An Architect's Guide to Fame

Paul Davies, Torsten Schmiedeknecht, Paul Davies, Torsten Schmiedeknecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136429927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

This lively text provides a candid inquiry into the contemporary means by which architects get work and (for better or worse) become famous. In response to the reciprocal relationship between publicity and everyday architectural practice, this book examines the mechanisms by which architects seek publicity and manage to establish themselves and their work ahead of their colleagues. Through the essays of specialist contributors, this book enables the reader to understand the complex relationship between what they see as the built environment and the unwritten stories behind how it came about.

Part I

PAPER ARCHITECTURE

What is it about the Smithsons?1

Charles Rattray

The view from the west as you approach is the famous one: the flat landscape held and defined by the blocks, the skeletal steel framework, the generously proportioned upper floor, that water-tank tower. All are familiar from the early black and white photographs and the architects’ perspective drawing. For this is an icon as well as a building: it is Hunstanton School in Norfolk, the first built work by Alison and Peter Smithson.

The open competition for the school was won in 1949 when Alison was aged 21 and Peter, 26. ‘We were just children’ he would say later, ‘just out of school’.¹ Newly-wed, they worked on the scheme at nights and weekends in their lodgings and made the final drawings with Graphos pens. There would have been much nib-soaking to stop the ink drying, much pen-cleaning. Affectionate gazes and necking, too, one hopes. For, beyond, it was a time of rationbooks and landladies, a time of continuing depression for the UK’s post-war economy. Looking back on the period, Evelyn Waugh would describe his literary response to such wartime privation as ‘a kind of gluttony [...] for rhetorical and ornamental language’.² In architecture there was a parallel reaction, seen most clearly in the effete material decoration and picturesque composition of much of the Festival of Britain: a serious departure from the Heroic Modern. The Smithsons were anti all that. And just as the work of ‘The Angry Young Men’ of 1950s British literature ( John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine) would displace more declamatory writing by language that was colloquial and down-to-earth, Hunstanton School would stand as an indictment of architectural self-indulgence and as a celebration of something completely different: the ordinary, the everyday. This is the crux.

There are counter-arguments to this interpretation. Reyner Banham cavilled that the literary angries were ‘as English and dated as last week’s pools coupons’ whereas the architectural ideas espoused by the Smithsons were ‘live international currency’.³ But a more important objection is that, however much one admires the creative chutzpah of the young architects, theirs was an intellectual response to a set of social and economic circumstances as much imagined as real. A vision of a new, modern Britain had been an ongoing national preoccupation from the last years of the war, with public housing, new universities and a free health service as national priorities. The characteristic and pervasive optimism of the time was implicitly denied by the Smithsons’ fidelity to material circumstances ‘as-found’. Perhaps, after all, it was not so much a time to look back in anger (to coin a phrase) as to look forward to a decade in which a UK Prime Minister would boast that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.

Whichever, peers and critics were quick to see that Hunstanton was a landmark in Modernism. It was polemical, too, from its hermetic courts to the makers’ trademarks embossed on the steelwork to the exposed piping in the lavatories. The icon-makers were iconoclasts. For Philip Johnson it was ‘an extraordinary group of buildings... the opposite of the prevailing trend’.⁴ For Banham – an important early advocate – it carried the qualities of

‘brutality, je-m’en-foutisme ,... bloody-mindedness’.⁵ There

were dissenters: for the editors of the Architects’ Journal it seemed to be a ‘blind alley’, to ‘ignore the children for which it was built’ and to be ‘a formalist structure which will please only architects, and a small coterie concerned more with satisfying their personal design sense than with achieving a humanist, functional, architecture’.⁶

Nowadays, partly because of such implied functional shortcomings, suspended ceilings, opaque panels and paint have been added to the fabric. How one wishes a purgatorial suffering on the perpetrators! The changes dilute the school’s material directness. A pity because, for the architects, the issue – ‘the very heart of present-day architecture’, even – was ‘the invention of the formal means, whereby, without display or rhetoric, we sense only the essential mechanisms supporting and servicing our buildings [...] To make our mechanisms speak with our spaces is our central problem’.⁷

Characteristically (as we shall see) it was the Smithsons themselves who described the results of these concerns as the ‘New Brutalism’.⁸ They were on the map. They had made a remarkable start to their careers. But it was never quite the same again. After Hunstanton came – well – nothing much. There was, as they put it ‘a pause in building’ from 1954 to 1962, the first of many.⁹ The output of 50 years of practice was to be a dozen buildings, a couple of exhibitions and an annual Christmas card. Plus about a million words. They wrote and wrote and wrote.

Now the reputation of many distinguished architects is based on a combination of their buildings and their writings in different proportions: in the Modern era alone think of lyrical Corb; think of Aalto, Leslie Martin, Raphael Moneo; think, even, of the taciturn Mies. For design ideas, one looks to drawings, models and buildings. But for interpretation, assessment and didactics, the pen – famously mightier than the sword and lighter than the spade – contains a promise that brought out the latent Vitruvius in all of them. In the case of the Smithsons, however, there is an extra ingredient: what they thought about themselves. For theirs was a particularly introspective architectural relationship in which they went far beyond either explaining how their own work came to be the way it was or shedding critical light on the work of others. They meticulously recorded, gathered and archived the meditations and classifications of their own lives, too, and to a surprising degree. Moreover, throughout their working life they were almost continually engaged in disseminating these, presenting themselves to others through articles, books and teaching. Their thoughts – occasionally arresting and incisive, but more often arrogant and naïve – ultimately speak of one thing: the Smithsons were the Smithsons’ favourite subject. Unsurprisingly, they thought they were very good indeed.

More puzzling is why so many agree. Why, for instance, Sergison Bates say that ‘the debt we owe to Alison and Peter Smithson goes further than these notes allow us to express’¹⁰ or why Peter Cook applauds the quality that ‘they have many, many times reminded us of their uniqueness’.¹¹ The answer is unclear. It is not fully explained by the Smithsons’ intellectual level (well above the usual architectural practitioner), or their idiosyncratic contribution to English architectural culture (Cook, again, notes inter alia ‘the in-fight, the wearing of remarkable clothes, the tea ceremony, the heroic pronouncement’). It certainly is not explained by their influence on the wider society of patrons and the public (nil).

No, the Smithsons’ reputation is based not only on what we think of their work, the products of that charismatic intelligence, but also on what we think of them – on how seriously we take them in their adopted persona (they preferred to be considered as a single entity) of sequestered English intellectuals generating ideas of profound interest to the world. What surprises is less the idea that this caricature of the Smithsons might be accurate (after all, there were never any recreations in Peter’s Who’s Who entry) as that they make it without any hint of irony; in short, what surprises is that the Smithsons actually believed it. And in their public output, as they mix narcissistic photographs of themselves with all their jottings, family events and drawings, as they intertwine life and work, the reader is brought into a three-fold relationship – a sort of voyeurism by consent – and invited to believe it too. Examples of this projected persona are common. Take three.

When, in 1960, Rudolph Wittkower apologised for the ‘unwieldy character’ of his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism and its ‘many footnotes in quotations in languages other than English’ he was, to a large extent, echoing remarks of ASG Butler made in his review of the book for the RIBA Journal of December 1951. Butler, too, had remarked on ‘a ponderous thoroughness’ and ‘the density of the footnotes on every page’. Although, as David Watkin notes, it had become ‘fashionable for smart architects to be seen with copies’ of Wittkower,¹² Butler – mischievously, perhaps – ended his review by suggesting that a simpler exposition ‘might attract our young architects momentarily from the pursuit of ungoverned experiments in engineering’. Whether the Smithsons were stung by Butler’s comment, or genuinely upset that the review did not again draw attention to the move from aesthetic to intellectual art history which Wittkower and his Warburg Institute colleagues represented, is uncertain but their first outing in print was a response.¹³ ‘One had begun to write’ said Peter, portentously, and it was the authors (who else?) who would describe it as ‘the famous letter in defence of Wittkower’.¹⁴ But it was a shrill 250-word tirade making a withering attack on Butler as ‘a person almost wholly ignorant of the state of the profession’ and, as John Brandon-Jones implied subsequently (in the RIBA Journal of March 1952), it exactly illustrated the sort of over-reaction and lapse in judgement some might say was typical of youth. The fact that the letter is neither important (Wittkower needed no defence) nor famous (it generated only two further letters) is insignificant, then; the fact that in the cool light of the Smithsons’ advanced years they could describe it – or rather mythologise it – as both, is.

That self-delusion characterised their working life. Even as the external critical response to their output waxed and waned, their own self-confidence in praising and explaining it remained undiminished and increasingly concerned with fitting it to a historical continuity. As a second example, try this: ‘we deal with insights: the thoughts are there for when the need occurs’. A little pretentious, perhaps, but they follow it with this: ‘In the tradition of Vitruvius... Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio, Palladio, Serlio... Le Corbusier... our writings are directed at other building architects and their cast of mind’.¹⁵ Ellipsis-clogged, mistaken and embarrassing, it is the Smithsons’ writing in microcosm. Leave aside the startling jump from the heroes of Architectural Principles to Corb, forget the distinguished contenders for mention in the gap, such as Viollet-le-Duc or Semper; consider instead the character of a couple who, without a second thought, add themselves to the list.

As a third example, and in that distinguished tradition they identify, consider this extract from an audio-visual package the Smithsons made in 1979.¹⁶ Alison is the speaker:

The next slide is the WC in Limerston Street, London, 1956. [This was the Smithsons’ own house.] This is under the influence of Nigel Henderson. He papered his house in Eastern England – it was an old house – and showed how cutting round things, with a sort of tasteful margin adjusted to whatever old object you were moving round, could renew the place. The signs of occupancy we are also concerned with is [sic] the renewal of place as well as providing the new place that invites occupancy.

Now imagine a seminar where the tape might be played. It would be a scene deeply familiar to the Smithsons as teachers at several schools. Imagine a tutor pre-emptively explaining that the tone would be dead-pan (dead-pan!); imagine the snorts of laughter from students at the mention of ‘occupancy’; imagine the group straining to flush out the reason the architects picked a WC from a threedecade career.

Inevitably, the particular bounty of the Smithsons in re-living their experiences for us makes it easy to see their weaknesses. Without humour (invariably without humour), they give us the ill-judged, the arrogant, the trivial: this may be a cruel analysis, but why did the Smithsons insist on putting such things forward along with more worthy offerings? Why did they insist on presenting themselves so excessively and so personally?

Various reasons suggest themselves. The first, and most obvious, is that they had no work. As architects they were usually dramatically under-whelmed and this was a sideeffect. Little changed over the years. As teachers with time on their hands, an ongoing introverted re-consideration of their tiny output came naturally, but with this self-fixation came a loss of perspective. It became evident in the way their ideas were presented ex cathedra , the delivery pontifical rather than analytical or, even, biographical.

A second reason is more practical. The Smithson’s friendship with the artist and photographer Nigel Henderson was an essential influence. Henderson was celebrated for his photographs of life in the East End of London. It was his neighbourhood – he and his wife lived in Bethnal Green from 1945 to 1954 – and he liked to take friends on discovery tours of the area, ‘pointing out this shop front, that twisted gutter and so on, until they too had become sensitised to the unexpected and apparently mundane’.¹⁷ Having made an observation, gained an insight, on what Alison later called these ‘absolutely incredible’ walks, it was worth recording them.

A third reason is indirect: Duchamp’s advice to Henderson as they hung an exhibition of Cocteau drawings at the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery in 1938. Duchamp said ‘throw nothing away’.¹⁸ This advice was reinforced by Peggy Guggenheim’s gift to Henderson of Duchamp’s Boîte Verte (Green Box) of 1934. This was a box (one edition of several) containing 93 facsimile plans, photographs, notes and sketches related to Duchamp’s haunting mechanistic masterpiece, the so-called ‘Large Glass’ version of La Mariéemise à nu par ses cé libataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) of 1915–1923. The box was a talismanic object for Henderson and his circle.¹⁹ The Smithsons, entranced, also seemed to throw nothing away and to find a place to keep everything. In March 1989, Alison would write ‘I find that in November, 1981, – we keep a ‘Magic Box’ of insights – I wrote of Edinburgh [...]’ and later in the same piece, the sub-heading: ‘Thoughts from October 2nd, 1981’.²⁰ The ‘Magic Box’ (magic suitcase, magic trunk?) was well used: a great deal of the enjoyable Changing the Art of Inhabitation , for example, is composed of hitherto unpublished notes, some as short as a single sentence yet still dated to the day they were written.²¹

Henderson’s concern to capture the East End – its streets, its long-suffering adults and playing children – with an undistorted vision, what he called the ‘innocent eye’ of childhood,²² finds a parallel in the Smithsons’ interest in the ‘as-found’. But its influence ran deeper. The Smithsons’ description of a ‘microcosmic world in which the street games change with the seasons and the hours are reflected in the cycle ...