Brutalism E-Book

Alexander Clement

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The term 'Brutalism' is used to describe a form of architecture that appeared, mainly in Europe, from around 1945-75. Uncomprimisingly modern, this trend in architecture was both striking and arresting and, perhaps like no other style before or since, aroused extremes of emotion and debate. Some regarded Brutalist buildings as monstrous soulless structures of concrete, steel and glass, whereas others saw the genre as a logical progression, having its own grace and balance. In this revised second edition, Alexander Clement continues the debate of Brutalism in post-war Britain to the modern day, studying a number of key buildings and developments in the fields of civic, educational, commercial, leisure, private and ecclesiastical architecture. With new and improved illustrations, fresh case studies and profiles of the most influential architects, this new edition affords greater attention to iconic buildings and structures. Now that the age of Brutalism is a generation behind us, it is possible to view the movement with a degree of rational reappraisal, study how the style evolved and gauge its effect on Britain's urban landscape. This book will be of interest to architecture students, design students and anyone interested in post-war architecture. Fully illustrated with 160 colour and 4 black & white photographs.

Leseprobe

BRUTALISM

POST-WAR BRITISH ARCHITECTURE

SECOND EDITION

ALEXANDER CLEMENT

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2011 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2011

Revised edition 2018

© Alexander Clement 2011 and 2018

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of thistext may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 424 7

Acknowledgements

In the researching and writing of this book I would like to acknowledge the help and support of the following people: Andrea and Theo Clement, Jimmy Jaques, Stephen Clarke, Christine Otterwill and Kevin McGimpsey. I would also like to extend grateful thanks to Kendal Goode and Chief Superintendent Purdie of the North Wales Police, Sasha Ricketts, Terry Brown and Mick Farrell from GMW Architects, Sue Foster at Building Design Magazine, Pam Afghan at the Ministry of Justice, Karen Robinson at the Trades Union Congress, Mark Hansford and Sally Harper at The Economist Newspaper Ltd, Nick Saffell at the Cambridge University Office of Media Relations, Delwyn Evans at Flintshire County Council and Ather Mirza at the Leicester University Press and Corporate Communications Office.

Photography Credits

The images in this book have been taken by the author, with the exception of the following for which grateful thanks go to: Iqbal Alaam (the Chapel at Churchill College, Cambridge and Nottingham Playhouse), Darren Ashley (Chapter Hall, Truro Cathedral), Colin Brooks (Engineering Building, Charles Wilson Building and Attenborough Tower, Leicester University), Adam Brown at Durham University (Dunelm House, Durham), Elliott Brown (Birmingham Central Library), Steve Cadman (Cripps Building, Cambridge), Stephen Clarke (Trinity Car Park, Gateshead), Tim Eccleston (Coventry Cathedral), Johnathan Falkingham at Urban Splash (Park Hill Housing, Sheffield), Roger and Jane Kelly (Bernat Klein Studio), Adam Kerfoot-Roberts (Halifax Building), David Martyn (Clifton Roman Catholic Cathedral), Aiden McMichael (Ulster Museum Extension), Ste Passant (Preston Bus Station), Debbie Soon (New Court, Cambridge). Images of the University of East Anglia (UEA) were provided by courtesy of the University.

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

1 Historical Context

2 Civic Building

3 Educational Building

4 Commercial Building

5 Building for Leisure and Entertainment

6 Social and Private Housing

7 Ecclesiastical Building

8 Conclusion and the Future of Brutalism

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the Second Edition

When I began writing the first edition of Brutalism at the beginning of 2009, the subject was something of a niche interest. Indeed, the one question I was asked most frequently by those people who generously gave their time and help to the project was ‘Why on earth do you want to write about that?’ Brutalism was a term almost unknown in its meaning and context other than by architects and architectural historians. Hardly anyone knew what I was talking about and why ‘big ugly concrete buildings’ might be a subject worth writing about. Today, though, the scene is very different. Brutalism as an interest has taken on a life of its own, with a host of books, publications, social media interest groups, documentaries, seminars, blogs and even guided tours devoted to it. This is deeply heartening to someone who took a small risk in standing in defence of preserving and celebrating Brutalist buildings. So widespread has the interest in post-war Modernist architecture become that my original book, released in 2011, needed revision to bring it closer to the exacting standards now set in the genre.

As key examples of Brutalism find themselves still threatened by, and even sadly suffering, demolition, there has been a return to an apparent polarity in our understanding of the term. This polarity was observed by Reyner Banham as early as 1955, when he wrote in the Architectural Review about the dichotomy between ‘ethic and aesthetic’. Although the debate may be slightly removed from that today, Brutalism seems to mean different things to different people. However, it is the aesthetic side of things that often holds court, much above the consideration of materials and design espoused by Alison and Peter Smithson. To most observers and enthusiasts today, it means heavily massed rough-cast concrete, asymmetrical chunky forms and monumental megastructures. But there is another Brutalism, one that is often lost amid the clamour of surface appearances. The Brutalism of the Smithsons and Team 10 was about using high-quality materials left ‘as found’, exposed to speak for themselves, where the structure is clearly visible from the outside and where these factors work in concert to form a memorable image. There are some exceptional examples of Brutalism where concrete is not the primary facing material, but nevertheless the beating heart of the structure is purely Brutalist.

My book has, I will be the first to admit, been eclipsed by more recent publications on the subject, and so my small contribution to the genre now stands as a step towards the greater understanding and support Brutalism currently enjoys. It was never intended to be a masterwork of forensic academic research, and neither was it a comprehensive catalogue of every Brutalist building in the United Kingdom. Many of the chosen examples, far from being random, were earmarked for special attention by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) when the organisation chronicled British post-war building back in the 1980s. Some won awards and accolades at the time, in spite of later public derision. This second edition of Brutalism affords greater attention to buildings and schemes that could not be included in the first edition, as well as enhanced illustrations. I hope the reader finds these to be welcome improvements.

Alexander Clement, 2017

Introduction

The term ‘Brutalism’, when used to describe a specific type of Modernist architecture, has an uncertain origin. The Swedish architect Hans Asplund, writing in the Architectural Review in 1956, suggested that he coined the phrase in 1950 when describing the work of his colleagues Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm. The term then emigrated with them to Britain, where it was taken up by a select group of young up-and-coming architects. The first time the term was written down, though, was by Alison Smithson in 1952 in documenting a design for a new private house in Chelsea. By 1966 the word was fixed in the public and industry consciousness with the publication of Reyner Banham’s book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic.

What Brutalism describes is an uncompromisingly modern form of architecture which appeared and developed mainly in Europe between approximately 1945 and 1975. It is distinctive, arresting, exciting and, at the same time, like almost no other form of architecture before it, able to generate extreme emotions and heated debate. The use of modern materials predominates: concrete, steel and glass, although other more traditional ones were used in this period too, such as marble, stone and brick, but in a distinctively modern way. It is characterized by large, sometimes monumental, forms brought together in a unified whole with heavy, often asymmetrical proportions. Where concrete was used it was usually un adorned and rough-cast, adding to its unfortunate reputation for evoking a bleak dystopian future.

What begins to emerge to anyone studying this period is that there are three distinct phases of British post-war Modernism. I would identify these as, first, the ‘Early’ period which spanned approximately 1945 to 1960. During this time most buildings were essentially versions of the pre-war International Style or of Scandinavian influence. Then between around 1960 and 1975 came the ‘Massive’ period where the use of rough-cast concrete in chunky, asymmetrical forms predominated. Lastly, between 1975 and 1985 was what could be termed the ‘Transitional’ period where we find the use of brick combined with concrete and less monumental forms, stepping towards what would become the Neo-vernacular.

Now that the age of Brutalism is a comfortable thirty years in the past, there is an opportunity to look back at the way this style evolved in Britain, shaping the urban landscape and imprinting its character on our geography. Like few other countries, Britain possessed the optimum political and cultural environment following the Second World War for Modernist architecture to emerge from the shadows and become part of the mainstream. How it was that Brutalism became the style of choice this book aims to explore, studying its several forms and the functions modernist architecture was put to, looking at specific examples in context. In conclusion, the book will suggest what future there is for Brutalism in Britain – how the existing examples from the immediate post-war period will survive and share our spaces with new buildings both modern and vernacular and how Brutalism has found its way into the vocabulary of twenty-firstcentury buildings.

CONCRETE

Concrete is a building material comprising cement with other aggregate mixes, such as limestone, gravel and granite, which is mixed with sand and water. Once mixed, a chemical reaction takes place binding the whole together to form a dense, hard-wearing and strong material. Concrete was used by the Romans, indeed, the name is derived from the Latin concretus, meaning condensed or clotted, and a notable example of its use can be found at the Pantheon in Rome (c.AD126), with its massive dome. The material was almost entirely absent from world architecture until it was revived in France in the late eighteenth century and known as béton. It was here during the nineteenth century that architects began to experiment with reinforcing concrete, using iron to form floors, beams and columns. Its wider use in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century allowed other methods to develop which became important to its use as an exposed building material in the Brutalist period, some of which are detailed here.

Reinforced Concrete

As a building material, concrete is brittle on its own and lacks structural integrity under stress when used in supporting work. Reinforcement with metal, usually with iron or steel rods, provided exactly the tensile strength needed for concrete to form large sections which could carry heavy weights.

Pre-cast Concrete

Concrete-constructed buildings will frequently use elements which have been pre-cast off-site. This is done by using moulds into which the concrete mixture is poured and then allowed to cure under controlled conditions. The pre-cast pieces are then taken to the construction site to be fitted into place. Commonly pre-cast elements are floor and wall slabs or exterior cladding.

In situ Concrete

The alternative to using pre-cast elements is to construct the moulds on-site and pour in the concrete to cure in position. This method is generally used for larger, more monumental structures and elements. The moulds are usually made of wood panels or planks, known as shuttering, with metal reinforcing rods and lattices positioned ready. Once dry, the exterior mould is dismantled, leaving the concrete sections in place. These are usually fettled and polished to remove the casting seams left where panel sections were joined. During the Brutalist period this was one of the most common forms of construction and a characteristic of some buildings, such as Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre, left the concrete unpolished showing the casting seams on the exterior surfaces. This rough and unadorned form of concrete was termed by French architect Le Corbusier as béton brut.

Prestressed Concrete

Even with metal reinforcing, some concrete building elements, such as beams to support floor and ceiling slabs, may fracture under the stresses imposed on them. Prestressing is a technique used to prevent this. The normal method for treating a section is to stretch the metal reinforcing rods while the concrete is cast and then, once the mixture has cured, to release the rods, allowing the concrete to withstand load-bearing stresses when put into position.

Post-tensioned Concrete

This comes in two forms, bonded and unbonded, which result from the processes used with in situ casting. In bonded post-tensioning, the concrete is poured into a mould around steel cable tendons and allowed to cure. Once the concrete has cured, the cables are tensioned by using hydraulic jacks before being wedged into position and sealed to prevent corrosion. Unbonded post-tensioning is a similar process but here the steel cables are covered with a polythene sheath to allow them to move freely within the concrete. While the stress from tensioning is still transferred to the concrete, unbonded tendons can be detensioned, should the concrete section need to be repaired. Post-tensioning is generally used in situations where a structure requires stability against ground movement.

Chapter 1

Historical Context

To understand fully the development of Brutalism in Britain, we must first look at the genesis of Modernist architecture in the twentieth century. Probably the single most significant influential force in the development of Modernist design and architecture was the Industrial Revolution. This not only provided new materials and construction methods but also heralded a new age, the machine age, and a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

As 1900 approached, there was a groundswell of interest, particularly in Europe, in cultivating a style of design and architecture which embraced the spirit of the age. Many practitioners felt that the best way to find this style would be to break completely with tradition, to move away from historicist ornamentation. To the growing army of ‘modernists’, the notion of dressing up a factory or an office block to look like a Greek temple or Venetian Renaissance palazzo was an absurdity.

Beginnings

Approaches to this problem of style varied dramatically in the early years of the twentieth century and it was not for over two decades that something resembling a cohesive Modern Movement emerged. In Spain Antoni Gaudi explored organic forms in a uniquely Expressionistic way. Organic forms were also prominent in France around the turn of the century, but applied differently in the Art Nouveau style, exemplified by the work of Victor Horta and Hector Guimard. But to some practitioners the work of Horta and his ilk was considered too ostentatious and dependent on ornamentation. A signal to an alternative direction in architecture came in the work of Auguste Perret from around 1905 onwards, who used reinforced concrete structures which were entirely visible, reducing historical ornament to a minimum so that the exterior could reflect the inner structure rather than hiding it.

This notion of stripping away ornament to allow the structure of a building to be seen and, indeed, celebrated, became a core theme among architects throughout Europe by the 1920s. In Germany the designer Peter Behrens espoused the notion of finding beauty in objects that reflected their function without unnecessary embellishment. This sense of design integrity was initially inspired by the British Arts and Crafts Movement and the teachings of William Morris. Behrens’s most celebrated work was produced as architect and consultant for the A.E.G. Company, for whom he designed the Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909) which embodied his philosophy of form following function.

Between the wars Germany was a hotbed of avant-gardism, fuelled by the liberal Weimar Republic, which meant that new concepts of style in design and architecture were allowed to flourish. One particular nerve centre for such work was the Bauhaus design school, founded in 1919, when the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts merged. The School’s new director Walter Gropius reinvigorated the institution, designing its new buildings and recruiting a new wave of faculty tutors, including László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, who were all to become leading lights of the Modern Movement.

LE CORBUSIER

The French architect and designer Le Corbusier is regarded as one of the fathers of Modernism and is arguably the father of Brutalism. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in 1887 at the French-Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he took his pseudonym from a maternal ancestor Le Corbesier which he modified into Le Corbusier, suggesting crow-like qualities, which he used in his early writings and later as architect and town planner. He studied under Charles l’Eplattenier at the local art school and it was this teacher who persuaded him to abandon painting and take up architecture.

Jeanneret toured Europe in the early 1900s, coming into contact with designers such as Josef Hoffman, Frantz Jourdain and Eugene Grasset, the last of whom introduced him to the Perret brothers. In 1908–09 Jeanneret worked at the Atelier Perret, learning about the principles of reinforced concrete which the brothers had begun to use extensively in their designs. Through this period he began to leave behind the organic formalism of his art-school days and develop theories about architecture which leant strongly towards functionalism. Also of influence was a period in the office of the German industrial designer Peter Behrens, but his journey into Asia Minor and Greece in 1911 brought him in contact with architecture that had a simple geometry and which, with its pale, stuccoed facades, reflected the dazzling light of the region. He also found in the Parthenon at Athens a purity of form and spirit that would greatly influence his later work.

The two key elements that Le Corbusier brought to his own work over the next ten years or so were the ‘Dom-ino’ system and his ‘five points’ of new architecture, both of which would permeate his work through to the post-war period. The Dom-ino system (derived from the Latin Domus meaning house and a contraction of innovation) was designed to allow modular dwellings to be simply built and expanded and was based on three floor slabs supported on six columns, with stairs attached at one end to give access to each floor. This led towards his developing the five points of new architecture, which Le Corbusier held as the basic principles of building in the modern age, a thesis that he wrote in 1925 and published in 1927. They were:

Pilotis, raising the main structure above the ground supported by narrow columns;

Free facade, setting no restriction on the exterior surfaces;

Free plan, the structure allowing complete freedom from interior supporting walls;

Ribbon windows, which would provide uninterrupted views from inside; n Roof garden, creating a usable exterior space to replace the ground taken up by the building’s footprint.

Regarded as the archetypal International Style villa, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye at Poissy in France, 1931, encapsulated the architect’s ‘five points’ of modern architecture.

The two buildings which exemplified these theories and gave life to Le Corbusier’s imagination were his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau of 1925, built for the Paris Exposition of the same year, and the Villa Savoye of 1931. The latter, which still stands, was built at Poissy near Paris and has come to symbolize the International Style and the first phase of truly modern architecture.

In the immediate post-war period Le Corbusier’s architecture took a new direction aesthetically, although it still embodied the principles developed during the previous twenty-five years. The first flowering of this new style came in the form of a project he was commissioned to build in Marseille as part of a scheme to address an acute housing shortage at the time. The Unité d’Habitation (1947–52) was a study in modular housing as well as social engineering with its combination of dwellings, shops and recreational facilities. But aesthetically it was a departure from the stuccoed purity of his pre-war houses. Here the concrete structure was left unadorned and rough-cast, the massing of volumes was heavy, chunky and brutal. It was, one might argue, the birth of Brutalism. The other key structures at this time were the Jaoul houses at Neiully-sur-Seine (1951–55), with the combination of brick and béton brut concrete in distinctive arched forms, which would resonate throughout British Brutalism in the coming decades. Structures that followed, including his monastery at La Tourette and his scheme for the parliament buildings at Chandigarh in India, confirmed the new direction in modern architecture that would influence the pioneers of Brutalism in Britain and elsewhere.

The International Style

What developed in Europe, almost independently, was a new style of architecture which eschewed ornament and embraced the machine age, using materials such as steel, glass and concrete in new ways and setting aside the conventions of the past. Modernist buildings had completely free plans often with no internal load-bearing walls, which also allowed for large expanses of glass, cantilevered floors, smooth blank exterior elevations and flat roofs, which could house terraces and sun decks.

Much of the work of architects such as Gropius in Germany, Le Corbusier in France and J.J.P. Oud in Holland seemed to coincide stylistically and philosophically in the 1920s. This new wave became known as the International Style, after an exhibition of the same name organized by Alfred Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1932. The exhibition catalogue sought to group examples of modern architecture of the day stylistically, although it was later criticized for omitting examples that did not conform to their criteria. What the exhibition achieved, however, was a holistic appreciation of the new style, identifying a common language between architects all over the world.

Two other events should also be identified as decisive to the development of this new architectural vocabulary: the Weissenhoff Siedlung exhibition in Stuttgart, 1927, and the formation of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the following year.

The Weissenhoff estate comprised a collection of twenty-one buildings which formed the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition of 1927. Organized and administrated by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the exhibition brought together sixteen architects from Germany, Holland and France to produce individual houses and apartment dwellings for working-class people. What is significant about the exhibition is the congruous style of the buildings: free plans, ribbon windows, pilotis, interlocking spaces and rendered exteriors devoid of historical ornamentation. At Weissenhoff, the work of European architects to develop a new style solidified, although a great deal still had to be done to reconcile economic and cultural barriers.

A further step towards a cohesive Modern Movement in architecture came in 1928 with the formation of the CIAM. The inaugural meeting was organized by Le Corbusier at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland and included twenty-eight European architects. The group not only identified the principles of the movement but sought also to act as a political collective, using urban planning to improve the world.

Trends in North America

It is important also to look at the development of modern architecture in North America, which was to have a direct impact on what would happen in Britain after the Second World War. Like Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, America developed the materials and the technology to produce truly modern buildings but lacked the political will, cultural need or cohesive avant-garde to advance with a new vocabulary as happened in Europe. Initially, the new materials and technologies were used to solve the problems of space in crowded urban centres by extending upwards. While these technically modern buildings pushed the boundaries of engineering and began changing the skylines of cities such as Chicago and New York, the first examples were clad in traditional materials and historical ornament.

One North American architect did break from these traditions, although not in quite the same way as his European contemporaries. Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) took vernacular architecture and reinterpreted it in an increasingly stylized way. Indeed, much of his work during the early 1900s had more in common with that of the Vienna Secession (and particularly with interior detail) and with Charles Rennie Mackintosh than with the International Style. In spite of this, though, Wright’s work was noticed from Europe and influenced both Oud and Gropius. Through the inter-war period Wright brought to his projects a monumentality of style which would later play a key role in the development of Brutalism.

Trends in Britain

The British architectural scene between 1900 and 1930 was, by contrast, resoundingly historicist. Like North America, Britain enjoyed a period of complacency while Victoria’s empire remained pre-eminent, which meant that there was no cultural or political impetus to fuel the development of a new style in architecture, but, as in America, materials and techniques did develop and so under the traditional skin of many late nineteenth-century buildings there was something decidedly modern going on.

Reinforced concrete can be seen as early as 1897 at Weavers Mill in Swansea, designed by the French émigré Louis Gustave Mouchel. Steel structures emerged in the early 1900s, perhaps the most celebrated example being Daniel Burnham’s building for the Selfridge department store on Oxford Street in London, of 1910. Here the essentially Neo-classical facade covered a ground-breaking structure which allowed for large expanses of glass on the front elevation.

Arguably the first assuredly modern building in Britain was New Ways in Northampton (1925). The house was commissioned by the industrial modeller W.J. Bassett-Lowke and designed by Peter Behrens. That a foremost Continental designer worked in the heart of steadfastly traditional England is not entirely surprising when Bassett-Lowke’s previous house is considered; it was remodelled at Derngate by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who had met Behrens through the Vienna Secession in the early 1900s. Indeed, the client transferred much of the interior detail from Derngate to New Ways, but it was with the exterior that Behrens sewed the first seeds of Modernism in England with the flat rendered brick surface, cantilevered door canopy and the arrangement of windows. Intersecting the front elevation is a vertical, V-profile-glazed projection accenting the central staircase from the first to the second storey, surmounted with black concrete fins which run along the whole roof.

The Scottish architect Thomas Smith Tait developed his modern architectural style with Le Chateau in 1927, built as part of a series of houses for workers and managers of the Crittall window company at Silver End in Essex. Here the proportions were played with to give a more Continental design, with white rendered brickwork and horizontal metal windows – fabricated, of course, by Crittall. The appearance of the house fell into the pattern of foreign examples and would not have seemed out of place at the Weissenhoff Siedlung. Also part of the Silver End development was a terrace of smaller houses showing a clear influence from Behrens’s New Ways with V-shaped window projections. Tait, as part of Sir John Burnet Partners, had seen first-hand the exciting developments in France and The Netherlands and injected this new vocabulary into the Crittall buildings, which Henry Russell Hitchcock regarded as comparing favourably with the best examples of Modernism on the Continent.

But Silver End was just a tentative step towards a Modern Movement which was really only surface deep. One of Tait’s partners in the project, Frederick McManus, confessed his reservations in a letter to the architectural historian Jeremy Gould in 1972, ‘I worked enthusiastically on these houses but subsequently realized they were really the traditional house styled in the manner of the new architecture that was just beginning to emerge on the continent…’.

With the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition of 1928 this new direction in architecture was given a wider exposure. Elements of the style – the horizontal window, the white rendering – became popularized along with the emergence of Art Deco from the Paris Exposition des Artes Décoratif et Industriele of 1925 and became more widely used in housing schemes, particularly those on the south coast where more progressively and genuinely Modernist houses were later to appear.

The year 1927 saw the publication of one of the most important modern architectural texts in Britain. Frederick Etchell’s translation of Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture. It was a key point in the formation of a British Modern Movement, the book itself presenting such a tantalizing example to progressive young architects, poised to emulate the new forms of the machine age, the ‘…masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.’ Etchells himself took a role in these formative years, turning from Vorticist painting to architecture with his Crawfords building of 1929. Here he adopted the form of Le Corbusier with the ribbon windows and crisp rectilinear forms, and even nodded towards Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona exhibition pavilion of the same year with its chromed window mullions. It was the first modern office building in England and set the pace for later high-rise work with its exciting machine purity and art deco style.

In the same year as Behrens’s New Ways, the Paris Exposition of 1925 was to have further influence on British architects with its rejection of historicism and emphasis on the moderne. With abundant examples of what became known as ‘art deco’, a contraction of the exhibition’s full title, and tasters of Purism and Constructivism to influence young architects greatly, the Exposition was to have far-reaching effects on the British scene. The most significant building was Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau, a culmination of his work on what he called ‘Immeubles’ housing, a single habitation unit designed for an infinitely expandable apartment block. It involved simple, industrially produced components, the staircase, window frames and glass all of factory standard, the doors fabricated by the Ronier sheet metal company. The design took account of the use of space, light and air, all controlled within a reinforced concrete frame. The interior was a confluence of crafts and industry comprising Accasier modular storage units, bentwood Thonay chairs, Oriental rugs and South American pottery – a synthesis of hand and machine.

Le Corbusier’s pavilion was to influence architects considerably who would later shape the British modern scene. It presented an entirely new attitude to aesthetic form and interior volume which was to be adopted by British modernists throughout the inter-war period. One architect in particular, the New Zealander Amyas Connell, found English attempts at modern architecture insipid and directionless when compared with the work of Le Corbusier. When he won a scholarship to the British School in Rome, Connell was to test his own ability with his first commission, a house for the School’s director, Professor Ashmole. High and Over was built in 1929 at Amersham and marks ground zero for British Modernism. The influence from France is clear with its rigid plan, off-set by the 120-degree angle of the wings, the third-floor balcony a clear reference to Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein of 1927, and the cantilevered roof canopy from Andre Lurçat’s Villa Gugenbrühl, also of 1927. The interior has a spatial variety and excitement with its large, hexagonal central hall. With his references to beaux-arts planning and modern structure as well as the use of light, shade and surface from his interest in the baroque, Connell started a phase of architecture in England with something new and vital. The first rumblings had led to a serious attempt to emulate Continental theory.

New Blood

If there was a lack of direction in British modern architecture as Connell perceived it, then the influx of creative power from abroad served to inject the country with a fresh impetus and a new range of possibilities. Architects who are now considered the fathers of Modernism – Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer – came primarily to escape persecution in their native Germany, but also, perhaps inevitably, play a role in guiding British architecture in a new direction. Indeed, many of the architects who were involved in experimenting and supporting the modern style in Britain were from foreign climes – Amyas Connell and Basil Ward from New Zealand, Berthold Lubetkin and Serge Chermayeff from Russia and Raymond McGrath from Australia.

The first of the émigrés was Lubetkin, who travelled from Paris in 1930 and joined a group of rebellious Architectural Association students to form Tecton. Originally from the Caucasus, in the south-western Soviet Union, Lubetkin studied in Moscow and then Paris. He enrolled at the Atelier Perret where he learnt from Le Corbusier the techniques of building in concrete and quickly digested the ‘five points’ of architecture. In 1931 Tecton received its first commission, a building for two Congolese gorillas at Regent’s Park Zoo, which was quickly followed by another to design the penguin pool, the latter becoming a famous landmark with its oval form and twin intertwining ramps.

The inexorable rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party fostered a new German ethic of Nationalism in the early 1930s. In terms of architecture this meant a return to the Neo-classical tradition of Karl Schinkel (1781–1841) and the Bavarian vernacular. The political significance of classical art and design in Nazi Germany was not so much a result of Hitler’s interest in the subject but more from the nature of Modernism in the Weimar republic. The associations between the avant-garde and Communism, the only credible political threat to Hitler, meant that anything faintly left-wing had to be purged from the Fatherland and discredited as degenerate.

In the summer of 1933 Erich Mendelsohn, a Modernist and a Jew, moved from Germany to England with the intention of setting up a practice. He partnered Serge Chermayeff, with whom he was already acquainted, in an office on London’s Oxford Street. It is clear from their first commission, a private house in Buckinghamshire called Shrubbs Wood, that Mendelsohn had lost nothing of his architectural verve and expressive visual qualities. The volumes are highly articulated, staggered and proportioned in a characteristic, low vertical form, reflecting earlier work in Germany. Clearly, Mendelsohn was intent on starting afresh in England, free from the constraints and persecution of Nazi Germany and continuing to push forward the possibilities in architectural form. Together Mendelsohn and Chermayeff produced some of Britain’s iconic structures, including the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill (1935) and the Cohen house in Chelsea, London (1936).

In Britain during the inter-war period the International Style invaded the leafy suburbs of Hampstead with, among other structures, Wells Coates’ Isokon Lawn Road Flats, 1934.

In 1934 Walter Gropius arrived and formed a partnership with the British architect E. Maxwell Fry. Their first building together was also a private house, at 66 Old Church Street in Chelsea, for the playwright Benn Levy in 1935–36, sited on the adjacent plot to Mendelsohn and Chermayeff’s Cohen house of the same year. Gropius and Fry’s house presents an ambiguous face to the street, with intriguing curves enticing the eye towards the invisible, private spaces behind. The garage entrance is positioned next to the front door, voicing the ideology of machine and human coexistence and again refers back to Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein. It also says much about the significance of the automobile to the moneyed classes of the 1920s and 1930s.

One of the last of the German émigrés to arrive in England was Marcel Breuer in 1935 and, although primarily a designer of furniture in tubular steel at the Bauhaus, he had turned to architecture while still in Germany. In Britain he partnered Francis Yorke and they of all the émigré partnerships, embraced the use of reinforced concrete wholeheartedly.

The influx of foreign architects did much to breathe life into the 1930s scene in Britain. All but a few of the émigrés joined British architects and must have found these partnerships invaluable when encountering the convolutions of building practice in this country. In return, the native architects were able to work alongside the pioneers of Modernism and learn from their experience. Importantly, these strong associations indicated a desire for cohesion in the movement and almost certainly stemmed from the naturally collective nature of Modernism on the Continent. It was the strength of these associations that would prove vital to the survival of Modernism in Britain in the face of robust opposition.

One émigré architect of the 1930s was to have a greater influence on post-war architecture in Britain than any of the others. The Hungarian Ernö Goldfinger (1904–87) had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux Artes and with the atelier of August Perret, where he came into contact with Le Corbusier and Berthold Lubetkin. Goldfinger’s key early influences were Perret and Corbusier’s use of reinforced concrete, and the seminal text on English vernacular architecture by Hermann Muthesius, Das Englische Haus, of 1904. In 1933 he moved to London with his new British wife Ursula Blackwell and occupied a flat in Highpoint 1, an important Modernist block in Hampstead by Lubetkin.

Ernö Goldfinger’s own house at 1–3 Willow Road in Hampstead, London, 1939, was one of his first contributions to the Modern Movement in Britain; controversial in its day, the building was a comparatively unassuming presage of the architect’s post-war buildings that would exert a much more forceful presence on the landscape.

In 1939 Goldfinger built a small terrace of three houses close to Highpoint at 1–3 Willow Road, occupying number 2 for nearly forty years. This small-scale, brick-built structure was, in spite of the traditional materials, decidedly modern, but it does not even hint at the scale of his later highrise work in London, explored in more detail in chapter 6.

Although serious about their work and their motivation to improve Britain’s built environment, the Modernist architects lacked the cohesive spirit that had existed on the Continent. Efforts were made to bring the activities of these architects in Britain together in a collective unit and this came to fruition when the co-founder of the CIAM, Sigfried Giedion, approached the British architect Philip Morton Shand with the idea of forming a counterpart group here. Shand in turn contacted his fellow Briton Wells Coates and together they founded the Modern Architectural Research Society, otherwise known as MARS.

Their aims initially were to identify the problems of modern architecture and to move towards their solution. Their solidarity as a group was attributable as much, if not more, to their facing hostility or indifference from British society in general than to their unanimity in design philosophy. In fact, there were conflicts of viewpoint within the group and this served to erode the very unity that MARS desperately needed to survive. But in spite of divisions within the group, it continued to soldier on until 1957 when it was finally disbanded.

The post-war period in North America was dominated by the glass and steel aesthetic espoused by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, seen here in the seminal Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, of 1950.

The real death knell to the International Modern style of architecture was the outbreak of war in 1939. This cataclysmic event and the subsequent years of conflict served to further fragment the movement and focus the world’s attention away from new building styles. The architects of the Modern Movement continued to work with varying degrees of success. Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe all emigrated to North America. Le Corbusier remained in France, although he worked on buildings throughout the world, including the United States and India. The native British Modernists were to be replaced by a younger, more radical element which were to set about reforming the CIAM in the post-war period.

By the late 1940s the notion of a common vocabulary in Modernist architecture, an International Style as had existed pre-war, began to fragment. This was due in part to growing generational differences in the Modern Movement, but also to the changing supply of raw materials, which, to an extent, dictated form and style. Le Corbusier turned to rough-cast concrete, or béton brut, as exemplified in the Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, 1952. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe developed the distinctive skeletal steel and glass aesthetic, rooted in his Barcelona pavilion of 1929. This lent itself perfectly to the skyscraping commissions he won in his adopted home of the United States, here seen at its best in the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, of 1951. Although they were distinctively different approaches to the needs of modern architecture, as well as differing aesthetically, both ‘styles’ held much of interest and inspiration for the new generation of architects.

The Emergence of Brutalism

In the post-war years Le Corbusier had turned to a heavier, more monumental style of architecture, continuing to use the basic elements developed in the 1920s but adapting them to his new commissions. Concrete was no longer rendered or painted, it was largely left rough and unadorned in the form known as ‘béton brut’. One of the first of these where we see the seeds of Brutalism being sown is the Jaoul houses in Neuilly-sur-Seine, mentioned above, where brick and wood are mixed with concrete to form heavy, grounded volumes. Seen in context alongside his Duval factory at Saint-Die (1946–50) and the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (1947–53), what emerged from the offices of Le Corbusier was to have repercussions throughout the modern architectural world.

Britain emerged from the Second World War triumphant but severely damaged by the conflict. The Treasury was depleted and its urban landscape decimated by the blitz. Initially architecture in Britain was finding its feet and the divisions within the Modern Movement which emerged in the inter-war period continued to exist after 1945. There was a desire, particularly in the London County Council’s Architects’ Department, for building on a human scale, following Scandinavian examples and picturesque planning. The new breed of architects were keen to sweep these ideas aside in favour of something that genuinely met, as they saw it, the realities of modern life.

The second generation of modern architects began to drive the direction of the debate and set themselves apart from their elders in the CIAM. A splinter group, Team 10 (aka Team X), emerged in 1953, including Alison and Peter Smithson, for whom the group was of paramount importance. In the same year the Smithsons published designs for a house at Colville Place in Soho, London, using the term ‘New Brutalism’ for perhaps the first time in the accompanying text. As well as describing the nature of the materials, which were intended to be unfinished and unadorned wherever possible, the term was something of an in-joke. But the design theorist Reyner Banham seized upon it as emblematic of the new direction and the label was adopted by the rising stars of British modern architecture.

What emerged from the debate between ‘ethic and aesthetic’, as Banham described it, were some remarkable structures from both sides of the argument. Brutalism, though, was a very British phenomenon and may not have happened in quite the same way without the drive of eager, hungry young architects in this country willing to take on the elder statesmen of the CIAM, the New Humanists of the council architects’ departments and the prevailing conservative taste of the general public. Brutalism spread from Britain to other countries, taking on distinctive characteristics in Japan, France, Eastern Europe and the United States. One may also detect a wider cultural movement, of which Brutalist architecture was a part. In the fine arts, media, design and politics, Brutalism was an almost inevitable evolution of the Modern Movement.

The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic

In 1955, architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote a piece for Architectural Review in which he attempted to define the term ‘New Brutalism’. More was yet to be said on the origins of the phrase, but Banham believed it had been coined by Alison and Peter Smithson in a way that seemed to work as a counterpoint to the term ‘New Humanism’. What he was able to draw on were two key buildings, one complete and the other a concept. The built example was the Smithson’s school at Hunstanton, completed in 1947, which by virtue of its logical plan, its use of unadorned materials and its clearly exposed structure made it the first truly Brutalist building in England. The concept project was a house in Soho, London, the plans for which were published in Architectural Review in 1953. In their write-up, the Smithsons used the term ‘New Brutalism’ for perhaps the first time in print. At this point, Brutalism was an emerging ‘movement’, and both the ethics and aesthetics implicit in the term were not yet fully formed. But it was, nevertheless, a force majeure worth exploring, which Banham did in much more detail just over ten years later, in 1966, when he published his book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic. In this detailed biography of an architectural style, Banham traces its genesis as a concept, the development of an ethic and its evolution into an aesthetic.