Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  If the informal, modular approach of the Hertfordshire schools system was a triumph of Britain’s austerity years, the Smithsons had intended that Hunstanton Secondary Modern would be a homage to the new steel and glass structures of the USA. Alison Smithson had experienced – and rejected – the Hertfordshire system while working on schools for the LCC; at Hunstanton she and Peter sought to design something with much greater purity. More than the neat little prefabricated schools of the home counties, it deliberately resembles the starkly modern 1943 Minerals and Metals Research Building at the Illinois Institute of Technology. This was the first American project to be designed by former Bauhaus boss Mies van der Rohe, and as part of our tour of Hunstanton, Twentieth Century Society Chair Alan Powers showed us the impressive black-and-white photos of the IIT building that Alison had torn from the pages of Architect’s Journal to send to Peter.

  The Smithsons weren’t just architects; they were pop artists. They were formative members of the Independent Group, a cross-disciplinary artistic collective whose most famous product was the 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. The Independent Group had formed over coffee at the Primrose Hill flat of artist Mary Banham and her husband, the critic Peter Reyner Banham. Architects, artists and art historians would drop by on a Sunday morning for intense debates on the latest ideas. The biographer Mark Girouard paints a vivid picture of this quintessential fifties London bohemian scene, where one morning the artist Eduardo Paolozzi entered with a grand announcement: ‘Right! Make way for THE architects!’13 In walked Peter and Alison, who’d shaken up the conservative British architecture scene with Hunstanton and their peerlessly innovative entries for the Coventry Cathedral and Golden Lane housing estate competitions.

  Like the Medds, Peter and Alison had married in 1949 – the year they’d triumphed in the Hunstanton competition. By 1950 they had left their day jobs at the London County Council and set up their own practice. They were a deeply serious couple, but Peter’s intensity was occasionally leavened with a streak of dry wit. Alison was an altogether more eccentric proposition. Even from afar she made an impact, thanks to her extraordinary dress sense. ‘She was a Mary Quant before Mary Quant even thought she was Mary Quant,’ was artist Magda Cordell’s view.14 Mary Banham recalled a typically lurid homemade affair: ‘she knitted herself a kind of green gnome suit, like a baby grow, with a hood, and she looked absolutely extraordinary in it.’15 Behind the carefully maintained image was a razor-sharp mind. ‘She had a touch of genius, there’s no doubt about it,’ recalled Mary. ‘I was terribly fond of her … And yet she was terribly difficult to get on with.’16

  This fizzing, creative band of bohos set to work on their exhibition, This is Tomorrow: their plan was to force collaborations between young artists and architects. Up-and-coming figures in the art world such as Victor Pasmore, Theo Crosby and Eduardo Paolozzi worked with architects like James Stirling, Colin St. John Wilson and Ernő Goldfinger. The star exhibit was undoubtedly Richard Hamilton’s glorious proto-pop art collage Just What Is It About Today’s Homes That Makes Them So Different, So Appealing?, in which he wittily juxtaposed near-naked beefcake and cheesecake models with televisions, hoovers and tinned ham. That spring the Smithsons had contributed the House of the Future to the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show; the moulded plastic sci-fi structure boasted a dizzying plethora of fantastical innovations, such as remote controls and self-cleaning baths. Their exhibit for This is Tomorrow was as dystopian as their House of the Future had been utopian: a shack equipped with everything one might need to survive a nuclear attack. This provocative statement had a profound effect on the young J. G. Ballard. ‘I thought: here is a fiction for the present day,’ the novelist later recalled of his reaction to the exhibition. ‘I was interested in the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders … of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here.’17

  The Smithsons’ buildings demanded a level of technical expertise that was hard to come by in the enfeebled postwar British building sector, and sometimes the architects themselves made mistakes. ‘We are using the steel in the same way as medieval builders used wood,’ they claimed.18 Yet one unforeseen consequence of revealing the steelwork rather than burying it within the construction as was more typical, was that the metal frame buckled in the heat. Window frames would spontaneously shatter as the sun baked the exposed metal. At Hunstanton, thick wooden battens have been added around the edge of each steel framed panel to prevent warping. This was not the only effect temperature would have on the school. I managed to grab a few words with the caretaker as he puffed past, and asked him what it was like to work there. Without stopping he replied, ‘freezing in winter, boiling in summer,’ and then was gone. Daniel Weir agreed: ‘The extremes of temperature did make some of the winter and summer months a challenge,’ he told me in an email. ‘I did enjoy the glass though – meant I could stare into the distance in almost every lesson …’

  The Smithsons’ school was an experimental playground for the architects, engineers and builders. Windows shattered when steel expanded and contracted in the heat.

  Yet if early fifties technology had lagged behind the Smithsons’ inventiveness, the finished building still managed to cause a stir. ‘What has caused Hunstanton to lodge in the public’s gullet,’ posited the Architectural Review, ‘is that it is almost unique among modern buildings in being made of what it appears to be made of … Most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash or patent glazing even when they are made of concrete and steel. … One can see what Hunstanton is made of, and how it works.’19 No doubt most pleasing for Peter and Alison was the reaction of Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe’s chief collaborator in the U. S., who was full of praise for the school in Architectural Review. ‘All the more credit to them for mastering and using the language so well,’ he wrote of their interpretation of the IIT, ‘in my opinion as well as anyone ever has on either side of the ocean, not excluding the Midwesteners who have worked directly with Mies.’20

  The Smithsons would term the architectural style they had striven for at Hunstanton the new brutalism. It’s a name and a philosophy with seemingly endless interpretations. One thing was clear: it was a direct reaction against the new empiricism, the dreary -ism coined by the architecture journals to describe the dominant Scandinavian style of the day, seen most clearly in the Festival of Britain and the new towns. New brutalism was certainly a more memorable brand, ‘adopted as somewhere between a slogan and a brick-bat flung in the public’s face’, even if no one seemed able to decide quite what it stood for.21 For the Smithsons it was about a ‘reverence for materials’,22 a celebration, in Alan Powers’ words, of the ‘thingness of things’ – be it concrete, steel, wood or brick – without dressing them up as anything else.

  Nikolaus Pevsner, the foremost architectural critic of the day, was dismissive of the term. ‘Brutalism has been used to mean much,’ he said in a BBC Third Programme broadcast, ‘too much, for the Hunstanton School with which Peter and Alison Smithson made their name and which served to launch the term is entirely unbrutal.’23 For him the most puzzling thing was that up until that point, brutalism in architecture, if it could be attributed to anyone, would have been the specialism of concrete-obsessed Le Corbusier, and not Mies van der Rohe, whose steel and glass work Hunstanton so clearly imitated. Why Le Corbusier? Because in the immediate postwar period, he’d become fixated with the primitive allure of rough concrete – béton brut in French. But for the Smithsons it was Le Corbusier’s desire to show ‘the thingness of things’ in his buildings that was brutalist, not his love affair with rough concrete, even if, confusingly, the name suggested it was. Theo Crosby, the new editor of Architectural Design magazine in 1955 immediately saw new brutalism, ill-defined as it was, as a call to arms. He championed the cause of the Smithsons, which by this stage had gone far beyond a protest against the Medds and their super-flexible Hertfordshir
e schools, and was now a rallying cry against the prevailing Scandinavian style so beloved in the new towns. ‘For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing the coinage of M. Le Corbusier,’ he wrote, attempting to reclaim the radical spirit of the modern movement, ‘and had created a style – “Contemporary” – easily recognisable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of “modern” details’.24 Hunstanton and new brutalism was the hero of the hour, vanquishing pastiche, whimsy and uncontrolled prefabrication.

  Commentators often described brutalism approvingly as a reaction against ‘effeminacy’ – a label which, at a time when homophobia was rife, was calculated to cause maximum damage. The new empiricism of the new towns and the Festival of Britain was cast as the effete teddy bear-clutching Brideshead toff to new brutalism’s plain-speaking, authentic and earthily heterosexual working-class hero. Yet if the Festival of Britain’s Lansbury Estate could be characterised as effeminate and cosy, was the brutalism of much postwar architecture not simply a kind of butch drag? After all, its much-vaunted authenticity was itself a species of artifice, with schools, offices or houses ‘dressed up’ as factories, power stations or machines. Of course, the results were sometimes glorious and inspiring, but were they necessarily better than those of their opponents? There were fierce battles in the profession, and its press, between the two schools of thought, though sadly no one at the time thought to say, ‘Some buildings are gay – get over it.’

  The winds of change did not blow only for the New Brutalists. Charles Herbert Aslin’s team at Hertfordshire were proving hugely influential. It was inevitable, given the outstanding success of their programme, that its key figures would move on to a bigger stage. In 1949 the Medds moved from Herts to join the Ministry of Education: a considerable boost to the department’s skill set. The couple were on a mission to spread the message of prefabrication to other education authorities. In 1957, a pilot scheme was set up in Nottinghamshire to test a new prefabricated system of flexibly jointed steel-framed buildings, spring-loaded to cope with the county’s notoriously tricky problem of mining subsidence. With the Medds providing central support, a number of local authorities banded together to develop and fund the system, in order to make the manufacture of standard parts on a large scale cost-effective. The result was the Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme, or CLASP. By 1964, 17 authorities had joined the scheme, with 103 projects in train that year alone. With frames designed to be clad with timber, tiles or concrete panels, the results were varied and extremely flexible. ‘The light, airy, colourful and attractive character of these schools is a product of their economy and function; it is not a stylistic gloss,’ wrote the eminent planner Sir William Holford in The Times. In particular he praised ‘the impetus they have given to the formation of development groups in other types of building such as hospitals, laboratories, barracks, university hostels, transport buildings and even prisons’.25

  This dynamic new system was championed by Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, who in 1956 formed a slightly awkward partnership with the LCC’s ex-chief architect, Robert Matthew. Thanks to Stirrat’s contacts, their practice, RMJM, won a major contract at York University campus. ‘To speed up the construction,’ reported the Guardian, ‘the university is taking part in CLASP.’26 The company was split between those who shared Stirrat’s love of system building and the more traditional architects who loathed it: ‘Robert thought CLASP was a complete load of rubbish,’27 recalled Ken Feakes, who worked for RMJM at the time.

  CLASP was only one of many systems being developed by local authorities or private companies to build schools cheaply and effectively. One of the most successful was Intergrid, whose first building was a secondary technical school in Worthing in 1955. The joint patentees of this precast concrete system were private contractors Gilbert Ash and the Prestressed Concrete Company Ltd. By 1966 a whopping 22 percent of all schools in England and Wales were system-built, including many of the new comprehensives, the first of which had opened its doors to children in Kidbrooke, south-east London, in 1954. Hertfordshire rather than Hunstanton had certainly won out as the prevailing philosophy in education: cheap, modular, flexible and designed in consultation with teachers, the school buildings of the sixties were inspired by the ideas of the Medds and the other pioneers of prefabrication. In the words of Lionel Brett, former new town planner, these developments amounted to ‘more than a technology, they were an ideology’.28

  Hunstanton’s ducks enjoy their new habitat.

  Back in at Hunstanton Secondary Modern, life had overtaken brutalism. The Smithsons had placed the classrooms at either end of the building, around two courtyards designed as little more than light wells, and inaccessible to students. These have been colonised by mallard ducks. The ducks waddled after us as we wandered around the perimeter of the building; they were quite unafraid of all the people, offering the occasional friendly quack and generally looking hilarious in that duck way. In the hall, while we tried to focus on admiring the formal simplicity of the layout, the Wicked Witch of the West flew up and down on a wire in rehearsal for the school play. Even the society members were overtaken by a certain juvenile joie de vivre: through a window I spied a small splinter group giving each other piggy backs on the playing field. Inside, we played hide and seek around corners, as we attempted to create a pure Smithson moment and photograph the building without any sign of human life.

  By the mid-fifties, the first phase of postwar British history was drawing to a close. Partly with Marshall Plan money from the US, the Labour government had established the welfare state, built the new towns and put on a spectacular Festival of Britain. Rationing ended in 1954, and as if in celebration the first Wimpy bar opened its doors. Yet much of Britain remained bomb-damaged and slum-ridden – and now it was the Conservatives’ turn to work out how to transform it. They saw private enterprise rather than public planning as the answer.

  The next decade would see another deeply divided group of planners, architects, builders and politicians set about transforming the island of Great Britain in diverse ways and at an extraordinary rate. Yet, as this boom took hold, none of them saw that the greatest threat to reconstruction would come not from the economy, shortages or conservative attitudes to change, but from within the warring factions themselves.

  Notes

  1 Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, The Times, ‘The Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/61, piii

  2 David Kynaston, A World to Build, Bloomsbury, 2007, p28

  3 Manchester Guardian, 5/4/54, p10

  4 Maurice Lee in Miles Glendinning, Modern Architect, RIBA Publishing, 2008, p206

  5 Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, The Times, ‘The Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/61, piii

  6 C. H. Aslin, Manchester Guardian, 5/4/54, p10

  7 Andrew Saint, Guardian, 14/4/09

  8 Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, The Times, ‘The Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/61, piii

  9 Observer, 16/4/50, p5

  10 Observer, 20/2/55, p8

  11 Observer, 20/2/55, p8

  12 Manchester Guardian, 9/10/54, p2

  13 Mark Girouard, Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling, Chatto and Windus, 1998, p54

  14 Magda Cordell in Mark Girouard, p54

  15 Mary Banham in Mark Girouard, p54

  16 Mary Banham in Mark Girouard, p54

  17 J. G. Ballard in Kynaston, 2009, p653

  18 Peter and Alison Smithson in Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World, Routledge, 2002, p101

  19 Architectural Review, December 1955, p357

  20 Architectural Review, September 1954, p148

  21 Architectural Review, December 1955, p356

  22 Theo Crosby, Architectural Design, 25 Jan 55, p1

  23 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pevsner on Art and Architecture: The Radio Talks, Methuen, 2002, p298 – ‘The Anti-Pioneers’, 3/12/66, BBC Third Programme

  24 Theo Crosby, Architectural Design, 25/1/55, p1
>
  25 Sir William Holford, The Times, ‘The Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/61, pii

  26 Guardian, 26/2/63, p3

  27 K. Feakes in Miles Glendinning, Modern Architect, RIBA Publishing, 2008, p237

  28 Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave, Pelican, 1983, p57

  Part 2

  SHAKE IT UP BABY NOW

  1. ‘A Flying Saucer Taking You to Mars’

  GLASGOW AND COMPREHENSIVE REDEVELOPMENT (1957–65)

  ‘I grew up in the Gorbals. Actually, the posh end of the Gorbals: Hutchesontown. It was always classed as the posh end.’ I met Danny Gill, an energetic and chatty retired builder, at his cosy flat in south London. We’d been looking at a photograph of the tenement where he’d grown up, taken in the late fifties, and now I was failing to pick him out of the crowd in his school photo. ‘I came home from school one day, and ’cos our building had been up – as they all were – about 120 years at that time, the back of our building completely collapsed.’ He was quite matter of fact about it. ‘Nobody was killed, thank God, like. About six of the families were shifted out to one of the new housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow.’

  In 1961 the Queen came to the Gorbals to lay the foundation stone for her namesake buildings in Queen Elizabeth Square, which would soon rise over the old tenements. While she was there she paid a visit to the old streets, where she was reportedly shocked by the overcrowding and lack of basic amenities. ‘The Queen saw both sides yesterday,’ reported the Herald. ‘She visited six families in a blackened Victorian tenement … But even as she stood on the pavement, smiling at the milling crowd who struggled to see her, she also saw at the corner the tall towers of the first Hutchesontown-Gorbals redevelopment area, the gigantic 20-storey flats that are now nearing completion.’1