central block uses a reinforced concrete frame with load-bearing walls,¹¹ which allowed the double-height living room walls in the central section on the rear of the building to be almost all glass – the windows are sixteen feet by ten feet – providing uninterrupted views out toward Hampstead Heath; the wings are built in the manner of a load-bearing wall system also used in Highpoint I. The cladding on the garden façade reflects this structural difference – the wings are solidly covered in cream tiles, a...