Meet the Smithsons: separating the hype from reality
Written by Steve Smithson Monday, 23 August 2004 12:40
(© Hugh Pearman . First published in "The Month", a CD-Rom of cultural reviews issued with The Sunday Times, 30th November 2003)
Ever wondered who coined that wistful yet sinister phrase "streets in the sky"? Ever wondered whatever happened to the space-age house of the future? Ever wondered why so many architects talk rather than build? Meet Alison and Peter Smithson, post-war masters of architectural hype. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the Smithsons were one of the trendiest design couples in Britain. Critics hung on their every word.
The Smithsons, both fiercely intellectual, embodied the post-war architectural avant-garde in Britain. They were attached to the hot 'n' happening Independent Group of pop artists at the ICA. They drove trendy cars and wore weird clothes. They were a bit disrespectful about Le Corbusier, widely regarded as God by the architectural elite. They proposed a personality-led alternative to the sterile post-war "international style" of modernism. Oh yes, the Smithsons were manifesto architects, signature designers, colourful characters in an age of drab uniformity. But today, it's all a bit puzzling. They didn't build much, and a lot of it went wrong. Why was everyone convinced they were so good? Why do some people still refer to them with reverence?
Alison was always the mouthy one, inclined to wear bizarre self-designed clothes. She once wrote a book called "AS in DS" about the view through the windscreen of her Citroen DS (pronounced Déesse, as in Goddess, which may well be how AS saw herself). The great and mischievous British architect James Stirling got her measure. At a party once he shut her up by taking hold of her ludicrously exaggerated collar and tying it over her head. She threw a glass of wine over him, but Jim was used to that.
Three important projects of theirs survive: the late 1940s Hunstanton School in Norfolk, the mid 1960s Economist Building in London's St. James, and the early 1970s Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist complex of council-house slabs in East London. Their all-plastic 1956 "House of the Future" for the Ideal Home exhibition was also influential. There are some other bits and pieces, but that's about it, really. The Smithsons never hit the international big time like Stirling, their contemporary and sparring partner. Their project to build the British Embassy in Brasilia was axed. But unlike Stirling they theorized endlessly.
The Design Museum is taking a very specific line: the house. The show looks at the 1956 House of the Future project - like a Dan Dare version of Barbarella, which means no sex - and their last project, the "Hexenhaus" for a client in Germany. The future of the house turned out to be less Dan Dare, more Black Forest. The Smithsons (Alison died in 1993, Peter in 2003) always promised far more than they could ever deliver. They are a warning to all the architectural hypemeisters at large today: in the end, posterity ignores your blather and judges you only on what you build.
Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk, 1949-54
This was the one that first made them famous. Go there today and all you see is a run-down modernist comprehensive school like hundreds of others. But in its day (1949-54) it was revolutionary. A homage to the great German modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, its steel-frame construction with brick and glass panels was more like a factory. Wondering where to put the water tank on all those flat roofs, the Smithsons instead set it high on a freestanding tower like a heroic campanile.
The glass cracked, the pupils alternately roasted and froze, and black panels eventually replaced much of the glass in order to fix the problem. Some teachers at the school came to hate it. But as one of the first products of the 1944 Education Act, it set the tone for a brave new world of schooling.
House of the Future, 1956
This was the Smithsons' Pop phase. As participants in the famous "This is Tomorrow" exhibition of Pop Art, they adopted the pose of their friend, the artist Richard Hamilton, who urged them to be "Popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business". Alison rose to the challenge with her all-plastic house for the Ideal Home Exhibition. She correctly predicted electronic remote controls for television and lighting. And some budget hotels do indeed now have self-cleaning bathrooms as she suggested. But why don't women wear nylon pixie dresses, and why don't men sport combined leggings and shoes?
The Economist Building, 1959-64
Big business indeed. The most enduringly successful of the Smithsons' buildings, it is also the most conservative. Essentially it is the American idea of the tower-and-plaza, adapted to the tight scale of St. James, the heart of London's traditional clubland. This cluster of three miniature skyscrapers with their cutaway corners and clip-on panels of fossil-rich Portland stone is rather charming in its self-effacing way. By this time the Smithsons were rediscovering the merits of medieval streets and alleys, and the public route they designed through the complex is not a bad stab at updating that tradition.
Robin Hood Gardens, 1966-72
This is where it all started to go wrong. The Smithsons were wedded to their "streets in the sky " idea of broad aerial walkways in long slab blocks. Robin Hood Gardens, a 213-home council housing complex in East London, gave them the chance to practise what they preached on a grand scale. It was disastrous. The brutalist concrete structure turned out to be defective, but the social aspects were worse: Robin Hood Gardens became a hotbed of crime. The Smithsons were exposed as both arrogant and fallible. Their reputation never recovered in Britain, and though they later added modest buildings to Bath University, they were never trusted with such a large public project again. Having said which, Robin Hood Gardens is still there, and still inhabited.
Hexenhaus, near Lauenforde, Germany, 1984-2001
This was the pattern of the Smithsons' last years: agreeable small-scale commissions for private clients and friends, well away from the glare of the publicity they had once so assiduously courted. This sequence of house extensions for the German industrialist Axel Bruchhauser is a world away from the all-plastic future they had envisaged in 1956. At first glance a rather conventional pitched-roof timber house in a forest, it nevertheless has some rather fine, even eccentric, interiors. Including a ceiling like an inverted upturned volcanic crater, and lots of zig-zag woodwork. Peter finished it after Alison's death in 1993, after which he retreated into teaching and writing until his own death early in 2003.
Note: The book AS in DS mentioned in this article is available at www.amazon.co.uk
See Hugh Pearman's original article HERE
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