the english crucible kenneth frampton

The English Crucible

Kenneth Frampton

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UPSTREAM CIRCUITS1 The natural Scene2 The land of Britain3 The country4 Minerals of the Island5 Power and Production6 Sea and Ships7 Transport8 Dome of Discovery

DOWNSTREAM CIRCUIT9 The Peolple of Britain10 The Lion and the Unicorn11 Homes and Bardens12 The New School13 Health14 Sport15 SeasideOTHER DISPLAYS16 Television17 Telecinima18 1851 Centanary pavilion19 Shot Tower20 Design Review21 Skylon22 Royal Festival Hall

figure 1Model of the

Festival of Britain,1951

figure 2The Royal FestivalHall, developed bythe LCC (specificly

R. Matthew, J.Martin, E. Williams

and P. Morrow)

figure 3The StockholmExhibition 1930, TheParadise restaurantby Gunnar Asplundand Nils EinarEriksson

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eing asked to reflect on the English situation during the‘50s and ‘60s when the so-called New Brutalist movemententered the architectural stage has had the effect of

compelling me to reflect on my own origins. I started to studyarchitecture during the years that the Festival of Britain wasbeing conceived and realised, first in the Guildford School of Artand then at the AA School in London. I am old enough to havebeen exposed to the cult of rubbed ink renderings on stretchedpaper and the meticulous drawing of the classical orders duringthe first year of my education before I went to the AA school. Atthe AA during my initial year 1950-51 I was taught by the youngTurks of the Festival of Britain by Paul Boissevain, and above allLeonard Manasseh, who were among the propagators of the so-called Contemporary Style, which was vaguely Swedish in itsaffinities, as was the Festival itself in its overall tone, even thoughthree structures on the Festival site clearly had other origins:the Royal Festival Hall, the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery.Only one of these buildings is still standing, the Royal FestivalHall, which in my view remains the best civic monument realisedby the British in the second half of the twentieth century. Theother two were interesting, however, in as much as they owed agreat deal to the legacy of Russian Constructivism. This wasthe same modernising paradigm that had informed the StockholmExhibition of 1930, even though Gregor Paulson’s celebration ofthe Swedish Welfare State was as much affected by a lighterpopulism in terms of mass culture, as its successor the Festivalof Britain would be twenty years later; tulips and flags in thecase of Stockholm, ‘Black eyes and Lemonade’, to coin a popularnineteenth century jingle, in the case of London, althoughconsiderable play was also made on the South Bank with flowers,bunting and brightly coloured furniture by Ernest Race.

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To the extent that it favoured load-bearing brickwork, low-pitchedroofs, white, wood-framed picture windows fitted with plate glass,small-bore central heating and exotic indoor plants, the so-calledContemporary Style or that which was variously called People’sDetailing, the New Humanism or the New Empiricism was alsomainly Swedish in its affinities, the neutral, northern socialistwelfare state of World War II, which had been much favoured bythe British architects even before the war. The Alton East sectionof the famous Roehampton Estate of the LCC, in the design ofwhich Oliver Cox played a key role, was also overtly Swedish inits syntactical and ideological implications. It was known thatNew Brutalism arose very much as a reaction to this normativesyndrome, giving rise to James Stirling’s apocryphal remark,‘let’s face it, William Morris was a Swede’. It is clear that TheArchitectural Review played a key role throughout the late ‘40sand early ‘50s in furthering this so-called Swedish style, alongwith its championing a remedial, partially nostalgic picturesquemethodology known as Townscape that was pursued as a Neo-Sittesque principle by Gordon Cullen, the exceptionally giftedgraphic artist on the staff of the Review.

The left-wing students at the AA in the ‘50s – above all, JohnVoelcker, Andrew Derbyshire and Stephen Rosenberg – muchsubject to the influence of the unreconstructed communistidealism of Arthur Korn – were also categorically against thisliberal, petit bourgeois stylistic compromise. They were closeto Le Corbusier’s post-1945 bêton brut manner and the heroicconcrete engineering approach of Owen Williams, as they foundthis, say, in Williams’s Boots Factory (1932) and in his PeckhamHealth Centre (1935).

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figure 4Alton East,

Roehampton,developed by the

London CountyCounsil, 1952-1955

figure 5A journey through ahypothetical city,Drawn by GordonCullen, 1961

figure 6Housing in Norfolk,designed by Taylerand Green, 1948

figure 7Boots Factory,Owen Williams,1930-1932

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The Smithsons cut across both of these tendencies with theirNeo-Miesian Hunstanton School, influenced by Philip Johnson’smonograph on Mies of 1947 and under construction during thebest part of my years at the AA, having been won in competitionin 1950. In retrospect one may surely look back at Hunstantonas the self-conscious antithesis to the astonishing achievementsof the Hertfordshire County Council school building programunder the leadership of C.H. Aslin, which had served as a modelfor us as students. In retrospect, I hardly know which to admiremost, the actual realisation of these prefabricated, light-weightschools – 29 were built between 1946 and 1948 – or the detailedmicro space that they provided and the constructional standardsto which they were worked out to accommodate the needs ofchildren in the most sensitive way imaginable.

figure 8Hunstanton

Secondary ModernSchool, Norfolk,

1949-1954

figure 9Hunstanton

Secondary ModernSchool

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figure 10St. CrispinsSecondary ModernSchool, DevelopmentGroup with theBerkshire CountyCounsil, 1951-1953

figure 11St. CrispinsSecondary ModernSchool

The other key paradigm on the English scene prior to the fullemergence of New Brutalism between 1952 and 1956 was surelythe methodology and the Neo-Baroque, Neo-Corbusian languageand evolved by Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton team beforeWorld War II, most particularly in Highpoint 2 Apartment Block,with its caryatid portico, and in the Finsbury Heath Centre, bothcompleted in 1938. This language is all too evident at an urbandesign level in both Clive Entwistle’s Crystal Palace Competitionof 1946 (shades of Le Corbusier’s Cité Mondial of 1928) and inLubetkin’s rejected plan for the new town of Peter Lee of 1950,not to mention Lubetkin and Tecton’s Spa Green Estate (1947),the Royal Festival Hall (1949-51) and the TUC HeadquartersBuilding, designed by David du R. Aberdeen, all completed ataround the same time. However, in the internal furnishing and

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figure 12Highpoint two,

Lubetkin and Tecton,1936

figure 13T.U.C. MemorialBuilding, David DuR. Aberdeen, 1957

figure 14Factory at

Brynmawr, SouthWales, developed by

the Architect's Co-partnership, 1952

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detailing of both the RFH and the TUC one can also detect theinfluence of the Scandinavian popular, ‘softer’ contemporarymanner to which I have already referred. One might also arguethat the Brynmawr Rubber Factory completed in 1952 to thedesigns of the Architects Co. Partnership, who were my teachersin my second year at the AA, was also indirectly connected tothe syntax and the planning method of Tecton, even if it wasTecton of Highpoint 1, rather than Tecton of Highpoint 2, and onemight also note here in passing a wide span aircraft hangar andlaboratories designed by du R Aberdeen in 1950, which sharecertain tectonic tropes with the Brynmar Factory, above all theprominent use of shell vaults. It is significant, for me at least,since he taught us concrete, that the concrete structure of therubber factory was by Ove Arup and Partners, just as Ron Jenkinsof the same firm would be the engineer on Hunstanton.

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The completion of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseillein 1952, having been underway since 1948, broke upon theEnglish scene like a thunderbolt and encouraged the Smithsonsto move away from Mies in their Golden Lane competition entryof the same year. The Unité is also the inspiration behind theAlton West section of the LCC Roehampton estate of 1954designed by Howell, Killick and Partridge however much thispatently departed from the Fourieriste paradigm of Le Corbusier’sUnité. Le Corbusier’s Modulor proportional system was also amajor factor in the detailed resolution of this work, as this systemhad been publicised and validated by The Architectural Review.

Before going on to treat, however briefly, the Golden Lane proposalof Alison and Peter Smithson, I would like to focus on aconjunction dating from the late ‘40s, namely, the publication ofRudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in an Age ofHumanism in 1949, and in the same year Le Corbusier’s firstessay in low-rise, high-density housing, his Roq et Rob projectfor Cap Martin, made in that year. Although there is no directrelationship between the two, they were both to exercise aninfluence on the main protagonists of the New Brutalistmovement, Alison and Peter Smithson on the one hand andJames Stirling & James Gowan on the other. We may say thatthe popularisation of Le Corbusier’s Modulor and Wiltkower’srediscovery of Humanism fed into the latent Neo-Palladiantendency that floats just beneath the surface of certain projectsby the Smithsons and Stirling & Gowan at this time; Hunstantonin the first instance and Ham Common housing of 1958 in thesecond. However, a more delicate and so far perhaps insufficientlyacknowledged excursion on the part of both the Smithsons andJames Stirling was their separate projects for village infill housingof the mid ‘50s, above all the Smithsons fold and close houses

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figure 15Elevation of Roq etRob, Cap Martin, LeCorbusier, 1948-1950

figure 16Roq et Rob, Section

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figure 17Maison Jaoul, Le

Corbusier, 1956

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figure 18Ham Common, JamesStirling and JamesGowan, 1958

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of 1953. An unacknowledged influence in all this was surelyThomas Sharp’s study of The English Village dating from 1949.These extremely poetic unbuilt proposals conceived for anothertime and another kind of society were already oddly removedfrom the incipient consumerism of the British Welfare State asthis would be partially evoked in James Stirling’s Ham CommonHouses built at Richmond in 1958, where one might note thatbêton brut & brick fireplaces came to be plastered over. Thedetailing of Ham Common obviously owed something to LeCorbusier’s Marison Jaoul completed at Neuilly 1956, eventhough Stirling had initially criticised this work in the pages ofThe Architectural Review. ‘Mies is great but Corb communicates’was the Smithson’s slogan around the time that they designedGolden Lane which like Alton West but much more generouslywas conceived as a street-in-the-air housing scheme, owing asmuch to Le Corbusier’s Unité but also influenced Brinkman’sSpangen Housing in Rotterdam (1920). In terms of its layout,particularly as it would be hypothetically applied to bombed-outCoventry in a photo-montage, it was also indebted to LeCorbusier’s Ilôt Insalubre slum clearance project of 1937.

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figure 19Diagram of Villageinfill housing, A. andP Smithson

figure 20Golden LaneHousing Competition,A. and P. Smithson,1952

figure 21Housing in Spangen,Rotterdam, MichielBrinckman, 1920

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figure 22Patio and Pavilion atthe Exhibition This isTomorrow, by A, and

P.Smithson, N.Henderson and E.

Paolozzi, 1956

figure 23Pavilion at the

Exhibition House ofthe Future, A. and P.

Smithson, 1956

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Apart from their consistently heroic and imaginativeattempts to come to terms with the fragmented urbanised regionsof the post post-war world (for example their London Roads studyof 1953) the Smithsons pursued an ideological diversearchitecture that went in more than one direction at once as wemay judge from their House of the Future built for the Daily MailIdeal Home exhibition of 1956, and the garden shed and temenosthat they constructed with Eduardo Paolozzi & Nigel Hendersonfor the This is Tomorrow exhibition mounted in the WhitechapelGallery in the same year. Together with Parallel of Life & Artexhibition staged at the ICA in 1953, the Smithsons contributionto This Is Tomorrow pointed to a certain existentialist sensibilitythat was totally at variance with their Americanised ideal exhibitedin the Daily Mail show, with its debt to Richard Hamilton and tothe American car-cum-furniture designer Harvey Earl.

figure 24The Super 88,General Motors,designed by HarveyEarl, 1958

the english crucible kenneth frampton

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