Revolution

Interior Design from 1950

Drew Plunkett

• Editorial: RIBA Publishing
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000701616
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architettura
• Categoría: Architettura generale

The last half of the twentieth century saw the emergence, evolution and consolidation of a distinct interior design practice and profession. This book is invaluable for students and practitioners, providing a detailed specialist, contemporary historical analysis of their profession and is beautifully illustrated, with over 200 photos and images from the 1950s through to the present day.

1
In the Beginning: 1945–55

The years following the second world war were hard for Britain. While the country could take satisfaction from victory, it was weakened and no better off materially than defeated and occupied nations. Exhilaration at the war’s end was quickly tempered by the realisation that day-to-day existence would remain blighted by restrictions and deprivations, some even more severe than those of the war years. Shortages of food, fuels and raw materials continued into the mid-1950s. Economic recovery was fragile, and slow.

There was initial optimism that pre-war privations, inadequate housing, poor health care, and uncertainty about employment would be eliminated by a new Labour government elected on the strength of a manifesto that promised fundamental social reform.

Change – and the promise of change – did not bring harmony. Workers expected to do less work for more pay. Empathy with the new administration’s ideals did not prevent strikes, which further inhibited economic growth and exacerbated supply problems. The egalitarian sentiments that had evolved during the war mandated social reform but, with hindsight, economic reconstruction should perhaps have been given priority.

School building and changes to the structure of secondary education were crucial elements in the government’s reform agenda, but even more significant was the launch of the National Health Service in 1948. This provided free medical services for all, and the newly built hospitals and health centres spoke of modern efficiency while their interiors made gestures towards visual enhancement with murals, sculptures and pictures used in public spaces. The Financial Times warned from the outset that the economy could not support the proposed medical provision and, when treatment became free in 1948, demand, inflated by a rush for remedies unaffordable before the war, exceeded predictions. Charges were quickly introduced for the services of opticians and dentists.

Building materials were included in post-war rationing until 1954 and existing housing stock, which had been bombed or neglected in favour of other wartime priorities, could not meet the expectations of a settled peacetime population. Bombing had left two-and-a-quarter million people homeless. Some squeezed in with relatives; others packed into sublet rooms and shared inadequate washing and cooking provision. The most desperate resorted to squatting, sometimes in the deserted shells of grand town houses, sometimes in the corrugated tin huts built as wartime billets. The government, with nothing else to offer, tolerated the initiative.

In 1944 Churchill had talked of providing half a million prefabricated homes and these compact, factory-produced units did deliver something substantial and comparatively long-term. For those who had lived in pre-war slums the warm, dry, self-contained ‘prefabs’ with well-appointed kitchens and indoor lavatories offered a first experience of dwellings that transcended dire expediency, despite their modest dimensions. Architects engaged in arguments about the merits of high-rise flats versus terraced and semi-detached two-storey houses. Those waiting to be rehoused overwhelmingly favoured the traditional but architects and planners, fired up by Corbusian imagery and rhetoric, favoured point blocks. By September 1948, a quarter of a million council homes had been built, with a bias towards high-rise.

Efficient production of prefabs owed a lot to mass production methods honed by the pragmatism of war. While many manufacturing industries failed to recognise threats from the far east, innovators saw the potential of new materials and processes. Esavian, which had supplied everything from school books to folding partitions before the war, adapted the aluminium and plywood technologies of aircraft manufacture to produce the furniture that became standard in the school building programme. Innovative lightweight chairs and desks, designed by Jim Leonard, were featured in Domus magazine and served to give the future furniture buyers of the 1960s and 1970s their first taste of modernity.

Boosting Morale

The winter of 1946–47 was spectacularly severe. Blocked roads and railways stopped coal getting to power stations, some of which had to shut down. Domestic electricity was restricted to 19 hours a day and industrial supplies were cut entirely. Radio broadcasting was limited and television service, suspended at the outbreak of war, was again put on hold. Newspapers were reduced in size and some magazine production stopped. Food distribution was affected and vegetables were frozen in the ground. Inevitably, the mid-March thaw brought flooding. Public morale was low and, for many, insult was added to injury when, in February, Christian Dior revealed his ‘New Look’. While for some its long and voluminous silhouettes offered a seductive alternative to the abbreviated hemlines and shapes imposed by wartime textile rationing, for others they represented an unpatriotic waste of fabric. That the New Look originated in Paris, spared bombing by defeat and occupation, aggravated the offence.

The problem of national morale, and the unpopularity of continued rationing coupled with little evidence of economic recovery, prompted the government to develop the Royal Society of Arts’ 1943 proposal for an event to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1945 it was decided that an international exhibition would be too expensive and the priority should be reconstruction on the home front. Instead, a ‘Festival of Britain’ was proposed, which would feature homegrown arts and sciences: ‘One united act of national reassessment and one corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future.’¹ Its director, Gerald Barry, is generally credited with describing it more concisely, and less portentously, as a ‘tonic to the nation’. This lightness of touch was to characterise the festival’s buildings and artefacts.

Events were organised in cities and towns throughout the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. An exhibition ship, the Campania, toured the coast throughout the summer; on land, a travelling show focused on industrial design. There were misgivings about the festival’s likelihood of success but, on completion, even those who had forecast bathos admitted to excitement. Ten million visitors experienced emerging design ideas, and those who would not normally find themselves among the shops and showrooms of London’s West End had a taste of what the future might be. Beyond the festival small businesses were reluctant to invest in new interiors, but big business was more willing. Many of the more interesting experiments took place in exhibition stands, which provided freedom to push ideas far beyond the restraints of permanent construction techniques. Governments, keen to promote tourism, provided generous budgets and encouraged innovative solutions.

South African Tourist Corporation’s office, Piccadilly, London. James Cubitt & Partners, 1950.

Details that typified the Festival of Britain and the rest of the 1950s: the timber-slatted, undulating ceiling, patterned, plastic laminate floor, and potted plants were already established in progressive interiors in expensive and fashionable areas of the city.

London had a number of museum exhibitions and an area of the Lansbury Estate, a public housing development in East London, served as an example of architectural aspirations. The centrepiece of the whole event was the temporary South Bank Exhibition on a Thames-side site previously devoted to warehouses and working-class dwellings. It involved the reclamation of 1.8 hectares from the river, and its buildings and elevated walkways gave Britain its first readily accessible experience of Modernist architecture and planning. It was all the more powerful because it sat in the centre of a city still punctuated by bomb craters. Hugh Casson, aged 38 at the time, was appointed its director of architecture in 1948. He had just the right degree of amiable whimsicality to ensure that the physical manifestation of the festival was indeed festive.

Inevitably a faction of architects deemed the buildings insufficiently innovative, but an open-minded public was impressed. Of the buildings, only the Royal Festival Hall has survived to become, as was intended, the hub of the galleries and auditoria that are strung along the South Bank promenade. Other, more temporary, structures included the Dome of Discovery and the elegant Skylon, a stretched dirigible slung vertically between three angled supports.

Ten million people paid to see the main exhibitions throughout the country, with eight-and-a-half million visiting the South Bank. All had their appetites whetted for leisure, pleasure, and modernity. The theatre designer Ralph Adron remembers the exhilaration, after wartime blackouts, of seeing the illuminated site from the train. Max Clendinning, responsible for much of Belfast’s ‘Factories and Farms’ exhibition, saw the South Bank when he came to London to be interviewed for a place at the Architectural Association, and insisted that his Belfast collaborators made a visit. He was to become the most influential British interior designer of the 1960s, and they the leading Ulster architects.

The festival’s popularity was its undoing. After the NHS, it represented the Labour government’s most popular achievement, and so the Conservative government that came to power in 1951 demolished everything except the Royal Festival Hall. The Festival Pleasure Gardens, a few kilometres west along the river, which featured an amusement park, restaurants, fountains and auditoria, survived a few years more to recoup costs. The amusement park transmuted into Battersea Fun Fair and persisted, increasingly shabbily, until the 1970s.

Heritage

Many of those who had worked on the design of exhibits became the leading interior designers of the 1950s and subsequent decades. Most had trained as architects, with a few from the design disciplines that were infiltrating the curricula of art schools. The Design Research Unit, primarily an industrial design and graphics consultancy founded in 1943, was responsible for the Regatta Restaurant and a number of displays in the Dome of Discovery. Gordon and Ursula Bowyer designed the Sports Pavilion. Offsite, the Groags – Jacqueline, a textile and wallpaper designer, and Jacques, an architect – designed the festival information centre in Swan & Edgar’s department store in Piccadilly.

Husband and wife professional practices were not unusual at the time. The couple would meet as students and drift naturally into creative partnership. One might risk the assumption that the female ‘eye’ was seen as a particular asset in dealing with an interior’s decorative intricacies. Margaret Casson, wife of the festival’s director of architecture and his collaborator on interior projects, explained to her designer daughter Dinah that the traditional, and onerous, responsibilities of a housewife and mother favoured spousal collaboration.

Gordon and Ursula Bowyer continued as influential and successful designers throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as did John and Sylvia Reid. Peter and Alison Smithson were best known for their steel and glass school at Hunstanton, which was generally disliked beyond the architectural profession for its austerity and operational shortcomings, but their softly organic House of the Future, at the 1956 Ideal Home Show, created a more positive stir. The textile designer Lucienne Day and her furniture designer husband Robin both contributed to the festival and were to speak, 60 years later, with pleasure about lifelong careers spent at opposite ends of a shared work table.

Sports Pavilion, main festival site.

Gordon and Ursula Bowyer, 1951. Designers were encouraged to experiment with structure and detail.

Interior of the Dome of Discovery.

There were eight galleries, each with its own theme, convenor, and designer.

In photographs the festival buildings have a panache that looks like the result of pent-up energies of young designers frustrated by the lack of post-war commissions, but they share an aesthetic. Hugh Casson orchestrated the diverse inclinations of individual designers and delivered coherence. It was as superficially frivolous as it needed to be to buck up the nation, and it achieved a popularity that the ponderous lump of the Millennium Dome half a century later did not. Construction was inspired but expedient, not obliged to repel the weather beyond the five months of summer. Limited funds forced designers to deal ingeniously and ‘honestly’, like true Modernists, with materials and techniques.

No matter how ephemeral they might have been, the buildings and artefacts defined a particular strain of interior design dubbed ‘Contemporary’ and described by the critic William Feaver as:

Braced legs, indoor plants, lily-of-the-valley sprays of light bulbs, aluminium lattices, Cotswold type walling with picture windows, flying staircases, blond wood, the thorn, the spike, the molecule. ²

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