by Rachel Cooke
Away from the studio, they took turns when it came to cooking, and Peter did most of the shopping. Their kitchen staples included olive oil, vine leaves and feta cheese (purchased at a Greek shop near Hyde Park), and the still wildly exotic aubergines and avocados. They drank strong black coffee and red wine rather than tea and beer. Alison, maker extraordinaire, sewed most of her own clothes and Peter’s too – and they were, everyone agreed, startling. His shirts were stitched in Liberty lawn, with a kind of built-in cravat (beautifully cut, they would become his trademark); she even made him a pair of swimming trunks, fashioned entirely from diamond-shaped offcuts of leatherette. Her dresses were copied from Vogue; one of the most memorable was covered in what looked like Formica samples, arranged like the scales of a fish. Later, when money allowed, there would be pinafores from Mary Quant, kaftans by Marimekko.† The Smithsons were frugal; they had to be. But they also knew exactly how they wanted to live. ‘Most architects are happy if they do a pretty elevation,’ says one of their contemporaries, ‘but it was a total experience for them; it was a way of life.’ According to Tim Tinker, who worked as their assistant, life and art overlapped: ‘They were in the business of acting out the life of a modern person.’ Another friend remembers, as if it were yesterday, a pair of curtains Alison made. They were covered with the shards of Delftware she had found while digging over her flowerbeds, and must have jangled merrily whenever they were drawn.
Nineteen fifty-six. Britain was changing. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger had its premiere at the Royal Court, and in doing so practically ended the career of Terence Rattigan and all who sailed in him; Colin Wilson published The Outsider, a book about social alienation in the work of Camus, Sartre and others, and it became a best-seller; and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot began a somewhat tricky tour of the provinces (it even took in Blackpool, where it competed for ticket sales with the likes of Ken Dodd and Jimmy Clitheroe). Meanwhile, the urban environment was undergoing its own existential crisis. The Clean Air Act had finally come into force, four years after the smog that had paralysed London and killed thousands, transforming many landscapes simply by dint of restoring the view; in Manchester, winter sunshine doubled as a result. Just as dramatic in its effect, the Housing Subsidies Act now made it financially advantageous for local authorities engaged in slum clearance to build high-rise blocks rather than houses (the subsidy for a flat in a fifteen-storey tower was three times that for a house). After a slow start – for years after the war, people had wondered aloud why bomb sites continued to stand empty – great swathes of cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Newcastle were now in the process of being demolished, a programme of ‘improvement’ that provoked high praise in some quarters and extreme horror in others.*
In March the Daily Mail staged its Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia, an annual event that was covered by every newspaper in the land and almost every magazine. Among the commissions for the Jubilee edition of the show, which would be attended by more than a million wide-eyed visitors, was a design by the Smithsons entitled the House of the Future. From the outside, this house – its name, projected on one side, flashed on and off, Piccadilly Circus-style – appeared to be little more than a large white box tacked on to the end of a small ‘street’ of prefabs. It had an opening at one end, and inside was another slightly smaller box, its exterior wall forming a rectangular corridor with the interior walls of its larger partner. There were two ways to see the contents of this second container: visitors could either peek in through a series of small windows at ground level, or they could ascend to an upper level where a viewing platform provided a bird’s-eye view. Outside, queues soon formed. For a new generation of new and wannabe home-owners, aspirational and optimistic, the House of the Future’s flashing sign announced a must-see attraction. This was the era of the New Town, of open-plan living rooms, of DIY, Formica and gleaming, seductively advertised appliances.
It was Alison who designed the interior of the House of the Future (Peter restricted himself to the external structure), and it was a remarkable thing: ‘a Wellsian fantasy in plastic’ according to the magazine House Beautiful. Cross Jules Verne’s submarine, Nautilus, with the Jetsons’ apartment in Orbit City (though, of course, The Jetsons was a creation of the early Sixties), and you’re still only about halfway there. For its influences did not stop at sci-fi. According to Peter, Alison was also inspired by The Garden of Paradise, a fifteenth-century German panel painting by the Master of the Middle Rhine, and by the ancient cave dwellings at Les Baux in Provence. Perhaps, too, she had in mind the air-raid shelters she’d known as a teenager in South Shields. Part touring caravan, part nuclear bunker and part space station, her home of the future (of 1981, to be exact) was an antiseptic, airless, hermetic pod where the tasks to which housewives had previously devoted themselves with such fervour – the laying of fires, the dusting of skirting boards, the scrubbing of floors – had been firmly consigned to the (shiny, plastic) swing bin of the past.
Although it was little more than a stage set – the Daily Mail’s contractors built it in just ten days, mostly of plywood – to the naked eye the House of the Future’s interior was all of piece: curvy, smooth, unbroken. And no wonder: in the first instance it was a paean to synthetic materials in all their various guises. The kitchen sink, sunken bath (with automatic rinsing system) and shower cubicle (also a dryer, thus dispensing with the need for germ-ridden towels) were made of a Bakelite polyester/fibreglass moulding in pimento red. The mattresses and ‘headrests’ – no unhygienic pillows here – were of latex foam. The bedclothes consisted of a single nylon fitted sheet as, naturally, the House of the Future was climate controlled. The kitchen cupboards and work surfaces were made of something called Pitch Pine Warerite. Alison had designed four chairs for the house and these, too, were experiments in plastic. The folding Pogo was made of steel and Perspex, the Egg, Tulip and Saddle of moulded polyester resin.
House of the Future
(Daily Mail/Rex Features.)
The space-age theme was explicit. In the kitchen were eggs without shells, their contents – separated into yolk and white – instead packed in polythene sachets. Among the list of objects the Smithsons wanted to be included in the house was a book, open at a page featuring an image of a spaceman, and a film still of someone on Mars in a silver frame (such a picture proved difficult to find). The house’s survivalist undertones were easy to spot too. Rainwater was collected from the roof and all the food in its store cupboards had been bombarded, visitors were told, with gamma rays ‘to kill bacteria’. The design included hatches where delivery men might leave their parcels, and a series of air locks. In the centre of the house was a garden so tiny and protected it was really little more than the memory of a garden: a fragment of a once verdant past, to be gazed on like a photograph in an album.
Who occupied this house? A cast of actors, whose presence was designed to turn visitors into unwitting voyeurs (the House of the Future reminds me, strongly, of the Big Brother house). These men and women wore clothes by Teddy Tinling, a sportswear designer who had designed outfits for Wimbledon – though the Smithsons had strong ideas about what they were expecting from him (they wanted gear that reflected the ‘atmosphere’ of the house, its ‘glamour’). The News Chronicle described the result, somewhat wryly, as: ‘FOR HIM: A Superman space outfit of nylon sweats and tights with foam rubber fitted soles. FOR HER: The Pixie look – a sort of nylon skirt with a scalloped edge, and tights with high-heeled fitted soles.’ To the Smithsons’ horror, these costumes sometimes reduced the crowd on the viewing platform to helpless giggles – though when Peter looked at his own photographs of the actors and the visitors side by side forty years later, it was, he thought, those dressed in the fashions of 1956 who looked the more ridiculous.
In May, the Smithsons took part in an even more significant cultural event when their installation Patio & Pavilion was included in This Is Tomorrow, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. This
Is Tomorrow, conceived by their friend Theo Crosby, was a quasi-anthropological, semi-ironic look at the imagery of the post-war mass market and is remembered mostly for Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? This piece, which appeared on the exhibition poster and is now considered to be one of the earliest examples of what came to be known as pop art, features a naked woman with a lampshade on her head and a muscled man holding a large lollipop in a living room scattered with emblems of the new affluence: a tinned ham, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner. But the Smithsons’ installation must have struck contemporary visitors just as forcefully. The words ‘patio’ and ‘pavilion’ – so suburban, so genteel – were a kind of horrible joke in this instance. In fact, the pavilion was a rudimentary shelter of wood and corrugated plastic furnished with the kind of basic objects (a wheel, a fishing net) a human being might need to survive in extremis; the patio, meanwhile, was little more than a sand pit. Nowhere did it say so explicitly, but the installation neatly encapsulated the fears of an age. This was what life might look like after the Bomb.
This Is Tomorrow (left to right): Peter, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison, Nigel Henderson – plus iconic chairs
(© The Estate of Nigel Henderson and The Mayor Gallery.)
The novelist J. G. Ballard, shortly to become a popular poet of the post-apocalypse, considered This Is Tomorrow to be the defining event of 1956. ‘I thought: here is fiction for the present day,’ he recalled in 2008. ‘I wasn’t interested in the far future, spaceships and all that. Forget it. I was interested in the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here.’ And he wasn’t alone. The exhibition thrilled many of those who saw it, and it made Richard Hamilton famous. It also marked – as Ballard noted – the final dethroning of the establishment avant-garde as represented by the likes of Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. What did the Smithsons feel about it? This is more complicated. Their picture in the exhibition catalogue – they were photographed with Paolozzi and Henderson, who showed in the same room – looks like nothing so much as an album cover. Taken in a Chelsea street, and featuring several pieces from their collection of iconic chairs, they look arrogant, proud, painfully cool. Alison is dressed like a French resistance fighter, or perhaps a car mechanic. Peter is wearing desert boots and a frown. But when, a year later, Hamilton sent them a letter in which he tentatively felt his way towards a definition of pop art,* he received no reply (and, according to Hamilton, Peter later denied ever having received it). Collaboration, you feel, did not come naturally to them. And perhaps, too, they were wary of being identified with yet another movement. To be associated with one may be regarded as misfortune. To be associated with two begins to look like carelessness.
Nineteen fifty-six was also the year the Smithsons finally managed to get another of their designs realised: the Sugden House, in Watford, Hertfordshire. This modest, undramatic home – only the slightest of tweaks distinguish its exterior from the rows of semis near by – is not generally considered to be a masterpiece; it was not even listed until 2012. But in truth, it is among the most elegant of all their built designs for the simple reason that it is wholly successful. It works.
Derek Sugden, who commissioned it, worked as an engineer at Arup, which was how he knew Alison and Peter. He had long dreamed of building his own place and, having bought a plot of land, thought he would have a go at drawing up the plans himself. After all, he had designed sheds and even a factory. How difficult could it be? Unfortunately, the answer was: extremely difficult. After working on the project for a month, he realised it was beyond him. He would need an architect.
Sugden mentioned this problem, in passing, to Peter, and to his amazement – the budget was only £2500 and Sugden and his wife Jean were adamant that they did not want a house that could be described as ‘contemporary’ – Peter suggested that he and Alison do the job. ‘Oh, Peter,’ said Derek, embarrassed. ‘You can’t do it. You’re famous.’ But Peter was insistent. Why not? They’d be happy to take it on. After all, they had nothing else on the books.
It was Alison who drew up the first scheme, and it was a disaster. ‘She gave us . . . this thing!’ recalls Derek Sugden. Yes, she had raised the house up, on a man-made platform at one end of the site, which seemed absolutely right: the view would take in the extent of the long garden. But in every other respect her drawings felt completely wrong. In particular, Derek and Jean hated the windows, which were little more than ‘arrow-slits’. The Sugdens associated the modern movement with big windows. They wanted air and light.
A meeting was called. The two couples went laboriously through the plans (baby Simon was in some kind of hammock beneath Alison’s drawing board) until – at last – Derek just came out with it. ‘Actually, we don’t like it,’ he said. Alison was furious and told him, ‘Well, you’d better find another architect, then.’ She seemed to be on the point of walking out. It was left to Peter to save the day. ‘If we can’t design something for the Sugdens, we may as well pack up now,’ he said. He would do a new set of drawings.
Three weeks later a second set of sketches arrived. This time, everyone was happy. The house would be built of brick (second hand, to keep down costs); it would have a saddle roof and no dreaded valley gutter (the first design had incorporated three roofs, each of a different height); and it would have lots of regular-sized windows in a uniform steel-framed Critall system, slender and durable. Alison, it was agreed, would do all the interior detailing. It was Alison, then, who designed the house’s fitted cupboards, including their wooden handles; it was Alison who elected to make the kitchen counter open to the dining room, and to give it a floor of black-and-white vinyl, inspired by the Dutch interiors of Vermeer and de Hooch; it was Alison who chose the elegant Troughton & Young wall lights. The only splash of colour would be provided by the anthracite boiler, which would be a striking purple, an idea the Sugdens loved.
The Sugden House, with its Vermeer-inspired floor and Troughton & Young wall lights
(Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.)
But, still. The difficulties continued. When Alison and Peter came to the see the house shortly before it was due to be finished, Peter rubbed his face, and emitted a moan – a sign, as Derek knew very well by now, that he was about to raise something his client might not agree to. On this occasion, it seemed that the Smithsons wanted to dye the wooden door frames and staircase green and purple. When Derek queried this – wasn’t the idea to use materials ‘as found’? – Alison told him this was already ‘passe’. (He stuck to his guns and, in the end, the wood was merely sealed.) And what were the Sugdens’ thoughts regarding curtains? Alison thought they should be white. When Jean demurred – the idea was impractical with three children in the house – Alison announced, ‘There is enough colour with your shirt and those books.’ (Derek was wearing a red shirt, and owned a lot of orange-spined Penguins.) By way of concession, Jean and Derek did allow their architects to paint each window’s opening light a different colour, but at the first opportunity they had them repainted in white.
Were the Smithsons pleased with how the house looked once it was inhabited? Not exactly. Alison disliked the Sugdens’ new furniture, some of which they had bought from Heals, and said so. When Jean asked Alison what she thought of her curtains (black, not white), she affected not to have noticed them. But they appreciated the way the Sugdens took care of the house – its comfortable spaces are unchanged, even today – and it pleased them that the family was clearly happy there.*
The two couples never became friends. While Peter was always genial, Alison did not invite closeness. Some time later, Derek Sugden introduced her to two young colleagues in the hope that they might be able to help her with an engineering problem. The encounter was a disaster. They were terrified. ’W
e can’t work with her!’ they told him. ‘You’ll have to do it.’ Years of experience meant that he knew how they felt. Was this forbidding exterior a carapace, a defensive shell? Or did it run deeper than that? Derek believes it was both: ‘Nature and nurture. Her experiences – she was unusual, and she must have felt it – magnified that side of her character.’
Alison gave birth to her second child, a daughter called Samantha, the next year; once again, she returned to work after only a week, though it would be wholly wrong to see this as detachment, still less as coldness. ‘It is not possible to contemplate not being married,’ she would say later. ‘Not being married would have been not being. And not having children would have been no success at all. I would have died if I had not had children. It made me feel more feminine; if you are working at something I think it makes you anxious to prove that there is another side to you.’ Her marriage to Peter was happy, but the couple were prone to ‘fantastic quarrels’, rows whose source was partly ‘sexual . . . each desires not to submit’. Did Alison ‘submit’ to Peter? Never. She had, he thought, a certain ‘intactness’, and though he admired it hugely, it was also infuriating. The children (Soraya would arrive in 1964) were Alison’s idea – Peter would have been content not to have any – and though he loved them he felt himself to be a slightly inadequate father, perhaps because he was so dazzled by his young wife’s metamorphosis into motherhood: ‘This weird business of a transformation of a girl into a mother . . . One is astounded by their competence. Men are shits . . . [I was] thoughtless, taking her for granted, just not thinking about it . . . [that she was] bringing up children, and doing a job.’ It was Alison who was the disciplinarian; she ran the family on Edwardian lines. The children were given defined slots in the day and knew better than to interrupt their parents, even when, as they grew older, they arrived home from school. The Smithsons did not down pencils until 6.45 p.m., and that was that.*