The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew
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The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew

Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics

Iain Jackson, Jessica Holland

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eBook - ePub

The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew

Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics

Iain Jackson, Jessica Holland

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About This Book

Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were pioneers of Modern Architecture in Britain and its former colonies from the late 1920s through to the early 1970s. As a barometer of twentieth century architecture, their work traces the major cultural developments of that century from the development of modernism, its spread into the late-colonial arena and finally, to its re-evaluation that resulted in a more expressive, formalist approach in the post-war era. This book thoroughly examines Fry and Drew's highly influential 'Tropical Architecture' in West Africa and India, whilst also discussing their British work, such as their post World War II projects for the Festival of Britain, Harlow New Town, Pilkington Brothers' Headquarters and Coychurch Crematorium. It highlights the collaborative nature of Fry and Drew's work, including schemes undertaken with Elizabeth Denby, Walter Gropius, Denys Lasdun, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier. Positioning their architecture, writing and educational endeavours within a wider context, this book illustrates the significant artistic and cultural contributions made by Fry and Drew throughout their lengthy careers.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317044857

1

From Classical Beginnings

Much has been written of the development of the Modern Movement in interwar Britain and Edwin Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) – or Max Fry as he came to be known – occupies a central role in the ‘Grand Narrative’ that depicts the movement as a continuous, homogeneous process.1 Fry’s friends and MARS Group colleagues, Alison and Peter Smithson, for example, allied Fry’s work with their chronology of the ‘Heroic Period of Modern Architecture’, presenting Kensal House (1937) as a final British flourish.2 Fry’s work is thus presented as part of a Modern inheritance, part of ‘the rock on which we [architects] stand’ wrote the Smithsons.3 Fry, too, contributed to the establishment of his position as one of a handful of home-grown modernists amongst an interwar scene dominated by European ideals and influences. In 1957, he wrote of the difficulties in building his first Modern house, ‘it was not before we had been turned off three sites and found one sufficiently remote that I was able to build … with the limitation imposed by the council that traditional materials should be employed’.4 These post-war recollections of struggles against an insular architectural establishment – and the flowering of British Modernism nonetheless – reinforce Fry’s place at the heart of the heroic canon.
Recent revisionist interpretations of the period also recognise Fry as a key figure in the founding and development of a Modern Movement in Britain.5 Such interpretations consider the British milieu to be more positively inclined toward Modern architecture and the domestic growth of the movement, with Fry portrayed as a central figure in the ‘narratives of modernity’ that came together to help Modernism achieve its ‘ultimate hegemony’ post World War Two.6 This consensus of Fry’s position as the leading light of British Modernism encourages a closer examination of his work. Now, as during his lengthy career, Fry’s work generally receives a positive reception; as Anthony Jackson observes, ‘Fry was almost unique in his acceptance by the various shades of architectural opinion’.7 Indeed, there are interesting contrasts present throughout his career: Fry combined a privileged position of associate membership on the RIBA Council (1933–37) and his role as a key figure of the MARS Group with no apparent conflict of interest or agenda; he was a member of the exclusive Athenaeum Club in London – of which the ardent anti-modernist Reginald Blomfield was also a member – while also holding membership to the leftist Political and Economic Planning (PEP) Club. Fry is a perfect example of the ‘permissive transgression’ between supposed modernists and traditionalists in British interwar architectural culture, highlighted by Hélène Lipstadt.8
Looking beyond these social connections, this chapter investigates the roots of Fry’s career. Fry’s autobiography describes his ‘conversion’ to Modernism in the mid-1920s, which prompted him to tear up drawings of his earlier Classical work and begin again with a fresh sheet of paper.9 Yet Fry’s architectural training in the international cities of Liverpool and New York suggest that his education and formative influences were more progressive than Fry would care to admit. This chapter reconsiders Fry’s route to Modernism, looking beyond his built work to examine a broader scope of his life, to illustrate the continuity of his architectural training and career. It focuses on his formative years in Liverpool, his education, and his early professional collaborations up to the end of the 1920s: firstly, with the town planners Thomas Adams (1871–1940) and Francis Longstreth Thompson; and, secondly, with his fellow modernist pioneers Jack Pritchard (1899–1992) and Wells Coates (1895–1958).
Fry grew up on Merseyside. He was not only a graduate of the Liverpool School of Architecture, but he was a product of the city itself. His childhood instilled in him values that remained throughout his lifetime and directly influenced his approach to the built environment. In his memoirs, written in the 1970s, the long shadow of his childhood experience is evident, played out against the backdrop of a city full of vitality. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the time of Fry’s birth, Liverpool was one of the most prosperous ports in the world. Established initially for commerce with Ireland in the thirteenth century, the port had grown dramatically due to the lucrative cotton trade of the late-eighteenth century to create a city of physical and intellectual modernity that was unusual in Britain.10 This dynamic shipping trade – rather than the manufacturing tradition of industrial centres like Manchester – gave Liverpool an international outlook that thrived on technological advances borrowed from other cultures to ensure its continued wealth. It was the perfect setting for an aspiring architect.
The frequent passenger ships transporting emigrants to the new world facilitated the city’s assimilation of innovative ideas. Liverpool’s capitalist and cultural ventures that operated through the port thus looked outward to America – rather than into Britain’s ‘island culture’ or to nearby Europe – to such an extent that news from the US was reported in the local newspapers.11 The port was the centre of life in the city, as Fry later recalled, evocatively describing the cargo and its associated wealth:
There was no escaping it. A stone’s throw from the politest shopping street were narrow alleys lined with warehouses reeking of cloves and pepper. The smell of molasses came in pungent waves up the slopes from the docks into the financial centre where men in top hats and hands deep in trouser pockets talked money as they walked from one set of chambers to another.12
As a centre of flourishing industry, Liverpool inevitably fostered an under-class of low-paid workers; Christopher Crouch notes, ‘Enormous wealth and absolute squalor existed side by side’.13 The transient emigrants swelled the city’s already considerable population of casual dock labourers, keeping wages low and facilitating growth. This extreme inequality led to social tensions and Liverpool was an unusually politicised city that looked to protect the rights of its disenfranchised casual workforce. During Fry’s period of architectural training in the 1920s, Liverpool ‘was characterised chiefly by the struggles against unemployment’.14 These struggles were manifest in a series of strikes and riots, beginning almost a decade earlier with the dock strike of 1911, which sparked subsequent action by various workers’ groups and garnered lasting cohesion amongst the unions.15 The young Fry would have been aware of these tensions and the plight of the working classes – and the squalid living conditions of the prevalent slums – and he sought to address these issues in his architecture from an early stage.
The Fry family were typical of the aspirational lower-middle classes that hoped to find opportunity in the city. Fry’s entrepreneurial father, Ambrose Owen Fry (b. 1869), had an itinerant childhood; born in Montreal, he was raised first in Greenock, Scotland, and then a few miles from Liverpool city centre, in Walton-on-the-Hill.16 Ambrose Fry is recorded as a commercial traveller and later a chemical manufacturer, and he travelled on business every few years on passenger liners from Liverpool to Montreal and, more frequently, to New York.17 These enterprises would have illustrated the nearness of the British Empire and beyond to his eldest son, although Fry’s memoirs show a degree of ambivalence towards his father’s work and he describes Ambrose Fry as ‘nothing if not a businessman with all sorts of irons in the fire – chemicals, electricals, old property, reversions, house conversions’.18 Instead, Fry chose to align himself with his artistic, piano-playing mother, known as Lily (b. 1869), whom he later portrayed as a refuge from the professional ambitions held for him by his father.
The Fry family moved frequently, according to the success or failure of Ambrose Fry’s business ventures. After a spell in Wallasey, across the River Mersey on the Wirral peninsula, the young Fry spent his formative years in ‘an undistinguished house in an undistinguished street’ in the southern suburbs of Liverpool.19 He shared the ten-room house with his two elder sisters, Muriel (b. 1895) and Nora (b. 1897), and his younger brother, Sydney (b. 1900), and a domestic servant employed by the family, Annie Blanchard.20 Straddling the divide between rich and poor, his home was situated close to the large merchant villas that surround the genteel Victorian grounds of Sefton Park but also backing onto an adjacent workhouse. A model of respectability, the Fry family attended the nearby Unitarian church and Fry was schooled at the prestigious Liverpool Institute, a grammar school close to the city centre. Fry was an undistinguished student, his early education coming instead from his friendship with a wealthy local ship-owner, described by Fry as his ‘patron’.21 ‘Old Hall’, as he later asked Fry to call him,22 introduced his protégé to English lyrical poetry (an interest that Fry acknowledged lasted a lifetime) and provided an opportunity to experience first-hand the engineering that had brought the city its wealth; as Fry later wrote, ‘climbing up and down the cavernous engine-rooms of his ship lying in dock I recognised the purposeful elegance of machinery fortified by a boyish worship of the great steam locomotives’.23
Fry’s entry into the architectural profession took a convoluted route. Prior to his training he had worked in his father’s ...

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