Читать книгу A Place for All People - Richard Rogers - Страница 10
Оглавление2The Shock of the New
Modernism exploded into the twentieth century, embracing medicine, science, manufacture, travel, music, visual arts, literature and architecture. Shaped and driven by industrial manufacture, mainstream modernism challenged tradition in every field of human creativity, stripping back ornamentation, dissolving form and embedding constant renewal. Like previous waves of change, it represented a belief in progress, and in the potential of innovation to transform society. Karl Marx’s famous passage from The Communist Manifesto anticipates the giddy excitement of change:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
All good architecture is an expression of its age, materials and technology - from the classical columns of antiquity to the flying buttresses of the gothic cathedral. Modernism was spare, stripped down and spartan, with a clear geometric order. Its lineage can be traced back through the Bauhaus, to Adolf Loos (who in 1910 famously asserted that ornament was crime), Louis Sullivan, Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Joseph Paxton and other nineteenth-century innovators. But you can go back further, to the classical Japanese architecture that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. In the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which dates back more than 500 years, the beauty of the building lies in the expressive use of scale and natural materials – the simple tapered wooden structure, the paper walls, and tatami mats inside; the sand, stones and water outside – rather than in decorations applied to them. Though it is a product of tradition rather than a rejection of it, it also embodies the modern principles of restraint preached by Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé and Frei Otto – to do the most with the least.
Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which dates from the sixteenth century, feels thoroughly contemporary in its simplicity of manufacturing, transparency and expression, and has influenced many modernist architects.
By the mid-twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were presiding over a rebirth of architecture, and a rediscovery of the unadorned and rational simplicity of Japanese building, reinvented for the age of machines. Their styles were different; Wright’s naturalism contrasted with the more classical approaches pioneered by Mies and Corb. Inspired by modern manufacturing techniques, they saw houses in minimalist, functional terms, as ‘machines for living’; form should follow function; distracting ornamentation and historical cherry-picking should be outlawed; materials should be true to themselves; natural light, air and health should be celebrated.
Whole cities could be remodelled to replace urban squalor with rational blocks and street layouts. Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin proposed demolishing central Paris north of the Seine, replacing it with a grid of cruciform skyscrapers, connected by raised walkways separating pedestrians from cars, and topped with roof gardens. The idea was to bring the same rigour and scientific thinking to architecture that Lister and Pasteur had brought to medicine.
The tone of early modernism is uncompromising, but if you are a pioneer, you have to be uncompromising. Architects such as Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus wanted to rethink not just the shape of buildings, but the way we would live in the machine age. The Bauhaus took a total view of modern life, bringing together architects, artists, interior designers and craft workers. They felt the need to wipe the slate clean, to enable a fresh start after an orgy of decorative excess at the turn of the twentieth century. Since most critics at the time felt that what the modernist pioneers were doing was trash, should be outlawed and replaced by neoclassical and neo-Gothic pastiche, there was no space for compromise. You sometimes have to lean into the wind to make progress.
There were other currents of the modern movement too. Alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, other Chicago architects were using the steel frame, the telephone and the elevator to enable building at previously unheard of heights. In northern Europe, a Nordic modernism was developed by Alvar Aalto – more contextual, more humane, not immune to acknowledging history and the vernacular.
Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, built in Marseille, 1947 – 1952.
The flat roof is a public space, with a running track and a paddling pool for children.
The building still expresses early modernism’s confidence in the value of daylight and fresh air.
The building is constructed from raw concrete – the béton brut that gives brutalism its name – but has brightly coloured balconies, with well-proportioned rooms, and shops, clinics and restaurants on site.
A dialogue between Mediterranean and Nordic modernism can be seen in the London County Council-designed Alton Estate, in Roehampton in southwest London. One of the triumphs of post-war housing, the concrete Corbusian towers of Alton East contrast with the brick-built Alton West.
Aalto’s cool northern-European contextualism was tinged with elements of the Arts and Crafts movement; Le Corbusier offered harsher lines, cubist forms and brighter Mediterranean colours. As an Italian, albeit one transplanted to England at an early age, I knew where my instinctive sympathies lay – with buildings like Corb’s Villa Savoye, Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Hitch-hiking to Italy every summer, I would usually sleep under the stars. On one trip, I took a detour to see Corb’s socially and architecturally radical Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. Night fell, and I gave up my search and instead found a field to sleep in. I woke up to see the building itself looming over me, with its residents peering curiously down at me from their windows and balconies. A few years later, I met Charlotte Perriand, the designer who worked closely with Corb on many of his interiors, at Jean Prouvé’s studio; when I expressed interest in their work together, she insisted on taking me in her car to visit the nearby Priory of Sainte Marie de la Tourette.
Jean Prouvé with Charlotte Perriand, who designed interiors and furniture with Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier (and once gave me a guided tour of Corb’s Priory of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette near Lyon).
Mies van der Rohe’s buildings were tightly controlled, complete works of art, which expressed their structure, but also took incredible care over scale and harmony. Nothing could be added or taken away. My good friend Peter Palumbo, who acquired Mies’ Farnsworth House in Illinois in 1972, once invited me to spend a night there together with my son Roo. I will never forget the magic of sleeping next to Roo in this perfectly realised jewel, barely able to close my eyes in my excitement, both of us marvelling at the poise and precision of the building, and the dialogue it establishes with the wild fields that surround it.
These mid-century modernists carved toeholds in the ice and showed a path, but did not complete the journey – Le Corbusier acknowledges as much in the title of his best-known work, Vers Une Architecture (75 years later, this title must have influenced the title of the Urban Task Force’s report, Towards an Urban Renaissance, produced under my chairmanship). My generation of architects, and the generation who taught me at the AA and elsewhere, used these toeholds to explore new pathways. We wanted a new architectural language that could flourish and add impetus to modernism, without being stifled or drowned out by this forceful collection of architectural and intellectual revolutionaries.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s exquisite Farnsworth House, built in Plano, Illinois, in 1951. The house is unequalled in its lightness, transparency and simplicity, seeming to float above the ground. The night I spent there is one of my most magical architectural experiences.
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist Buildings in St James’s, London. The stone-clad buildings and piazza are emphatically but quietly modernist, engaging in a careful dialogue with the surrounding gentlemen’s clubs and historic buildings.
By the mid-1950s, the modernist edifice was starting to crack. A new generation was stepping away from a rigidly utopian attitude, sensing that modernism was itself becoming a codified style (the much-criticised ‘international style’). Reyner Banham, who later became a great friend, began to unpick the idea of a modernist style, divorced from function and from the zeitgeist. In Italy, my cousin Ernesto Rogers was imbuing his modernist towers with a sense of context and historical continuity, and in England Alison and Peter Smithson were mounting their own challenge to the clean-lined utopianism of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.
The Smithsons’ two best-known London schemes could hardly be more different. The 1964 Economist Building in St James’s is one of London’s greatest modern buildings, standing in an elegant piazza, a delicate insertion into a historically rich context. Robin Hood Gardens, their housing scheme in Poplar completed in 1972, was in an uncompromising location alongside the urban motorway that leads to the Blackwall Tunnel. There, in the heart of east London, they introduced the radical concept of ‘streets in the air’ – designed to replicate the street life of east London, rather than the dark, dingy internal corridors then common in blocks of flats (their earlier unbuilt scheme for Golden Lane, a social housing scheme on the edge of the City of London, adopted the same language).
Cedric Price, whose radical ideas and projects inspired my architecture, and those of a generation of architects.
Hunstanton School in Norfolk, which the Smithsons completed in 1954, was a huge breakthrough. It was a rough building, owing plan and section to Mies van der Rohe, but taking a harsher, deformalised, more personal and reductive approach. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but looking back I can see the link between the honesty of Hunstanton, the Californian Case Study Houses’ celebration of standardised factory-produced components, and the architectural language that Norman Foster, Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman and I would later develop as Team 4.
Together with other members of MARS (the Modern Architecture Research Group – a younger and more radical English version of the modernist Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) – the Smithsons attacked the increasingly formalised international style adopted by the old guard, but also tore into the new contextualism espoused by Ernesto; there was heated correspondence between Ernesto and Reyner Banham, and one of my essays at the AA provoked a frosty response from Peter Smithson for discussing the role of history in modern architecture.
Another challenge to modernism was emerging from the conceptual thinking of Peter Cook, who would become one of the founders of Archigram, and Cedric Price. Cedric was a subtle, radical and considerable thinker, who overlapped with me at the AA. He saw architecture as a way of responding to the rapid changes of a post-industrial society, teaching a generation to challenge the brief and question what clients really wanted, while trying to find new ways to bring delight, learning, arts and culture to everyone’s doorstep. He devised the Fun Palace in the early 1960s with theatre director Joan Littlewood (who had scandalised the establishment by staging the First World War satire Oh! What A Lovely War at Stratford East), a mobile home for arts and sciences constructed of moveable and modular plug-ins. Cedric’s Thinkbelt project for the declining Potteries area would be a university on wheels, travelling along disused railway lines. Peter Cook’s Archigram projects also had a futuristic optimism, in love with the potential of technology and the fast-changing shape of the future, though they had less interest in social or political issues.
The Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in east London, a magnificent housing scheme completed in 1972 that has been allowed to deteriorate and is now scheduled for demolition.
The Smithsons’ unrealised 1952 design for Golden Lane, central London, showing the sociability and spaciousness of their ‘streets in the air’.
Alison and Peter Smithson at work.
Architectural Association – Meeting the Modern in Bedford Square
When I arrived at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1954, after a year at Epsom Art School (where I argued about philosophy as much as I studied art), it was the only school of modernist architecture in the UK, and the most important in Europe. Robert Furneax Jordan, my first-year tutor and a former head of the school, had a discursive style, a cosmopolitan and humanistic outlook, and a belief in architecture as a potent force for social and economic change. He invited architects from across Europe, including Ernesto as well as Bauhaus refugees from Nazi Germany and Constructivist exiles from Soviet Russia, to teach and lecture at the school.
The students were almost as impressive as the teachers. Philip Powell and Jacko Moya, designers of the Festival of Britain’s Skylon and the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, had left a few years before I arrived, and the year above me included Peter Ahrends, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek, who would go on to design the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Keble College, Oxford, extension. One of the finest talents was Ed Reynolds, whose radical forms were far ahead of their time, but who never had the chance to develop his talents, as he died of cancer at the age of thirty-two. They were in their final year when I arrived and were already developing groundbreaking plans for social housing, reflecting the generally leftist and socially engaged atmosphere at the school. Intellectual and political debate was the lifeblood of the AA. Many nights at Epsom Art School had been spent debating how to change the world with Brian Taylor, a good friend and brilliant artist, my girlfriend Georgie Cheesman, and her sister Wendy. So this ambience of debate and discussion at the AA’s Bedford Square premises seemed like a natural progression.
Georgie Cheesman (later Wolton), my first great love. We met at Epsom Art School and studied together at the AA, where she helped rescue many of my drawings.
Georgie and I had met at Epsom, where we became inseparable. She started at the AA the year after I did, despite opposition from her father, a Lloyd’s insurance underwriter who absolutely loathed me, threatening to sue me and chasing me out of his house on multiple occasions. She was a great intellectual influence, and her help with my drawings was probably the only thing that stopped me from being thrown out of the AA (and was not the last time she would rescue my career). She was vivacious and intelligent, with a wild spark. After highs and lows, we separated at the end of my third year at the AA but stayed friends; she worked briefly at Team 4, and later on the landscaping outside the River Café and on the roof terrace at Royal Avenue.
My initial reports at the AA were dreadful. My drawing had failed to improve, and my ability to express myself in writing was poor. I had to repeat my fourth year. Reports from Michael Pattrick, head of the school, acknowledged my enthusiasm, but gave me little basis for believing that I could succeed as an architect. He even suggested that I move to furniture design – ignoring the fact that draughtsmanship was as important for a furniture designer as it was for an architect, if not more so.
But by my last year, something changed, or several things did. Peter Smithson was my tutor, and became very supportive (once he had got over my endorsements of Ernesto’s belief in historical continuity), alongside other excellent teachers like Alan Colquhoun and John Killick. There was also the sense that the post-war cultural freeze was finally thawing. We were inspired by This is Tomorrow, the 1956 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition that featured the Smithsons, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. My drawing had improved too, with Georgie’s help, and I wrote my first essay on the future of cities.
My final-year project, which appealed to Peter’s social instincts, was a school for children with special educational needs in Wales, which used locally grown timber, and was designed so that the children could participate in building. The school reflected a budding interest in social architecture, in the process as well as the result of construction. Smithson’s report on my scheme referred to my ‘capacity for worrying about the effect the building will have on people and a concern for shape on the inside’, and awarded me the final-year prize.
Meeting Su Brumwell
I met Su Brumwell in Milan at the end of my third year. She was beautiful, intelligent and sophisticated, and catapulted me into a milieu of left-wing politics and modern art in Britain. Su’s mother Rene was a Labour councillor from a long socialist tradition. Her father Marcus was a remarkable man. He headed an advertising agency (which he said bored him), chaired the Labour Party’s Science and Arts Committee, and had founded the Design Research Unit, the team behind the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain.
Marcus and Rene were strong supporters of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, the potter Bernard Leach, and other artists of the St Ives School. They seemed to have met every other artist who passed through England in the post-war years, from Piet Mondrian to Naum Gabo. One painting, which Mondrian gave Marcus to pay off a £37 debt, was later sold to fund the construction of Creek Vean, one of Team 4’s first projects.
The late 1950s was an exciting time, with the beginnings of the space race and huge technological advances, but also a frightening one. Su and I joined the Easter 1958 Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. It was snowing, and we planned to throw it in after one day’s marching as it was so cold. But the next day we saw the press, which was full of vicious lies about ‘hooligans’ and ‘commies’. This bore no resemblance to the very orderly civilised march we had been on, so we re-joined the march, and returned in subsequent years. I shall never forget the passion of the marchers, or the kindness of the Quaker families who gave us food, lodging and plasters for our blistered feet, any more than I will forget the venom of the press and some of the bystanders.
We moved in together in Hampstead, and we married in August 1960, while she was completing her sociology degree at the LSE. I went to work at Middlesex County Council, designing schools, drawn to work with Whitfield Lewis, a senior architect for the Alton Estate in Roehampton. Every local authority had an architecture department and some of these were huge: in 1956, the London County Council Architects Department had 3,000 employees, and was led by Leslie Martin, the architect of the Royal Festival Hall, a leading modernist thinker, and a friend of the Brumwells, who helped me maintain confidence a few years later when I was worrying whether I was cut out for architecture. A sense of social responsibility made it seem natural for the majority of young architects to work for the state rather than on the private commissions that dominate today. The focus of architectural training and practice was on public and civic buildings – schools, health centres, concert halls, new housing developments. It is time we returned to that socially driven model.
Su and I on 42nd Street in New York in 1961, the year after we married. We were photographed like celebrities by the New Haven local paper on our way to Yale.
We took a cargo boat to Israel during our honeymoon – still a young country and looking like a socialist utopia, creating orange groves out of the desert – where we worked on a kibbutz and met some of the state’s founders. We hitch-hiked back through Syria, Lebanon and Turkey to Europe, finding unbelievable kindness wherever we went, with the poorest being the kindest of all; hearing we were on honeymoon, people plied us with food and drink. It was a real cultural eye-opener. We came back through Paris, where we saw Pierre Chareau’s stunning Maison de Verre, crafted in the 1930s from glass bricks, to allow in light without revealing the view of a blank wall.
New York – The Athens of the Twentieth Century
Louis Kahn in his Yale Centre for British Art Building.
Arriving in New York was one of the greatest shocks of my life. Su and I left Southampton on an autumn day in 1961. As our ship, the Queen Elizabeth, pulled out of the port, we looked down on grey two-storey houses, and men in cloth caps cycling along the quayside of a city still scarred by wartime bombing. Five days later, we woke to see Manhattan towering above us, an urban island with buildings and canyons that dwarfed the ship. That image, and the sheer excitement of seeing those glittering towers for the first time, is still with me. The New Haven local paper had sent a reporter out on the pilot’s boat to interview us, as a young couple arriving fresh in New York, and we felt self-conscious, almost like ambassadors for the youth of Europe.
We were on our way to Yale. I was taking up a Fulbright scholarship to study for my master’s degree, and Su had a scholarship to study city planning. After the AA, I had been torn between applying for a scholarship in Rome, which I knew and loved, and going to America. But I knew deep down that Rome was the past; America was the future. Yale looked close enough to New York, offered a Louis Kahn building even if Kahn himself had moved on, and was on the sea. Or so we thought – the sea was completely blocked off by industry and naval yards. I never even saw it in the year I was there.
New York had an incredible energy, richness and vitality in the early 1960s. It was the Athens of the mid-twentieth century, the epicentre of modern art, of modern architecture, of modern music. We listened to jazz, blues and rock and roll – Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet, Elvis Presley – exciting music that seemed a world away from English jazz or skiffle. We saw works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning – the artists who were changing painting around the world. We read Marcuse’s critiques of consumerism and Adorno on commodified culture. England had only finished rationing a few years earlier, was adapting painfully to its post-colonial future, and felt austere in spirit if not in policy. By comparison, the vigour and prosperity of America, where a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy had just taken office as President, were palpable. The streets were full of people from every country, as London’s are today. It was clearly the capital of the world.
Paul Rudolph, our professor at Yale, standing in front of the rough concrete wall of his Yale Art and Architecture Building.
Rudolph’s 1953 Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island, Florida. Before coming to Yale, Rudolph was a leading light in the ‘Sarasota School’, whose delicate architecture drew me to study with him.
After a few days of being escorted round New York like minor celebrities, we made it to Yale’s campus, where I had two less pleasant shocks. The first was that the campus was designed as a strange pastiche of a Victorian Oxbridge college, with Gothic revival buildings arranged around grassy quadrangles, and strange secret fraternities for the privileged few. This was a complete contrast to the rest of the town, which was a study in urban dereliction, with the worst poverty and drug problems of the east coast. Town and gown seemed to be forever at each other’s throats. It was only when it became clear that the state of the city was pushing faculty and students away that Yale started to embrace rather than ignore its urban setting.
The second shock was delivered by Paul Rudolph, the professor, when I met him on the stairs on my first day. I introduced myself. He looked unimpressed: ‘We are already four days into term. Your first assignment is due in ten days. You need to pass it, or you’re out.’
After the ruminative intellectual atmosphere of the AA, the relentless pace at Yale showed us what hard work architecture could be; 80- to 100-hour weeks, working through the night, grabbing a few hours rest on the battered leather sofa in the studio. There were 13 of us in the class – about two-thirds American and one-third British – and we would be there day and night. It was an architectural boot camp; students did not so much fail as physically collapse.
Rudolph’s early work in and around Sarasota, Florida, had drawn me to Yale. These delicate lightweight houses and school buildings, inspired by his experience as a naval architect during the war, used materials minimally and made the most of natural lighting and ventilation. Rudolph taught us for the first semester. He had a brilliant analytical mind, and influenced all of us, Norman Foster in particular. He also kept late hours; he was busy designing his brutalist masterpiece, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, at the same time as teaching. He drove himself every bit as hard as he drove us.
Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The laboratories are the clearest expression of Khan’s distinction between ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces. The three laboratory towers have open, unobstructed floors and windows to let in natural light. They are grouped round a central service core housing air intakes and elevators. Each laboratory tower is also supported by air extractors and stairways, contained in external shafts.
It was an introduction to the different pace of American life. People took pride in not having holidays or stopping for lunch, in contrast to Europe, where everything used to shut for several hours at lunchtime (Renzo Piano told me plainly when we first met, ‘I don’t talk work when I’m eating.’), and for the whole of August.
It was also a complete contrast to the theoretical ambience of the AA. There was little time for that in Rudolph’s world; it was all about production, and about appearance. On one occasion we were discussing cars, and I was debating how they could safely share streets with pedestrians. Rudolph felt I was missing the point; he was more interested in how the cars looked, and the composition their different colours would create when viewed from above. The contrast between the English and American approaches found expression in friendly rivalry between the students too. The Americans put up a banner saying ‘Do More’; the English contingent responded with one saying ‘Think More’.
Yale opened the door to new influences, both inside and outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Arts Building, temporary home of the architecture school. This concrete and brick building, with services integrated into its honeycombed ceiling, was one of Louis Kahn’s earliest commissions. It had a confidence and weight to its concrete floorplates, its handling of geometry and order, and its elegant central staircase.
We went to see Kahn himself lecture in Pennsylvania, where he had moved a few years before. Kahn’s poetic sensibility set him apart from the previous generation. He was the first great post-war architect, and a huge influence on Norman Foster and me, an inspirational lecturer and a great teacher. He talked poetically of the nature of materials and the respect that architects owed them, of the relationship between architecture and music, of space and silence, of asking a brick what it wanted to be in a building. His intellectual analysis of the distinction between served spaces, the functional rooms and spaces of buildings, and servant spaces, the spaces and rooms that support them (staircases, toilets, ventilation ducts and so on) made a deep impression on me. His best-known buildings came later, and at their best – the Richards Medical Research Laboratories in Philadelphia, for example, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California – they were stunning.
James Stirling also came to lecture at Yale, and became a close friend. Jim was the bright hope of British modernist architecture and the first to emerge from under the shadow of giants like Aalto, Mies and Corb. We had good architects, but we’d never managed to develop a distinct architectural movement. Working with James Gowan, Jim devised a modernist British vernacular, combining standardised industrial materials – red brick, standard window sections, industrial glazing – structural inventiveness, and a sense of architectural rhythm and lightness that brought life to the façades of his buildings.
The Engineering Building at Leicester University, designed by James Gowan and James Stirling, felt like a new beginning, the emergence of an English vernacular form of modernism.
Stirling and Gowan’s designs for Leicester University’s Department of Engineering felt like an explosion of new language. The department had a legible ‘engineered’ structure – you could read what the elements did in supporting the building – but also had a sculptural, almost constructivist aspect to its plant and façade. It was expressive and eclectic, but also clearly modern. Sadly, after he split with Gowan, Jim’s buildings lost their lightness of touch and their humour, but he was a huge influence on all of us at the time, as well as a hugely exciting, big presence when I was at Yale. Jim attached himself to our little gang of British students; Norman, Eldred Evans (who was the most talented of us all) and I visited New York with him, enjoying architecture and cocktails at the Four Seasons. (Jim thought he had escaped notice while slipping their elegant ashtrays into his pocket, only to discover them appearing on his bill when we left.) We shared an apartment for a period, hosting the most riotous parties, with plates thrown out of the window to save on washing up, and regular visits by the police.
Gowan (left) and Stirling in front of the building in 1963.
For my second semester at Yale, Serge Chermayeff, who was a professor at Harvard, took over from Paul Rudolph. Chermayeff had escaped from Russia to England in the 1920s, where he worked with Erich Mendelsohn on projects such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and the Hamlyn House in Chelsea, but moved to the United States in 1940. He took a more intellectual and European view of architecture than Rudolph in books like Community and Privacy, looking at the balance between the public and private realms, and at how distinctions and transitions between them could be preserved in a modern world that seemed intent on blurring them. Chermayeff was a great teacher and an intellectual force and he dominated us completely. I remember thinking that if he had opened a window and told us we could fly, we would have leapt out.
But of all these teachers, Vincent Scully made the deepest impression. His lectures drew students and architects from miles around, and regularly received standing ovations. He would hurl himself round the stage when he was lecturing, once becoming so animated that he fell off and broke his arm. His breadth of knowledge and understanding of the history of art and architecture, particularly of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, was complemented by a deep civic sense of the relationship between buildings, people and places (he recommended we read Paul Ritter’s Planning for Man and Motor, one of the first books to consider seriously the impact of cars on cities).
Norman Foster’s and my student project design for Yale Science Buildings. Heavily influenced by Louis Kahn, our scheme included a central spine of car parking, service towers and lecture theatres along the ridge of the hilly site with laboratories spilling downhill either side.
Vince’s lectures opened up new ways of seeing and experiencing buildings, and in particular helped me to understand Frank Lloyd Wright and his ordering of internal and external space. Wright had a profound influence on me. Norman, Eldred, our brilliant fellow student Carl Abbott and I visited every Wright building we could.
Norman Foster, me and Carl Abbott, at Yale in 1962.
Su and I went to stay with the sculptor Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam, thanks to the connections of her father Marcus. They lived about an hour from Yale, in Middlebury, and their house felt like the heart of an intellectual colony: the artist Alexander Calder and the philosopher Lewis Mumford lived nearby. We spent six months there, with the Gabos and their daughter Nina, in this incredible artistic and intellectual milieu, intoxicated by evenings speculating about the future and its possibilities.
Back at Yale, Norman Foster and I began working together closely. Like me, Norman had a scholarship, but his background was as different to mine as could be imagined. He had gone to grammar school before taking a job at Manchester City Council and completing his national service in the Royal Air Force. He managed to persuade Manchester University to take him on as an architecture student, largely on the basis of a portfolio of excellent drawings, and was a star student there.
We instantly struck up a friendship. Norman has a brilliant mind, and an incredibly clear way of explaining and arguing. At Yale, his drawings were already exceptional, while I still struggled, but we connected on a far more instinctive level. For five or six years, we would talk for hours every day, often late into the night, about cities, about architecture, about our practice. It was an intense, verbal love affair, and I don’t think I’d ever had such wonderful intellectual discussions with anyone else. We travelled in Carl Abbott’s VW to New York, and to Chicago, which we thought of as the Florence of the States, where we visited buildings by Wright and Mies, Louis Sullivan and the early modern pioneers.
Our final-year project (see opposite) was a scheme for science laboratories at Yale. Our design clustered round a central spine, with laboratories down the sides of the hillside site. It had service towers and an expressive structure and its spine followed the line of the slope. At the crit – the formal review of student projects that forms a central part of architectural education to this day – Philip Johnson, the don of American modernism, then teetering on the edge of his descent into post-modernism, snapped off one of the service towers, muttering as if to himself, ‘These will have to go.’ Looking back, I can see so many of the roots of our later work in that project – the separation of ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces, the central movement axis, the articulated and expressive towers, the use of prefabrication.
The muscular industrial architecture that inspired us on our road trips across the USA.
Smoke stacks and case studies
After graduating, Su and I decided to head out west. We had read Kerouac’s On The Road, and wanted to feel the expansiveness, the sense of space and possibility that America could offer. We relished the way that architects like Neutra, Meier, Schindler and Ellwood had found the freedom to build houses from scratch, and were swept off our feet by the results. Like many young people, we wanted to find our own spirit, our own language, our own technologies to solve the problems of the day.
In particular, we continued to see as many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as possible. Some architecture, like Le Corbusier’s, can be readily understood through looking at façade, plan and section, but Wright is different. His buildings express place and movement. You have to move through them to understand how they work, how they respond to landscape and light, how the relationship between inside and outside is expressed and resolved, how the play of light and shadow changes, brought to life by the sweeping lines of the buildings. We wanted to develop a language that could respond to Wright’s ideas – about light, landscape and movement – without simply mimicking his particular style or his forms. We preferred his earlier, more contextual work, though his more sculptural later buildings (like the New York Guggenheim Museum) have proved an equally powerful inspiration for architects like Frank Gehry, Amanda Levete, Jan Kaplický and Zaha Hadid.
The other influence from those early road trips was the industrial architecture around Long Island and New Jersey – the pipes, tanks, girders, gantries and towers of the refineries, factories and processing plants that spilled out around the city, the water towers and grain silos that rose from the flat countryside of the Midwest. England had great industrial and technological architecture from the nineteenth century, from Brunel’s bridges to Paxton’s greenhouses, but American industrial structures were on a scale that I had never seen before. They were the undiluted and unornamented essence of functional expression. But they could also be visually exciting and even romantic, lit up at night or shrouded in smoke.
Su and I bought a Renault Dauphine, a wreck of a car with some disturbing habits. On one early journey, we were sitting in the front seats, and had picked up a hitch-hiker who was sitting in the back. We weren’t going very fast, but suddenly we realised the back seat was empty. The engine, at the back of the car, had caught fire, as it tended to do whenever you reached a certain speed (we later realised that the fuel line leaked over the exhaust pipe the more you put your foot down), and the hitch-hiker had opened the door and leapt out.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909 – 11, is one of his finest ‘Prairie School’ houses. Their horizontal lines and organic styling evoke the flatness of the Midwestern landscape.
The Eames House, designed and built by Charles and Ray Eames in Los Angeles in 1949 as part of the Case Study Houses programme, using standardised windows and doors chosen from a catalogue.
The interior with Charles and Ray Eames surrounded by furniture made to their designs, and their collections of art works and folk art.
We travelled across the country, wondering at the sense of space, but also at the poverty and intolerance that persisted in the segregated southern states, where even the smallest gas station would have separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. The discrimination was shocking, and the civil rights movement still in its infancy – it is amazing to think that it would be another 50 years before the USA would elect its first black President.
Somehow, we made it to San Francisco in the Renault without too many fires, where the Federal Housing Authority employed Su, and I took a job with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Being at SOM was an amazing experience, though I quickly came to realise that working in someone else’s architectural practice was not for me. One day, I was on the twenty-seventh floor of their offices and heard fire engines. Looking out of the window, I saw that the car had burst into flames again.
It was the Case Study Houses that drew us to California. The Houses were commissioned from 1945 to 1962 by Arts & Architecture magazine’s editor Esther McCoy as prototypes for post-war family housing, ‘conceived within the spirit of our time, using as far as is practicable many war-born techniques and materials best suited to the expression of man’s life in the modern world’. They were to reflect the spirit of the age.
The Eames House, almost improvised by Charles and Ray Eames and enhanced by their beautiful furniture, was a revelation. But it was Rudolph Schindler and Raphael Soriano who particularly made their mark on me. Schindler had been a student and colleague of Wright’s, and worked on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He took Wright’s design sensibilities and translated them from concrete blocks to a carefully considered mix of materials, including plastic panels and lightweight steel frame constructions.
Soriano was unusual in that he used absolutely standardised components – plywood, I-beams, tin roofs, cork tiling, Formica – in his 1950 Case Study House, and had started his career building cheap housing for workers. He was one of the first architects I met whose design was not just modernist in style, but seemed rooted in the possibilities of the modern industrial age. Where Mies was essentially a superb modern classicist who built scale mock-ups of his buildings and for whom structure was expressive, Soriano, who later became a close friend of mine, simply used components to structure the building; there was no artifice.
Rudolph Schindler’s 1926 Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach, California, shows the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Schindler had worked.
We raced around California, seeing as many of the Case Study Houses as possible. I had written my thesis at Yale on Schindler, so felt like an expert when I went visiting. In one, an older woman let me in, and I told her enthusiastically all about Schindler’s architecture, his wild life and his many affairs. She listened to me politely, and then said, ‘I know. I was his wife.’
We returned to New York, and considered staying there. But we were enticed back to England by the prospect of working on Creek Vean, Su’s parents’ house in Cornwall. They had commissioned designs for updating their creekside holiday home from Ernst Freud and sent them to us in New York for our views. We delivered a fairly tough critique – this was a job that required fresh thinking and a younger architect! – Marcus Brumwell suggested that we take over. We came back from California in the summer of 1963 (we were also expecting our first child by then), and Norman returned shortly afterwards.
Raphael Soriano’s Case Study House, 1950, which used standardised steel components to create an extendable and open structure, would influence Parkside, the house I built for my parents in Wimbledon.
With my mother on a site visit at Parkside in 1968. The three steel portal frames of the lodge are in the foreground; the five that would form the main house are beyond where we are standing.
Viewed from the side, you can see Parkside as a series of slices, capable of endless extension.
