Alison and Peter Smithson A Brutalist Story PDF

367,6 totale breedte 27,6 rug

Dirk van den Heuvel

Dirk van den Heuvel

ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON
A BRUTALIST STORY
involving the house, the city and the everyday
(plus a couple of other things)
A BRUTALIST STORY
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A BRUTALIST STORY
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A BRUTALIST STORY
involving the house, the city and the everyday
(plus a couple of other things)
Proefschrift
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor
aan de Technische Universiteit Delft
op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Prof. Ir. K.C.A.M. Luyben,
voorzitter van het College voor Promoties,
in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 6 mei 2013 om 12.30 uur
door Dirk van den Heuvel
Bouwkundig Ingenieur
geboren te Apeldoorn.
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Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotoren:
Prof. Ir. D.E. van Gameren
Prof. Dr. Ir. H.M.C. Heynen
Samenstelling promotiecommissie:
Rector Magnificus, voorzitter

Prof. Ir. D.E. van Gameren Technische Universiteit Delft, promotor
Prof. Dr. Ir. H.M.C. Heynen Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, België, promotor
Prof. Dr. M.C. Boyer Princeton University, Verenigde Staten
Prof. T. Fretton Technische Universiteit Delft
Prof. Dr. A. Forty University College London, Groot Brittannië
Prof. Dr. G. Teyssot Laval University, Quebec, Canada
Prof. Ir. M. Risselada Technische Universiteit Delft
Prof. Ir. M. Riedijk Technische Universiteit Delft, reservelid
4 Dirk van den Heuvel
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10 propositions
of the dissertation by Dirk van den Heuvel, ‘Alison and Peter

Smithson: A Brutalist Story, involving the house, the city and
the everyday (plus a couple of other things)’
01 No one knows exactly how ideas come into the world. The
concepts of a singular author and a linear historical development
are most unhelpful to map the origins of ideas. Instead it is more
useful to think of a multitude of condensation points, a cloud that
starts to rain when saturated or simply blows over when too light.
02 The bridge between our ideas and the outside world is

constructed by language, not so much by the ‘word-bound concept’
but rather the ‘image-making or figurative word’ (Johan Huizinga,
Homo Ludens). Hence, our relationship with reality is always
a poetic one.
03 In language, one of the media of the architecture discourse

(besides drawing, calculating and building), metaphors are always
at work. Architecture itself is one of the foundational metaphors
employed to conceptualize the world that we design for ourselves
to live in. Thus, in our discursive practice architecture serves as
the subject of investigation while it simultaneously provides the
structure for that investigation.
04 We are in need of an open, speculative historiography –

neither an operative criticism, nor a projective theory, but a
practice that acknowledges that the historic subject will inevitably
be removed from its context and time by the research project,
while equally inevitably the research project itself will be displaced
and recontextualized by the history under investigation. Such a
new relation between design and history will open up latent and
overlooked possibilities.
05 Conventionally, the house and the everyday are considered to

be idyllic places of innocence and repose. They are not. They are
prime battlefields of cultural values.
5 Propositions / Stellingen
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06 As a source of invention for architecture and its principles of
ordering, the everyday is as unifying as it is disruptive.
07 Throughout the modern era the house has been reinvented time
and time again. And while there is an equally rich repository of
images for the city, the city as the confluence of shifting flows and
patterns of use still escapes our grasp.
08 Alison and Peter Smithson redefined the art of inhabitation

as a game of associations, ingeniously building on the vast
accumulation of past experience, recombining the ‘found’,
while providing space for new, unfolding relations and interactions
between the architecture of the house, the order of things and
the inhabitants.
09 The truly unresolved paradox of the Smithsons’ work concerns

the wish (and the task they set themselves) to do justice to both
the larger whole and the specific fragment, to find a possible order
that brings together the generic and the singular, the collective
and the individual. It is an issue that runs like a thread from the
post-war reconstruction of our cities up to our postindustrial
time of cultural fragmentation. Above all, it is a question most
characteristic of open and democratic societies.
10 It would fit the ambitions of our university to trade the T of

Technology for the D of Design in order to ensure that the many
interrelationships between technology and culture become the
natural and socially relevant focus of our research and education.
These propositions are regarded as opposable and defendable,

and have been approved as such by the supervisors:
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10 stellingen
horende bij het proefschrift van Dirk van den Heuvel, ‘Alison and
Peter Smithson: A Brutalist Story, involving the house, the city and
the everyday (plus a couple of other things)’
01 Niemand weet precies hoe een idee in de wereld komt. Om de

oorsprong van ideeën in kaart te brengen zijn de concepten van
een enkelvoudige auteur of een lineaire historische ontwikkeling
niet bepaald nuttig. In plaats daarvan is het zinvoller om te denken
aan een verzameling van condensatiepunten, als een wolk die
leegregent wanneer deze verzadigd is, of die simpelweg overwaait
als hij te licht blijft.
02 De taal vormt de brug tussen onze ideeën en de buitenwereld,

niet zozeer middels het ‘aan woorden gekoppelde begrip’, maar
veeleer middels het ‘verbeeldende woord’ (Johan Huizinga,
Homo Ludens). Onze verhouding tot de werkelijkheid is daarom
altijd een dichterlijke.
03 Aangezien de taal een van de media van het architectonisch

discours is (naast tekenen, berekenen en bouwen), zijn er altijd
metaforen in het spel. Een van de fundamentele metaforen die
we gebruiken om de wereld te verbeelden die we voor onszelf
ontwerpen om in te wonen, is de architectuur zelf. Dat maakt dat
in ons werk de architectuur het onderwerp van onderzoek is en
tegelijkertijd de structuur van ditzelfde onderzoek aanreikt.
04 We hebben een open, speculatieve geschiedschrijving nodig

– niet een operatieve kritiek, noch een projectieve theorie –
maar een praktijk die onderkent dat het onvermijdelijk is dat
het historische subject uit zijn eigen context en tijd wordt gelicht
in het onderzoeksproject, net zoals het even onvermijdelijk is
dat het onderzoek zelf uit de eigen context en tijd zal worden
geplaatst door de onderzochte geschiedenis. Een dergelijke
nieuwe verhouding tussen ontwerp en geschiedenis zal latente,
onvermoede mogelijkheden aan het licht brengen.
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05 Het huis en het alledaagse worden gewoonlijk beschouwd
als idyllische plekken van onschuld en rust. Maar dat zijn ze niet.
Ze vormen een belangrijk strijdveld in het debat over culturele
waarden.
06 Het alledaagse als bron van inventie voor de architectuur en

haar grondslagen kan zowel tot een nieuwe eenheid leiden als tot
ontwrichting.
07 Gedurende de moderne tijd is het huis keer op keer opnieuw

uitgevonden. En hoewel er voor de stad een even rijke verzameling
aan beelden voorhanden is, als een samenvloeien van wisselende
stromen en gebruikspatronen ontsnapt zij nog altijd aan ons begrip.
08 Alison en Peter Smithson hebben de kunst van het wonen

geherdefinieerd als een spel van associaties waarbij ze op een
vernuftige manier putten uit de historische ervaring om zo nieuwe
combinaties uit het ‘trouvé’ te maken. Tegelijk maken ze zo ruimte
voor nieuwe, zich ontwikkelende relaties en interacties tussen de
architectuur van het huis, de orde der dingen en de bewoners.
09 De werkelijk onopgeloste paradox in het werk van de Smithsons

betreft de wens (en de opdracht die zij zichzelf hebben gesteld)
om recht te doen aan zowel het grote geheel als het specifieke
fragment, om een mogelijke orde te vinden die het algemene en het
bijzondere omvat, het collectieve en het individuele samenbrengt.
Die vraag vormt een rode draad die loopt van de naoorlogse
reconstructie van onze steden tot aan onze post-industriële tijd
van culturele fragmentatie. Vóór alles betreft het een vraag die
kenmerkend is voor open en democratische samenlevingen.
10 Het past binnen de ambities van onze universiteit om de T van

Techniek om te ruilen voor de O van Ontwerp om zo te garanderen
dat de relatie tussen techniek en cultuur de vanzelfsprekende
maatschappelijke focus van ons onderzoek en onderwijs wordt.
Deze stellingen worden opponeerbaar en verdedigbaar geacht

en zijn als zodanig goedgekeurd door de promotoren:
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11 Table of contents
13 Preface
16 Summary
19 Conclusions
Dissertation
25 The Smithson-ness of the Smithsons

On Writing, History and Anecdote
57 ‘The Simple Life, Well Done’

Culture, Ordinariness and Domesticity
105 Competing Traditions

Englishness and the Post-war Debate on Modern Architecture
in Britain
157 The New Brutalist Game of Associations

On Principles of Ordering and Finding Processes
195 Another Sensibility

The Discovery of Context and the Idea of Conglomerate Ordering
241 The Great Society

Between Welfare State Ideals and Consumer Drives
293 At Home
Domesticity and the Order of Things
327 Images
395 Sources and References
411 Acknowledgements
415 Biographical Note
11 Table of contents
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PREFACE
‘No book can ever be finished’ Karl Popper wrote in his preface
to the second edition of his monumental two volumes of
The Open Society.1 The thought is disheartening just as it is also
consoling. ‘While working on it we learn just enough to find it
immature the moment we turn away from it’, he added. This has
to do with the inner logic of writing and research, which inevitably
produces new viewpoints that might upset the whole structure
of the argument just freshly and neatly constructed by the author.
Yet clearly, this problem of an ever shifting perspective is not
brought about by the inner logic of the text alone. The work of
competing and collaborating colleagues too, continues to offer
new viewpoints while working on one’s own text, with new
questions to look into, doubts to double check.2 And thus the
subject matter under scrutiny transforms while being examined,
just as the author’s knowledge and instruments change along
the way. Such is the reciprocity between text and author.
Doeschka Meijsing wrote about the curious problem of the author

being manipulated and controlled by her own subject matter.
She compared writing to a game of chess, the noblest of games
with apparently very clear rules and overall strategic control
by the players who oversee the pieces on the board, the pawns,
rooks, knights and bishops, king and queen. Yet, along the way,
the game itself and the pieces’ shifting configurations inevitably
1 Karl Popper, The Open Soci- take over, the players becoming other pieces in a game bigger
ety and Its Enemies, Routledge,
London and New York, 2011, than they themselves, something that also envelopes the ones
p. xxxiv.
who erroneously think they are in control of the pushing and
2 For instance, Steve Parnell
and Alex Kitnick have recently shoving.3 This can hardly be a surprise when one remembers
published very interesting disser-
tations, while Claire Zimmerman how Johan Huizinga already described play as an interior that
and Mark Crinson edited a chal-
lenging anthology of essays on
one can enter only by accepting the rules and by its relative
post-war art and architecture in isolation from society and its other conventions; play, and by
Britain, just as Christine Boyer is
working on a book on the writings default human culture according to Huizinga, is not a realm
of Alison Smithson.
that is fully controlled and planned by the ones who play it.4
3 Doeschka Meijsing, ‘Tegen
jezelf. Tegen wie?’ in: Doeschka Scholarly writing too, cannot escape such game conventions.
Meijsing, Het kauwgomkind. De
verhalen, Querido, Amsterdam /
Antwerpen, 2012, pp. 132-142.
Another hurdle to be noted concerns the historic course of
4 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens,
1938. events and their disappearance in the past. For any scholar
13 Preface
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of a historic subject, or partially historic, this presents
an insurmountable problem, especially when it comes to
biographical aspects. During my work on the dissertation I was
hesitant to go into too much biographical detail and looking
back this is the most important bit that I would do differently
now. Because I feel that in general the impact of biography
on the actual discourse of architecture is underestimated,
and sometimes simply denied. Still, there are also many good
reasons not to enter into biographical survey – ranging from
the impossibility to properly check sources to the inevitable
voyeurism and its seductions. At the same time, one wonders
what a contemporary Giorgio Vasari might reveal of what
remains hidden now.
In his masterful novel The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst

touches exactly on this problem. The novel tells the story of the
survivors of the poet Cecil Valance and his various biographers;
Valance being a fictitious figure cleverly based on a very real one.5
Hollinghurst uses the historical facts and mythical accounts to
lure the reader into a tale of love affairs and desires unfulfilled
while painting a portrait of English society and its transformation
during the twentieth century. In five chapters Hollinghurst
weaves a story, which ultimately cannot be unraveled completely
(this is not a Dan Brown detective story, but a Henry James
portrait of social custom). The impossibility of full historical and
biographical transparency stems from all sorts of reasons we
learn, often banal ones: contemporaries who cherish their own
memories, letters kept secret, poems lost, but also precious finds,
authors’ own agendas, money, time, opportunity, and so forth and
so on. It is a story all too familiar to any historian and all one can
do is to enter the labyrinth, play the game and begin to identify
5 The poet Rupert Brooke, who and follow some of the threads one comes across. At any rate,
joined the Royal Navy and who
died in 1915 in Skyros only 27 whereas biographical detail is not avoided, this thesis is not a
years old; see Alan Hollinghurst,
The Stranger’s Child, Picador, biographical exercise as such.
London 2011. An excellent review
uncovering some of Holling-
hurst’s tricks with the reader is But then – to put the obvious question – why the Smithsons
from Christopher Tayler, ‘The
Rupert Trunk’, in: London Review and their work as a topic for a thesis? Why architecture,
of Books, Vol. 33, No. 15, 28 July
2011, pp. 9-10. and why a focus on the city, housing and the domestic?
6 See: Dirk van den Heuvel and The dissertation naturally fits the longer standing research
Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and
Peter Smithson – from the House programme of the Faculty of Architecture, in particular the
of the Future to a house of today,
010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004; programme as pursued by my mentor Max Risselada, with
and Max Risselada, Dirk van den
Heuvel (eds.), Team 10. In Search
whom I undertook the exhibition project on the houses of the
of a Utopia of the Present 1953- Smithsons: ‘from the House of the Future to a house of today’
1981, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam,
2005. that was accompanied by the book of the same title, and the
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Team 10 research project ‘Team 10 – in search of a Utopia of
the present’ that also entailed a major exhibition plus book
publication.6 Much of this research programme is continued
today with Dick van Gameren as Risselada’s successor and
chair of the Department of Architecture. Key questions that
direct this research, concern the ongoing modernization of
our living environment and how architects respond to this in
terms of design concepts and strategies. The post-war period
and the issues of housing and town planning are regarded as
major anchor points to investigate this historical condition
that is still current with regard to the questions we are facing
today, as architects, designers, theorists and historians alike.
Alison and Peter Smithson were a major voice of the post-war
period with regard to the fields of modern architecture, housing
and town planning, and thus their work a natural subject of
further investigation.
Still, the institutional context hardly explains my own personal

fascination for the work of Alison and Peter Smithson. Insofar as
one can fully understand one’s own motivations, I would say that
my attraction lies with the critical potential of the Smithsons’
rigorous way of thinking, which at the same time accepts, or
even embraces ambiguity as part of life and as a generative
principle. In the thinking of the Smithsons things are never
one-dimensional, which is a source for puzzlement, wonder and
pleasure, unrelenting criticism and further enquiry, just as it
can be a source for annoyance and perhaps frustration. Despite
the often bold statements, which deserved the Smithsons their
reputation as ‘brutes’, this Socratic art of enquiry returns in all
their writings and design work, something I learned to appreciate
at a younger age at the Stedelijk Gymnasium in Den Bosch, and
for which I’m still grateful. As I learned when I enrolled the Delft
Faculty of Architecture, architecture is a fantastic vehicle for
such Socratic enquiry, since it is capable of bringing together the
profoundly conceptual with the mundane realm of the everyday
and dwelling.
Amsterdam and Delft, 5 December 2012
Dirk van den Heuvel
15 Preface
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SUMMARY
The dissertation looks into the work of the British architects

Alison and Peter Smithson (1928-1993, 1923-2003). Their work
is regarded as exemplary for the development of modern
architecture in the second half of the twentieth century,
specifically with regard to the relation between architecture,
welfare state politics and the rise of a new consumer culture
in Western Europe. As members of the platforms of Team 10,
informal successor to the disbanded CIAM organization, and
the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London, Alison and Peter Smithson were leading voices
of the architectural debate of the post-war period, not only in
Great Britain but globally. Among their many proposals for
the future development of modern architecture their idea for
‘another architecture’: the so-called New Brutalism stands out
as one of the most remarkable and important contributions,
propagated as such by influential critics as Reyner Banham,
Theo Crosby and Robin Middleton, and today, still an inspiration
for architectural innovation.
Main questions of the dissertation concern the architecture of

the house, housing, and town planning, and how the Smithsons
both continued, criticized and transformed modernist
concepts of architectural order. The combined notions of form
and formlessness, of image and movement, of material and
experience, of process, finding processes and the As Found,
are key to the aesthetics and aesthetic procedures as proposed
by the Smithsons.
The dissertation holds seven chapters. The first one

‘The Smithson-ness of the Smithsons’ is an almost autonomous
piece as an introduction to the various interdependent themes
of the research, including the methodological issues of
discourse analysis, historiography and writing. The second and
third chapter (‘“The Simple Life Well Done”’ and ‘Competing
Traditions’) are an attempt to recontextualize the work and
thinking of the Smithsons, not so much with regard to the
CIAM and Team 10 debates of the time, but rather the British
17 Summary
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context and the themes of the everyday and dwelling. The fourth
chapter (‘The New Brutalist Game of Associations’) is the
central chapter in that it investigates the principles of ordering
and the architectural concepts at stake in the work of the
Smithsons. The last three chapters (‘Another Sensibility’,
‘The Great Society’ and ‘At Home’) are a further elaboration
along the lines of first, modernization, landscape and the issue
of context; second, the rise and fall of the post-war welfare state
including the issues of mass housing and town planning; and
finally, the house as ultimate assignment and demonstration of
principle in architecture, and hence as paradigm of the structure
of the discourse itself.
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CONCLUSIONS
The conclusions of the dissertation can be grouped into various

subcategories: methodology in terms of discourse analysis,
disciplinary in terns of the relation design and history, the internal
development of the modern architecture discourse and the specific
position of Alison and Peter Smithson within the discourse.
Discourse analysis, knowledge and language
Language is one of the most important media by which we

communicate ideas in architecture. Language is also a most
slippery phenomenon in that the same words may mean different
things, just as apparently different terms may be used to describe
the same phenomenon. Hence, a crucial part of discourse analysis
is to map the various uses of words and their contexts, in order
to understand the development of the ideas under investigation,
not unlike Adrian Forty’s example of Words and Buildings of 2000.
The dissertation argues and demonstrates how various words
and terms are used to structure the actual discourse in terms
of affinities and genealogies (‘family’ and ‘our generation’), or
exclusion of adversaries and competitors. The same terms are
often used in different ways (‘Picturesque’ or ‘context’), just as
some can be appropriated by one party in an exclusive manner
(‘Englishness’). In the Brutalist discourse such slipperiness of
language is consciously made operative as a form of wordplay
and Surrealist associative thinking. While its aim is to look
for new principles of ordering, the New Brutalism resists a
systematic approach and objectification in terms of rationalist,
scholarly knowledge. The Brutalist discourse is an attempt
to incorporate both positivist and irrationalist impulses, its
ambition is to be all-inclusive, and as such it is a vitalist project
that aims to regenerate the practices of the avant-garde and
modern architecture. As a project the New Brutalism can never
be final, since it is a regenerative process by nature; its outcome
will always differ depending on place, moment in time and the
participants involved.
19 Conclusions
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Design and history
As Mark Wigley has demonstrated (among others in

‘The Architectural Cult of Synchronization’, 2000), amnesia and
suppression of past facts are part and parcel of the workings of
the architecture discourse, while at the same time it is impossible
to escape from history altogether. Usually, when discarded,
history is pejoratively defined as something academic, dead,
or redundant; irrelevant for adequately approaching the questions
of today. Whereas this position can also be observed within the
post-war British debates (although not quite as dominant as in
today’s debates one might add), one also finds that history and
the vast body of historical production hold a critical potential
that can be re-activated at will. Also, in the work and thinking of
Alison and Peter Smithson we find that the historical production
is regarded as a resource of knowledge and attitudes most useful
for contemporary practice. Architecture itself is considered
as an accumulation of past experience, including conventions,
practices, and ideas, which not only offers a repertoire of
solutions but also demands an awareness of the way history,
historic experience and architecture always work together.
A critical aspect of this practice of re-activation is the process
of selection, what to include and what not, what to highlight,
what to suppress. What stands out in the British discourse,
including the example of the Smithsons, is the way dominant
histories are challenged by looking at and including supposedly
peripheral positions (ranging from Pikionis to Lewerentz to
Scharoun to Aalto among others). These peripheral or ‘other’
positions are used to amend the hegemonic historiographies as
well as to change the course of the architecture debate and the
design production. A so-called double perspective is developed
to criticize established categories, supplanting some of them by
new ones (the notion of territory for instance), while at the same
time enabling the continuation and transformation of others
(the role of technology among others).
Modern architecture, internal critique and local contexts
Regarding the post-war history of modern architecture, one

commonly finds the reproduction of the myth of generation
conflict, class struggle and revolting ‘angry young men’. This has
been refuted by others already, by Peter Bürger in more general
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terms of the history of the avant-gardes, and by Anne Massey
and Penny Sparke of the history of the Independent Group (as
early as 1985). Most of the conflict (or the evolving discourse)
happened within the confines of established institutes, such as
the CIAM organization in the case of Team 10, or the Institute
of Contemporary Arts in the case of the Independent Group.
Statements, essays and projects were published in existing
journals that pursued inclusive editorial policies sympathetic of
new voices, not in newly founded magazines. One is looking at
an internal critique rather than a challenge from outsiders, or as
Colin St John Wilson put it, the Independent Group was never
anything like a salon des réfusées. In the case of the development
of modern architecture, the combination of the specific post-war
British context with pre-war Continental invention and ambition
seems to have been of a much greater impact – if one might make
such generalizing statements. The influence of MARS members
(older and younger ones) on the course of events during the late
CIAM conferences and the susbsequent Team 10 Meetings still
seems unrecognized, or at least too little. Especially, the way the
legacy of Patrick Geddes started to profoundly redirect modernist
town planning ideas (the ‘Heart of the City’, Hoddesdon 1951,
the ‘Valley Section’, Doorn 1954, Dubrovnik 1956), can only be
explained by way of the British contribution. Moreover, context
awareness, notions of territory, movement and landscape, are all
primed in the profoundly British Picturesque tradition; perhaps
not quite as Nikolaus Pevsner likened it in 1955, but his argument
was certainly not far off the point, despite the fierce opposition
of Reyner Banham in particular.
Alison and Peter Smithson and the architecture of the house
As writing and building architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s

body of work remains of a special, lasting interest. It presents
a micro-history of its own that coincides with the establishment
of the post-war welfare state and its demise from the mid-1970s
onward. From today’s perspective it situates the Smithsons
in between the heroic generation of modern architects
who sought to deliver a unified, new style for the Zeitgeist,
and the postmodernist moderns so to speak, architects
such as Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas, who following
Charles Jencks seemed to have given up on any socio-utopian
ambition for architecture. The house and what they called the
21 Conclusions
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‘art of inhabitation’ is central to the Smithsons’ contribution
to the development of the modern architecture discourse. The
house is never conceived as a singular object, but always as
related to the larger whole of society. The demand for authenticity
and an ‘architecture of reality’ together with their wish to leave
behind the Functional City concept and seek an expanded way
of living that combines the domestic with labour and other living
functions, demonstrates how much the Smithsons owe to the
Arts and Crafts movement. The relentless re-invention of the
house that we see in the work of the Smithsons, over and over
again, and which according to Beatriz Colomina is also the
history of the architecture of the twentieth century, is paired with
a continuous rethinking of the city. But whereas the idea of the
city seems to dissolve in multiple systems with shifting centres,
patterns of ‘noise’ and ‘quiet’, clusters of ‘other’ geometries, the
idea of the modern house is restored as a safe haven, encapsuled
by a protective territory, situated in an idyllic enclave to sustain
a working and thinking life.
The dissertation concludes with three unresolved, open

questions as embodied by the Smithsons’ work. They are
related to the house and might direct the further expansion
of the language of modern architecture into the 21st century:
how the house as a constructed environment is also involved in
the construction of memory and its re-activation (as a place of
accumulated experience in every sense of the word); how the
architecture of the house is a testing-ground for new expansions
of the language of architecture itself and how this language
brings together the architecture of the house, the order of things,
the patterns of use and the meaning for its inhabitants; and
finally, how the house because of this constitutes the paradigm
of the modern architecture discourse both in terms of its ethical
demands and its aesthetic aspiration.
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23 Conclusions
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1 THE SMITHSON-NESS OF THE SMITHSONS
On Writing, History and Anecdote
Neither Le Corbusier nor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, two of the
great heroes of modern architecture, would begin their writings by
pointing out the limits of their range. Today, it seems impossible not
to start with a word of reservation. This is due to the by now normal
practice of historiography, a practice of consciously putting into
perspective, (re)contextualizing, tracing shifts and translations,
while recounting micro-histories.1 This account of the work of the
British architects couple Alison and Peter Smithson (1928-1993
and 1923-2003) must open with some explanatory remarks as well.
The dissertation is an attempt to trace the Smithsons’ work and

ideas in the fields of the everyday, the city and the home. As such it
is neither a monograph, nor a biography. It might be characterized
as an exercise in discourse analysis, mapping the formation of the
various concepts and trends of thoughts at play throughout their
work, their development and elaboration, including the breaks,
transformations and continuities.2 The triangulation of the home,
the city and the everyday has been chosen for various reasons.
1 By ‘normal’ historiography First, it makes it possible to resituate the Smithsons within
I refer to the kind of ‘normal’, es-
tablished practices of science as the larger discourse of the twentieth century, as well as that of
described by Thomas Kuhn in his
The Structure of Scientific Revolu- modern architecture, since housing, the city and ordinariness are
tions, 1962, and his ‘Postscript’ of
1969, pp. 174-210 in the 1996 third among the most important elements of those discourses. Second,
edition published by The Univer- this triangulation of words serves as a ‘method’ to approach the
sity of Chicago Press.
2 According to Catherine Gal- subject of the dissertation: they set out the main direction, while
lagher and Stephen Greenblatt
the practice of ideology critique
leaving enough room for intermezzi or reflection when necessary.
has been superseded by the one Language is the main medium of our research practice, yet
of discourse analysis. One may
characterize this practice as language is also slippery. The same words never mean quite the
one that is politically much less
charged, yet does not abandon same thing, and the same things are often addressed by different
the political dimensions of the
historical, cultural formations
words, while all sorts of translation complicate matters further.
under scrutiny as well as one’s It already starts with the proposed triangulation: the home, the
own position as critic. See for
an explanation of the practice of house, the dwelling, the everyday, the ordinary, the quotidian, the
discourse analysis: Catherine
Gallagher and Stephen Green- simple life, the city, the metropolis, the town, and onward with:
blatt, Practicing New Historicism,
The University of Chicago Press,
region, landscape, network, mobility, communication, association,
Chicago and London, 2000, in identity and so forth and so on. The concatenations of words
particular their ‘Introduction’ to
their book, pp. 1-19. overlap, they are sometimes interchangeable and sometimes not.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 25 21-04-13 16:56

3 A very elegant example of this As we will see, the game of words and wordplay were part and
approach one finds with Adrian
Forty and his book Words and parcel of the practice of Alison and Peter Smithson and their
Buildings. A Vocabulary of Modern peers: to mark their own position, to outwit their adversaries,
Architecture, Thames & Hudson,
London, 2000. capture the mood of the day, grasp the problems they faced, or to
4 Alison and Peter Smithson,
Ordinariness and Light. Urban the-
regenerate the tradition they sought to continue. To unpack the
ories 1952-60, and their application words then, to triangulate them so to speak, to map the different
in a building project 1963-70, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1970. ways they were used, by whom and in what specific situations, is
5 The manuscript Maigret’s Map, a way to help to understand the formation of the various concepts
Smithson Family Archive.
6 The full quote reads: and trends of thoughts at stake.3 Many authors have compared
‘At five o’clock, while the police
of the Eighth Arrondissement were
this kind of discourse analysis with the work of a detective, an
keeping an eye on the Mouse’s anthropologist or an archaeologist, e.g. by such great writers as
movements, Lognon was ringing
on the doorbell of a flat in the Ave- Michel Foucault and Manfredo Tafuri, or more recently by Beatriz
nue du Parc-Montsouris. It was
on the sunny side of the avenue, Colomina. The Smithsons themselves also suggested such
and he was dazlled, as soon as he
entered, by the brightness of the
parallels, for instance by way of their opening quote to their 1970
flat, with its white walls, its gaily anthology Ordinariness and Light.4 It is a passage from a novel by
coloured curtains, and its furniture
which was so clean that it looked the Belgian detective writer Georges Simenon, one of Alison’s
as if it had come straight from the
shop. favourite authors. All the Penguin paperbacks were on a special
A little boy of five was playing on
the balcony. As for Luciel Boisvin,
shelf in the Smithson house and an unpublished manuscript of
who was dressed in bright colours hers is completely devoted to Simenon’s descriptions of Paris.5
too, she no longer recalled the
unruly child in the portrait, or the Yet, since the inserted passage is completely decontextualized,
police reports, but suggested ra-
the a model young mother. knitting it remains unclear why the quote is there in the first place – it is a
with green wool.
As Lognon walked in without
riddle presented to the reader, the solution of which could concern
saying anything, with his stubborn the people involved, a man, a mother and a child, or the description
look, she gave a start and asked:
“Did Edgar send you?” Then of a bright, light-filled flat in the Avenue du Parc-Montsouris, or
frightened by the bushy eyebrows
which drew together, she said: perhaps the found photograph that is mentioned, or eventually,
“Nothing’s happened to him,
has it?”
how the modernist aesthetic of hygiene had become a natural part
“I don’t think so ... I found this of a common literature produced for a mass readership. In the
photograph in the neighbour-
hood ... I wanted to give it back final instance, it is up to the reader what to make of it, a cryptic
to you ...”
She didn’t understand. “How yet strategic aperçu, as open-ended as it is also rhetorical; it is a
did you know it was me?” Then
rather embarrassed, he explained
demonstration of the riddle-like approach which returns in many of
that he lived in the Rue Dareau, the Smithsons’ works, in their writings as well as in the exhibitions
that he had already caught sight
of her, and that he had thought and designs.6
that this photograph might have
sentimental value for her. As for
her, nonplussed, she turned the
piece of cardboard over and over
Eventually, the questions at stake revolve around what Rudolf
between her fingers. “It was Edgar, Wittkower and John Summerson called architectural principles
wasn’t it, who told you ...”
He felt uneasy, for he was not or, referring to Alberti, principia.7 The Smithsons usually speak
there on official business. He was
in a hurry to get away ... about ordering, and organisation, yet this is at the core of their
“I just don’t understand ... This
looks like the photo he insisted on
efforts: to define new principles of ordering for the architecture
keeping in his pocket ... Tell me ... discipline in an age of unprecedented technological advancement
You’re sure nothing has happened
to hime ...” and socio-political modernization. These questions of architectural
The child was listening to them.
While Lucile Boisvin was dark, order hover over the entire dissertation and its related research.8
the boy had silver-blond hair and
a milky-white complexion. “Why
Clearly, the Smithsons considered those new principles to be
hasn’t he come?” she murmu- a continuation and elaboration of the ones as established by
red as if to herself. This visitor
intrigued her. She had not asked the founding, heroic generation of the modern tradition, while
dvdh10PRINT.indd 26 21-04-13 16:56

him to sit down. It was warm, and
Lognon reflected that he would
at the same time being distinctly their own. In the introduction
have liked a flat as light as this one, of The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, the Smithsons’
without a sible object lying around,
without a single speck of dust, a hommage to their spiritual fathers, they formulated it as follows:
flat which, in fact made him think
of a luxury clinic.’ in: Alison and ‘This Heroic Period of Modern Architecture is the rock on which
Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and
Light, 1970, pp. 7-8.
we stand. Through it we feel the continuity of history and the
Next to the detective, the Smith- necessity of achieving our own idea of order.’ 9
sons also suggested another
model for discourse practice as
well as discourse analysis, which
surprisingly enough, has found Next to the problem of language, each historiographical
little support in architecture
theory until now, namely that of
excercise has to face the problem of time perspective. This
literary analysis. This disserta- dissertation is written from a contemporary perspective, and
tion is not quite the right place to
fully elaborate this question of I would say, inevitably so. An obvious reason is perhaps that the
methodology, but the topic will be
touched upon if only superfici- history of the Smithsons is a recent one, and to a large extent
ally, since later on the work of
literary critic and cultural theorist
a still living one: through one’s own memories, the surviving
Raymond Williams will be used contemporaries, not to mention the generations who grew up with
to understand the Smithsons’
notion of ordinariness as well as their teachings and keep furthering their ideas, sometimes as part
their cultural-political affinities.
of a self-conscious practice, but more often more intuitively. Time
7 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural
Principles in the Age of Huma- and its perspective concern a classic dilemma in architecture
nism, 1949; John Summerson,
‘The Case for a Theory of Modern writing and its theorizing, whether to strictly remain within the
Architecture’, in: RIBA Journal,
1957, June, pp. 307-313. boundaries of historiographical orthodoxy or to embark on a
8 Two related research projects more speculative exercise in architecture theory synthesizing
exploring the Team 10 discourse
and the work of the Smithsons historically isolated events.10 This dilemma of diachronic versus
in particular, were the book and synchronic readings of past history cannot be solved within
exhibition realised together with
Max Risselada: Alison and Peter this piece of writing. To complicate things further, the dilemma
Smithson – from the House of the
Future to a house of today, 010 is quite naturally also present in the Smithsons’ own work and
Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004; and
Team 10, 1953-81. In Search of a writings. For instance, when they speak of such things as ‘the
Utopia of the Present, NAi Publis- continuity of history’ as quoted above. Such continuity is more
hers, Rotterdam, 2005.
9 Alison and Peter Smithson, The often than not a fabrication, yet clearly, it is also a precondition
Heroic Period of Modern Architec-
ture, Rizzoli / Idea Editions, New
to operationalize concepts and ideas in architecture. In order
York / Milan, 1981, p. 5; originally to understand the way those concepts structure the discourse
published as a special issue of
Architectural Design, December and make it tick, so to speak, while evolving through time, from
1965.
one place to another, through one generation after another and
10 Two remarks of methodology
and positioning are neces- another, one has to acknowledge such operativity, in the work and
sary here. First, this disserta-
tion is not the place to discuss writing under investigation, as in our own research. As we know,
the disciplinary boundaries
between architecture theory and
the architectural discourse is littered with such examples – not
historiography – if these fields just in accounts by architects, but also in the work of the greatest
can be demarcated that clearly
at all. It must suffice to state writers such as Pevsner or Tafuri and in the sweeping lines they
that both fields need to borrow
methods and instruments from drew to put order to the discourse: from Morris to Gropius, or
each other. Any architecture
theory that is not able, or even
from the 1970s all the way back to Piranesi. Next to the material
willing to contextualize in the production of designs and buildings, such fabrications make
sense of to historicize, cannot
produce any reliable knowledge, up the very structure of the discourse we are looking at, while
but rather runs the risk of pro-
ducing ideology. And vice versa, building on it ourselves. Such operativity also means a definitive
architecture history that is not
aware of the theoretical issues at
history cannot be written. It is the inherent operativity of our own
stake including their discursive writing, which makes this impossible. Dutch historian Jan Romein
functions, will vainly try to grasp
the historical production remai- referred to this, when he spoke of the ‘revolving aspect of the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 27 21-04-13 16:56

incomplete past, because each time it is a different present that
illuminates the past’.11
In the case of the dissertation, the triangulation of the everyday,

the city and the house can be regarded as belonging to such
operativity. It might be considered a first, willful gesture to
put order to the material under investigation, perhaps not a
hundred percent historically correct, yet, it is not an arbitrary one
either, nor historically incorrect. The triangulation as a possible
framework by which one may demonstrate the order hidden
within the Smithsons’ work is in the first place suggested by the
work of the couple themselves, just as much as it is suggested
by the wider discourse in which the Smithsons were operating,
by current historiography of twentieth century architecture, as
well as by the ongoing debates regarding our own cities which
we inhabit.
ning stuck in naive historicism.
See for an extensive explanation
of the epistemological problems
surrounding historiography: Chris
Lorenz, De constructie van het
verleden. Een inleiding in de theo-
rie van de geschiedenis, Uitgeverij Shifts and Lines of Inheritance
Boom, Amsterdam, fifth revised
edition, 1998, originally published
in 1987. Second, when it comes to One of the more conspicuous elements of the working life of
the use of such terms as moder-
nity, modernization and modern Alison and Peter Smithson is not only the way they situated
architecture, I refer to Hilde Hey-
nen’s study Architecture and Mo- themselves within the tradition of modern architecture, but also
dernity. A Critique, The MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1999, especially
the perseverance with which they kept carving out a niche for
the first chapter ‘Architecture themselves within this larger historical framework. This may have
Facing Modernity’, pp. 8-24, which
builds on Marshall Berman’s been a natural thing to do in their early years, when they moved
argument. When it comes to
the use of the term ‘pastoral’ to within the circles of CIAM and when they were actively involved
define certain tendencies within
modern architecture as Heynen
in the debates regarding the intellectual legacy of CIAM, and
does, I will follow the specific out of which Team 10 would emerge as the leading platform for
English discourse on capitalism,
modernity and the Picturesque, the future development of modern architecture.12 But throughout
most notably Raymond Williams’
analyses of British culture. More the Smithsons’ career this would remain a recurrent element
on this can be found in the chap-
ters 2 and 3 of this dissertation,
structuring their argument. However, looking at the evolution of
‘The Simple Life, Well Done’ and the Smithsons’ designs, especially from the mid-1970s onward,
‘Competing Traditions’.
11 Jan Romein, Het onvoltooid it becomes very hard to consider them as part of the modern
verleden. Kultuurhistorische tradition. That the work of the Smithsons represents a break
studies, Em. Querido’s Uitgevers-
maatschappij, Amsterdam, 1937, with the International Style as originally defined by Henry-
pp. 5-8.
12 For more on this: Max Risse-
Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932, could hardly be
lada, Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.), surprising – the New Brutalist impulse was, among many other
Team 10. In Search of a Utopia
of the Present 1953-1981, NAi things, deliberately tuned against the American appropriation
Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005; Eric
Mumford, The CIAM Discourse of Continental invention, but the evaporation of the seminal
on Urbanism, 1928-1960, The MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 2000;
Corbusian or Miesian elements from the pre-war period is
Rassegna, nr. 52, December 1992, much more troublesome. A brief glance at the later work of the
‘The Last CIAMs’, special issue
edited by Jos Bosman. 1980s, the university buildings in Bath, or the German house
dvdh10PRINT.indd 28 21-04-13 16:56

built for Axel Bruchhäuser for instance, suggests that a moving
away from the modern tradition would be a much more fitting
description than inheritance.
Such observation that eventually the Smithsons positioned

themselves outside of modernist orthodoxy is partly based on
the way Hitchcock and Johnson, but also Sigfried Giedion and
Pevsner framed the modern tradition – not to mention the anti-
modernist accounts of Colin Rowe and Charles Jencks, who both
(albeit each in a very different way) produced an erudite, yet also
reductive reading of the history of modern architecture, against
which they could pit their plea for a post-modern architecture, and
whose accounts one might add, still support the paradigm of the
current architectural discourse.13 A closer look at the Smithsons’
work and writings reveals they also picked up on different, more
peripheral strands of the modern tradition, about which they
were much less vocal in comparison to the core of the tradition
as embodied by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies, and which
was extensively celebrated by the Smithsons. This interest in the
more peripheral positions, the so-called ‘other moderns’,14 next
to the appropriation of the core of the modern tradition, seems to
have always been present in the Smithsons’ thinking. This double
perspective on both centre and periphery is a key characteristic
of the development of the larger post-war British discourse and
at least partially explains the various revisions of the modern
tradition as proposed by British architects and historians of that
generation. Perhaps, one could argue that ultimately, Alison and
Peter Smithson developed in a similar vein a double, or ‘other’
position, both inside and outside of modernist orthodoxy.
13 Naturally, Colin Rowe’s
contribution deserves a much
more extensive appreciation But still, over the years various core principles of the Modern
than this one cursory statement, Movement and their interrelated hierarchies seem to be
also with respect to the notion
of postmodernism, yet, the one reformulated by the Smithsons, or even put aside. The ideas
publication I have in mind at this
point is the highly influential of progress through technology and architectural expression
Collage City book that he wrote
together with Fred Koetter, MIT of technological invention made room for a much more urbane
Press, Cambridge MA, 1978, approach when their Economist project was built (1959-1964).
first published as an extensive
essay in The Architectural Review, From the mid-1960s onward Peter Smithson started talking
August 1975, pp. 66-90.
14 It’s a phrase that has a long
about the ‘machine-calm’ and the ‘machine-served’ as a re-
history of its own and belongs interpretation of the ideals of Mies van der Rohe as well as
to the post-war debates. Ken
Frampton still uses it in his tea- Le Corbusier – an ongoing, often implicit polemic with Reyner
chings, as does Max Risselada.
It was Colin StJohn Wilson who Banham, who remained throughout his life a fervent apostle of
eventually coined the term with
his book The Other Tradition of
progress by technological development. The idea of transparency
Modern Architecture. The Uncom- made way for a practice of layering as exemplified by their project
pleted Project, Academy Editions,
London, 1995. for St Hilda’s College in Oxford (1967-1970). Unadorned volumes
dvdh10PRINT.indd 29 21-04-13 16:56

and planes gave way for a new interpretation of decoration,
most convincingly demonstrated to the Smithsons by Charles
and Ray Eames.15 Drawing a line from the Hunstanton School
to the Bath interventions one oberves that clear-cut, geometric
volumes made way for ‘lumpish’ groupings or ‘conglomerates’.
Ultimately, there was not an attempt to arrive at an architecture of
‘magnificent play under the light’ as Le Corbusier would have it, but
an architecture, which in the words of the Smithsons ‘harnesses
all the senses’ and offers ‘pleasures beyond those of the eyes’.16
Universal space and infinite extension as can be found in the work
of Mies and the Dutch avant-garde of De Stijl, was substituted by
the socio-anthropological idea of cultural specificity, and such
existentialist-phenomenological notions as territory, and the
awareness of operating within an existing, urban fabric or tissue.
Ordering concepts that were proposed as part of this critique of
modern orthodoxy, included the charged void, the space between,
mat-building and conglomerate order. Earlier concepts such as
the doorstep philosophy, cluster, and patterns of associations and
of growth and change can also be mentioned here, even though
these were still developed within the CIAM discourse whereas
the former ones were formulated from the mid-1960s onward.
The proposed changes, breaks or amendments by the Smithsons

may be best described as ‘shifts’ within the larger paradigm of
modern architecture – implying both continuity and renewal.
Because this is what is ultimately at stake in the Smithsons’ work.17
Their sometimes bold rhetoric suggests the Smithsons strived for
15 The Smithsons edited a spe-
cial issue on the Eames’s work a quintessential avant-garde position, a clean break with the past
for Architectural Design: ‘Eames
Celebration’, September 1966.
and competing traditions, especially in their younger years. But
Among Independent Group fel- although avant-garde techniques and concepts were absorbed and
lows it was Geoffrey Holroyd who
first visited the Eames’s in 1953, reproduced by the couple, eventually the combination of continuity
see also his contribution to the
‘Eames Celebration’: ‘Architec- and regeneration while accepting, at times embracing the new,
ture Creating Relaxed Intensity’,
pp. 27-38. Peter Smithson visited
were central to their efforts in design and writing.
Charles and Ray Eames when he
visited the USA in 1958.
16 Alison and Peter Smithson, The various shifts as proposed by the Smithsons were not only
‘The Canon of Conglomerate the result of an internal reflection and personal maturing. At all
Ordering’, p. 62, in: Alison and
Peter Smithson, Italian Thoughts, times - and one cannot say this too often I suppose – it should be
Stockholm, 1993.
17 The Smithsons use the term
kept in mind that the Smithsons were operating within a dynamic
themselves when describing context of discursive competition. The silliest bits of writing, the
changes in their design attitudes
in their publication The Shift of most innocent of jokes, even the most cursory of comments, were
1982; in current research it is of-
ten claimed that the post-WWII all in function of this. Concepts and ideas, new and old ones, and
era presented a paradigm shift,
but I would contest this as too
not just those of the Smithsons, were consistently contested
big a definition for the discursive in the context of what their contemporary Kenneth Frampton
exchanges of the period under
scrutiny. called the ‘English crucible’, which in hindsight was one of the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 30 21-04-13 16:56

most vehement battlegrounds for reconfiguring the modernist
canon.18 Not only the New Brutalism sprang from this crucible,
with the Smithsons as its initial, foremost propagators, but one
could also point to the typical British inventions and revivals
that were characteristic of the post-war decades such as those
of neo-Classicism, the Picturesque and Townscape, Pop or Pop
Art, High Tech and eventually also the various manifestations of
postmodernism.
So, when observing the Smithsons moved away from some of

the codified core ideas of the Modern Movement while mining
peripheral variants – by what standards then we might ask, could
their efforts in writing and designing be regarded as part of the
modern tradition? And what standards have they themselves been
proposing? What then, are the actual lines of inheritance? Where
would we find continuities, and where the breaks? And last but
certainly not least, what idea of order did they seek to deliver? To
answer such questions, one should also note that a mere moving
away is not quite the linear development as could erroneously be
suggested. We are looking at simultaneous acts of deconstruction
and reconstruction,19 which explains the apparent contradictions
that come to the fore when examining the case of Alison and Peter
Smithson. Finally, it may be noted that it is exactly because of
these tensions which are to be solved, or at least balanced within
18 Kenneth Frampton, ‘The En-
glish Crucible’, in: D’Laine Camp,
each project of the couple why the Smithsons’ work is exemplary
Dirk van den Heuvel, Gijs de Waal and may serve to understand the development of modern
(eds.), CIAM Team 10, The English
Context, proceedings of the architecture during the second half of the twentieth century.
expert meeting November 5, 2001,
Delft 2002, also available online:
www.team10online.org; see also
Frampton’s chapter ‘The New
Brutalism and the Welfare State:
1949-59’, in his Modern Architec-
ture a Critical History, re-publis- Word Games and the Slipperiness of Language
hed in: Edward Leffingwell, Karen
Marta (eds.), Modern Dreams,
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop,
MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1988,
One of the problems of discourse analysis is that it cannot escape
pp. 46-52. discourse itself. We can describe the discourse, the exchange
19 Not unlike the way Thomas
Kuhn described the mechanisms of arguments, the interplay of words, just as we can describe
by which paradigms among pro- ourselves while we are looking in a mirror – to follow Foucault’s
fessional groups are contested,
established and assimilated. famous metaphor, which he used in his famous radio talk
20 Michel Foucault, ‘Des espaces
autres’, original lecture of 1967,
‘Des espaces autres’.20 We also realize that eventually, we cannot
based on two radio talks of 1966 exchange places with our mirror image and look at ourselves
in Tunisia entitled ‘Utopies et
hétérotopies’, republished and from an outside position. If the mirror image is such an outside
translated at many occasions,
among others as ‘Of Other Spa- position – as Foucault claims, an u-topia or non-place – it can only
ces, Utopias and Heterotopias’,
in: Joan Ockman (ed.), Architec-
be so in a virtual sense. And since one cannot escape discourse
ture Culture 1943-1968. A Docu- and language and stand outside them as some detached observer,
mentary Anthology, Rizzoli, New
York, 1993, 2005, pp. 420-426. the meaning of words and their historic use slip away like sand
dvdh10PRINT.indd 31 21-04-13 16:56

through our fingers. It is important to acknowledge this very
slipperiness and not to eliminate it, since crucially, it is also part of
the operativity at play. It is a productive kind of speculation present
in the rhetoric and reasoning that is going on in the discourse
under scrutiny, whether we are looking at the New Brutalist word
games or the skirmishes in Team 10 circles. All the words and catch
phrases that belong to these specific discourses are only effective
because of this very slipperiness: as found, image, topology, new
brutalism, conglomerate ordering, mat building, cluster, identity,
mobility, the space between, the charged void, and so forth and so
on – they are tuned to remain imprecise in an ever shifting debate.
Aldo van Eyck exclaimed ‘nous avons le droit d’être vague’, at

the 1956 CIAM conference in Dubrovnik.21 This vagueness is
connected to his idea of meaning in architecture and how it is
continuously regenerated. More generally speaking, it can probably
be extended to how this idea operated within the wider Team 10
discourse. Van Eyck would most clearly explain it when discussing
the architecture of the Dogon and the work of the psycho-analysts
Paul Parin and Fritz Morgenthaler, who studied the Dogon. Van
21 Van Eyck quotes himself in
Oscar Newman (ed.), CIAM ’59 in Eyck explained that he sought: 
Otterlo, Uitgeverij G. Van Saane,
Hilversum / Karl Krämer Verlag, ‘… still hidden meaning slumbering in what is perceived as well as in
Stuttgart, 1961, p. 197. what is conceived. To force conception and perception to coincide
22 Aldo van Eyck, ‘A Miracle of
Moderation’, in: Charles Jencks completely is to contract rather than extend the meaning of either.
and George baird (eds.), Meaning
in Architecture, George Braziller,
The poetry lies in the persistence of scope – scope for undefined and
New York, 1969, p. 174. latent multimeaning.’22
23 For more on mythopoiesis in
relation to the Team 10 dis-
course, see Dirk van den Heuvel, This ‘persistence of scope’ is one function of the ‘vagueness’, or
‘Team 10 Riddles. A Few Notes
on Mythopoiesis, Discourse and slipperiness that comes with the language used. With reference
Epistemology’, in: Max Risselada,
Dirk van den Heuvel and Gijs de to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, one might call this the
Waal (eds.), Team 10 – Keeping
the Language of Modern Archi- mythopoetic function, which is aimed at the continuous cultural
tecture Alive, Delft University of regeneration of human socio-discursive practices, the language
Technology, 2006, pp. 89-108; also
available online: www.team10on- and words used and the game of ever shifting positions of its
line.org.
24 Next to Van Eyck’s plea for
participants.23 This mythopoetic function seems to be inherent
vagueness, one may also refer to our practices of historiography, too, because of the medium of
to Claude Lévi-Strauss and
his Introduction to the Work language and because of the inevitable structure of history as a
of Marcel Mauss, the French
anthropologist who influenced narrative or set of narratives. For instance, when Tafuri called in
Surrealism and Aldo van Eyck,
originally published in 1950; in
Sisyphus as a metaphor, or Romein spoke of ‘the revolving aspect
his Design and Crime. And Other of the incomplete past’, we are firmly on mythopoetic grounds,
Diatribes, Hal Foster refers to
pp. 60-63 in the 1987 edition of where metaphors, or the ‘figurative word’ as Huizinga put it, cover
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London;
Foster: ‘“There is always a non- up the inherent incongruities between history as happened and as
equivalence or ‘inadequation’”
between signifier and signified,
mapped and theorized, where they bridge the inevitable non-fit and
Lévi-Strauss writes, and “every non-equivalence of perception and conception, of signified and
mythic and aesthetic invention”
works to cover this “non-fit”’. signifier.24
dvdh10PRINT.indd 32 21-04-13 16:56

Another function that renders the used language as problematic
in the sense of being not transparent or unambiguous, is the one
of control, as opposed to the one of regeneration. The wish and
urge to control the discourse is also behind the mythopoetic game,
to come up with new words and arguments that outwit existing
ones rendering them obsolete. It also leads to the use of terms
that are presented and used as if being meta-historical, outside
of history itself, words and terms that at first sight seem neutral
and objective, but upon closer inspection are crucial in structuring
the discourse in action, valuing the participants, distinguishing
between opponents and kindred spirits, setting boundaries and
drawing the lines of attack. Such terms are for instance those
of ‘avant-garde’, ‘movement’, ‘generation’, ‘family’, ‘tradition’
et cetera.
Alison and Peter Smithson certainly loved to talk about their

adversaries and friends in terms of generations. One comes
across the term everywhere in their writings, especially in their
many accounts of the history of Team 10 and CIAM. Yet, the figure
of a succession of generations and a history unfolding through
those generations is riddled with innumerable contradictions,
of which the Smithsons actually seem to be aware enough
when they point out for instance, that there are cases when the
youngsters influence the elders. The generation idea is one of
the most persisting and effective rhetorical gestures deployed in
discursive, historiographical battles, also in the case of the post-
war discourse on modern architecture. The idea of successive
generations is used to propose genealogy, origins and heritage,
continuation, hierarchy or appropriation, but perhaps more often,
conflict and distinction. Hence, the generation idea is a rather
versatile one, being linked to both the more notorious concept
of Zeitgeist and the idea of continuity and tradition. Le Corbusier
did so, as did Giedion and the other leading voices of CIAM.
Of the younger generation, Reyner Banham in particular, built his
myth of the New Brutalism on the model of a generation conflict,
thus covering up both the intergenerational continuities and the
difference of opinion between contemporaries. As noted, in the
case of Team 10 and Alison and Peter Smithson too, the figure of
generations was frequently used to structure the argument and to
explain either conflict or continuity. However, the trouble with this
rhetorical figure is that despite the clear lines it draws (and hence
its incredible rhetorical power), it falsely unifies the diverging,
individual positions across the generations.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 33 21-04-13 16:56

The second, meta-historical term that should be touched upon
briefly here, is the one of avant-garde. The predominant portrayal
of the post-war groups and individuals, who opposed the then
established culture is conventionally as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘neo-
avant-garde.’ Following current historiography of the period, the
Smithsons, too, belong to this meta-historical category, yet this is
highly problematic in understanding what was actually going on
and what the Smithsons were aiming for. Despite all the references
25 This is not a new thing to say; and quotations of recent years, the questions who was this ‘avant-
when browsing the literature
regarding these questions, one garde’, in what contexts did they actually work, what coalitions
generally finds references to
Peter Bürger and his classic work were build and so forth and so on, are too often overlooked or
Theory of the Avant-Garde of 1974 neglected. In architecture discourse, analysis and synthesis
as a new beginning of understan-
ding the various practices of the generally tends to be geared at an historiography of abstract
twentieth century avant-garde,
still this remains problematic in ideas, concepts and the larger paradigmatic frameworks so to
the sense that one sometimes
implicitly, sometimes expressly speak, and not so much on the actual practices.25 Naturally, (some
keeps assuming there is a unified of) the protagonists would often claim an avant-garde position
project of the various avant-gar-
des. The latest research by Mark for themselves. Giedion considered CIAM an avant-garde, and
Crinson and Claire Zimmerman,
who also use ‘neo-avant-garde’ Van Eyck likened the whole collection of modern artists and poets
to conceptually frame the art and
design work under investigation to be ‘the great gang’ whose multiplicitous, yet unified tradition
is even more confusing I find. he had set out to continue. However, not only were these so-called
Their otherwise well researched
anthology of essays Neo-avant- post-war avant-garde groups far from unequivocal about their
garde and Postmodern, Postwar
Architecture in Britain and Be- goals and ambitions, the structuring of the history of these groups
yond, The Yale Center for British
Art / The Paul Mellon Centre as a polarisation between a progressive, iconoclastic avant-garde
for Studies in British Art / Yale of young turks on the one hand, and conformist mass culture or
University Press, New Haven /
London, 2010, seems to ‘antedate’ established high culture elite on the other is most unhelpful in
the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ to the
1950s, whereas in the architecture determining the positions and cultural formations at stake, and
discourse this term of Bürger
was usually reserved for the hence, the value of the historical production, also with regard to
experiments of the late 1960s both the discourse of the time and the current one. In most cases,
and 1970s, especially Aldo Rossi
and Tendenza in Italy, and Peter the so-called post-war avant-gardes were working within the then
Eisenman and the New York Five
in the USA. An illuminating recently established infrastructure of art institutes, museums,
discussion of the reciprocal
conceptualizations of the terms government organisations and other institutional clients, perhaps
avant-garde, modernism and the more from the periphery of such establishment than from its very
everyday, in particular vis-à-vis
domesticity and bourgeois cul- centre, but from within nevertheless.26
ture, can be found with Hilde Hey-
nen, ‘Modernity and Domesticity:
Tensions and Contradictions’, in:
Hilde Heynen, Gülsüm Baydar For instance, unpacking the web of exchanges of the second half
(eds.), Negotiating Domesticity. of the twentieth century, in which the Smithsons operated, one
Spatial Productions of Gender in
Modern Architecture, Routledge, observes the central role of what one might call the professional
Abingdon / New York, 2005,
pp. 1-29. middle classes, but also the larger political framework of the
26 In the case of the Independent welfare state and the rise of the so-called post-industrial society.
Group Anne Massey and Penny
Sparke have made this crystal The rethinking of domestic, family life is one of the main, recurring
clear, even though their criticism
of the received myth of the interests of the Smithsons, it is not quite the discursive trope for
Independent Group is still hardly
referenced: Anne Massey and
iconoclast radicals. An historiography that departs from the avant-
Penny Sparke, ‘The Myth of the garde assumption categorizing the Smithsons as belonging to the
Independent Group’, in: Block,
nr. 10, 1985, pp. 48-56. so-called ‘angry young men’ of the time will completely overlook
dvdh10PRINT.indd 34 21-04-13 16:56

this aspect. The garden parties and camping trips that one comes
across in the Team 10 discourse for instance, are far removed from
quintessential avant-garde exchanges between individuals who
gather together in bars and studio spaces, plotting socio-aesthetic
revolutions.27
Capturing the Everyday
As mentioned, the focus on the triangulation of the everyday,

the city and dwelling has been chosen, since it defines a specific
27 The one essay I know of, which
field that is constituent of the tradition of modern architecture.
critically questions the implicit As will be demonstrated, this focus is useful in both situating
and unspoken assumptions that
the avant-garde represents the the Smithsons within that tradition and understanding the
‘other’, what is ‘different’ and
almost by matter of course the ways they reconstructed this tradition. The triangulation of the
politically correct or ‘progressive’
is by Mary McLeod, ‘Everyday and
everyday, city and dwelling encompasses such other key issues
“Other” Spaces’, in: Debra Cole- of the modern tradition as well: technology, mobility, identity,
man, Elizabeth Danze and Carol
Henderson (eds.), Architecture mass culture and consumer society. The everyday – spectre of the
and Feminism, Princeton Archi-
tectural Press, 1996, pp. 1-37. condition of modernity – is the central notion within the proposed
Concerning the issue of class,
there are other authors who cri-
triangulation, because it is source and inspiration for architectural
tically mentioned this, either the invention, for the Smithsons, as well as for the larger part of the
way class is used to (falsely) por-
tray the discourse (Penny Sparke tradition of modern architecture, while the city and the home are
and Anne Massey), or to criticize
the design (Peter Eisenman when the quintessential sites where the everyday is to be found and
discussing Robin Hood Gardens
for Architectural Design and
observed, and where the interrelations between architecture and
Oppositions). Recently, Hadas the everyday practices are consistently renegotiated. However,
Steiner also pointed out the
importance of family life to the putting the everyday central is not without consequences for the
Smithsons’ ideas on housing
and urban design; see ‘Life at writing of architectural theory and history itself, with regard to
the Treshold’, in: October nr. 136,
Spring 2011, pp. 133-155.
the work of the Smithsons, but also with the critics who tried to
28 Michel de Certeau, The theorize the everyday.
Writing of History, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1988,
originally published as L’écriture The French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau is one of the
de l’histoire, 1975; The Practice
of Everyday Life, University of foremost writers regarding the unresolved challenge posed to any
California Press, Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1984, originally researcher who attempts to investigates the unwieldy realm of
published as L’invention du quoti-
dien, Arts de faire, volume 1, 1980 the everyday. In his study The Practice of Everyday Life De Certeau
(a first English edition errone- opposed any practice of writing that overlooked the inherent
ously mentions 1974 as pointed
out to me by Ben Highmore); the complexity and contradiction of the everyday, while smoothing out
research project on which the
two volumes of L’invention du the accidents and incidents that come with everyday practices.
quotidien were based, ran from
1974-1978. De Certeau’s work represents a special example here, reflecting
29 Michel de Certeau, The Prac- on the two fields of historiography and the everyday. While working
tice of Everyday Life, University
of California Press, Berkeley and on his research project for The Practice of Everyday Life De Certeau
Los Angeles, 1984, especially the
last chapter ‘Indeterminate’ is
published The Writing of History, in 1975.28 De Certeau contrasted
most lucid, see pp.199-203; if not the ‘casual’ everyday with modernist functionalism.29 He defined
mentioned otherwise, all quotes
are taken from this chapter. ‘casual’ time, which makes up the realm of the everyday, as
dvdh10PRINT.indd 35 21-04-13 16:56

the opaque, ‘dark’ other of the rationalized, transparent time
concept of ‘functionalist technocracy’. He opposed a functionalist
historiography that would render the ‘incongruities of the other’
as a ‘transparent organicity of a scientific intelligibility’ by finding,
or rather constructing, ‘correlations’, ‘causes’, ‘effects’, or ‘serial
continuities’. According to De Certeau, historians should try
and resist the demand for a rationalized history, or as he put it
the ‘requirement of covering up the obscenity of indeterminacy
with the production of (fictive) “reason”.’ Therefore, De Certeau
called against the erasure of the so-called ‘darkness’ of the casual
time. Yet, any scholar knows this is quite an impossible demand.
Despite the inherent ‘vagueness’ of language, academic, scholarly
writing remains not only an act of construction and synthesis, by
nature it belongs to the project of Enlightenment. No matter what
method or procedure one might use to approach the everyday, its
accidents, the lacunae and what De Certeau called casual time.
Indeterminacy will be mapped, ruptures will be circumscribed, and
gaps bridged – no matter how pluralist the epistemology, or how
multiplicitous the points of view taken. Still, a writing practice
that tries to account for the opacity of the everyday might result
in a different kind of history, a historiography that is not a unified
narrative any more, and of course, this was what De Certeau was
after, a different practice of history writing, through which the
‘murmuring voices’ of the everyday might be heard, telling the tale
of a ‘living and “mythical” practice of the city’.30
Having this in mind, how then to approach a subject like the

Smithsons and their ideas on the everyday, and the city and
dwelling as the chief sites of the everyday? The conflict between
the everyday and the practice of historiography immediately arises
here, and not only as a theoretical issue, for instance how the
everyday represented a better or more rational functionalism to
the Smithsons than the banal functionalism of post-war CIAM
and building practice in the UK. The conflict between the everyday
and historiography also concerns methodology in quite a practical
30 One might also point to Man- way, since as already noted, much of the legacy of Alison and
fredo Tafuri’s work of the same
period, who – with regard to the Peter Smithson is still part of living history. The many, often
history of modern architecture
in particular – would call for the
contradictory anecdotes of surviving contemporaries break up any
demystification of history, while attempt at constructing a coherent account of their work and life.
re-defining historiography itself
as criticism geared to the precise Anecdotes are the nagging irritants of historians and theorists.
rendering of the ‘antitheses, the
frontal clash of the positions and One could say that they belong to the everyday counter-tactics
the accentuation of contradicti-
ons.’ Manfredo Tafuri, Theories
against the institutionalized, academic practices of writing.
and History of Architecture, Har- Anecdotes are hardly verifiable, they are the small myths with a
per & Row, New York, 1980, p. 237;
original Italian edition 1976. life of their own. They travel faster than any proper archive-based
dvdh10PRINT.indd 36 21-04-13 16:56

study, and without leaving traces, they communicate ideas and
concepts. They improperly establish reputations and confirm or
refute the values at stake. And in so doing, they create invisible
complicity and fleeting communities.31
It is also in these anecdotes that one finds the various, competing

narratives surrounding the legacy of Alison and Peter Smithson,
depending on the source and agenda at stake. Some see the
Smithsons as champions of an accelerated modernism, as
uncompromising avant-gardists, or as forerunners of Pop
Art aesthetics, whereas others liken them to be careful and
scrupulous thinkers, proto-ecologists with a strong inclination to
phenomenological attitudes. There are many stories about their
snobbishness, how they would offend their opponents, how ugly
their buildings really are, or how awful they behaved toward staff
and builders. But at the same time there are also stories how they
cherished their employees and saw them as extended family, how
thoughtful their approach to detailing and construction, stories
about the lack of pretense, about the careful and precise wording
of their ideas, and so forth and so on.32
31 The anecdote is actually a And still, it is only through these anecdotes and personalised
central component to New His-
toricism and has been theorised stories, the ‘indeterminate fables ... articulated on the
there; see Catherine Gallagher metaphorical practices and stratified places’ as De Certeau put it,
and Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Coun-
terhistory and the Anecdote’, that one gets a taste of the specifics of past events and the people
in: Gallagher and Greenblatt,
Practicing New Historicism, involved. In the case of the Smithsons too, it is through these
2000, pp. 49-74.
brief narratives, ever shifting, never quite true, sometimes simply
32 On the side it should be noted
that ‘living history’, here, is much fictional, that one starts to grasp the couple’s interests, attitudes
more complicated than the sheer
phenomenon of the memories of and ambitions, and the many ways they were, and still are viewed.
survivors. I myself got acquain-
ted with Peter Smithson while
It is also through such anecdotes that the Smithsons and their
working on the project for the work and ideas are re-invented as it were, and once again, become
exhibition and book Alison and
Peter Smithson – from the House part of contemporary discourse and design practice.
of the Future to a house of today.
I only met Alison once, when I
was a student, and then only brie-
fly, at the presentation of Team 10
In any account of the Smithsons’ history, among those ‘stratified
Meetings at Delft University in places’ London would be most prominent, especially the
1991. She wore a large, elegant
hat, and incredibly high, red heels Smithsons’ own homes, where they held office as well. Coming
for the occasion. After Peter
Smithson died a new phase of from the north of England they chose to pursue their career in the
commitment started by getting to
know the family, and subsequent-
British capital, briefly employed by the school building department
ly, by working together to get of the London County Council before setting up their own firm:
projects realized. A final remark
illuminating this impossible rela- first they lived and worked in Doughty Street, rooming with their
tion between researcher and his
object of study, might concern the friend Theo Crosby, and then in the burrough of Chelsea and South
uncomfortable feeling one gets
when one discovers one’s own
Kensington in Limerston Street, in Priory Walk, and finally from
letters (as unimportant as they 1970 onward, at Cato Lodge in Gilston Road. Crosby, it should be
are) in the archive one is combing
through. noted, was of crucial importance to the Smithsons’ career. He and
dvdh10PRINT.indd 37 21-04-13 16:56

Peter struck an immediate friendship when they met in Florence,
in Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana in the summer of 1948 as
Crosby recalled.33 Not only did they share flats, Crosby was a most
sociable person, who built quite a network in a very brief period
of time and would soon become an editor of Architectural Design
under Monica Pidgeon from 1953 onward.
Throughout their life the Smithsons worked from their home.

Allegedly one reason for this was that Alison didn’t like
commuting. The office was deliberately kept small, as to be able
to handle one big project at a time. Their practice was quite
unconventional for an architects’ firm; not only was it far removed
from any kind of commercial ambition, but even job acquisition
when work had halted, never seemed quite the natural thing to do.
The Smithsons rather made books or engaged in competitions
in such periods of relative quiet.
A special place for the Smithsons was their weekend home in

Upper Lawn in the countryside of Wiltshire – as a weekend home
not quite a place of the everyday, but as a place for retreat still
a locus of the ‘indeterminate’, for reading and writing, reflection
and speculation, in short a ‘restorative place in nature’ as
Alison Smithson called it. Although the Smithsons were very
strict regarding the separation between private family life and
professional life, the Upper Lawn weekend home and their life
there became a major point of reference for the couple in their later
writings on dwelling and its everyday patterns.34
The first, chronologically ordered, overview of the Smithsons’

work was compiled by Jeremy Baker in 1966, for Arena, then the
journal of the AA-school. It gives a succinct biographical summary
which has been republished in later books by and about the couple.
Alison and Peter Smithson were quite characteristically allowed
to insert some retrospective comments, which they also did in the
case of this biographical entry to the overview:
‘Sep 18 23
33 Theo Crosby, ‘Night Thoughts
of a Faded Utopia’, in: David Peter Denham Smithson
Robbins (ed.), The Independent
Group: Postwar Britain and the Born Stockton-on-Tees.
Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1990, pp. 197-199. Educated at Holy Trinity HG School, Stockton-on-Tees; The Grammar
34 In particular the 1986 publica- School, Stockton-on-Tees.
tion should be mentioned here,
which is completely devoted to Began at the Architectural School, University of Durham, Newcastle-
their weekend home: Alison and
Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn:
upon-Tyne 39-42. Interrupted by service, finally as a Lieutenant, for
Solar Pavilion, Folly, Edicions eighteen months in the Royal Engineers and then eighteen months
de la Universitat Politècnica de
Catalunya, Barcelona, 1986. in India and Burma in Queen Victoria’s Own Madras Sappers and
dvdh10PRINT.indd 38 21-04-13 16:56

Miners. Returned to Newcastle 45-48. Awarded a travel scholarship to
study Swedish housing. Acted as a studio assistant during final year
at Newcastle when studying town planning, meeting Alison who was
in the fourth year. Awarded Diploma with Distinction. Went for a year
to Royal Academy Schools, London 48-49. Worked at LCC Schools
Division, London, 49-50, designing Hunstanton in the evening.
Jun 22 28
Alison Margaret Gill
Born Sheffield.
Educated Church of England School, Sunderland; George Watson’s
Ladies’ College Edinburgh; South Shields High School for Girls.
Continued at Architectural School, University of Durham,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 44-49. Met the aforementioned studio
assistant. Awarded Diploma with Distinction. Worked with Peter
at LCC Schools Division, 49-50.’
Then the inserted comments follow, a mix of biographical

anecdote, ambition and moral ground:
‘Jan 04 66
We both came from street-built towns. Industrial towns.
There was no modern architecture around except that new school at
Richmond by Dennis Clarke Hall.
There were two buildings which we always showed to visitors –
Durham Cathedral and the Roman Wall. The Cathedral is amazing:
it succeeds on all levels, i.e., I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t
impressed by it, however well/badly educated he was.
I (PDS) wasn’t brought up to be an architect. If I was taken to see
churches or museums, [it] was for literary, not visual reasons.
There was still this self-improvement atmosphere. But the things
people admired they never attempted to get. They never saw a
discrepancy between liking a Dutch Interior and ugly knives and
forks. You need some sort of integration of education and all normal
personal decisions. We’re not saying it’s easy: we’ve made it work in
Tisbury but not so well in London.
(AMS) My father was Principal of South Shields Art School. He had
been taught by such people as Letherby [sic] at the Royal College.
My background was always that of an art/technical school, touching
on architecture and art through the training and background of both
my parents; and on building, the printing trades, and shipbuilding
(the draughtsmen gave us chance to get on to the main ships in
35 Jeremy Baker (ed.), ‘A Smith-
son File’, special issue of Arena,
for breaking up on the Tyne or the training-sailing ships). I was an
The Architectural Association only child, so was Peter.’ 35
Journal, Volume 81, nr. 899, Febru-
ary 1966, p. 180.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 39 21-04-13 16:56

Naturally, some of the key ‘stratified places’ appear in this
36 Other places of education description: next to those of their places of birth, their weekend
would include the London AA-
school, and Bath University. Both home in Tisbury and in London (then in 1966 at 2 Priory Walk, just
schools produced publications opposite of the Gilston Road house they moved to in 1971), but
commemorating the Smithsons’
teachings: Helena Webster (ed.) also places of war and places of education.36 Some places might
Modernism without Rhetoric.
Essays on the Work of Alison and be added here, for instance Alison’s stay in Edinburgh during
Peter Smithson, Academy Edi-
tions, London 1997, and Pamela World War II, where she was sent to live with her grandmother, and
Johnston (ed.), ‘Architecture where she started to collect images and advertisements from the
is not made with the brain’: The
labour of Alison and Peter Smith- American journals that were sent to her grandmother.37
son, Architectural Association,
London, 2005. Many other places
could be pointed out here, among
others the ILAUD Summer The places around which most of the ‘fables’ revolve in current
Schools, organized by Giancarlo historiography – and that are not mentioned here in this 1966 intro
De Carlo, resulting in the publi-
cations of Italian Thoughts, 1993, text – include those of the Independent Group meetings of artists,
Italienische Gedanken, 1996, and
Italienische Gedanken weiterge- critics and architects at the London Institute of Contemporary
dacht, 2001; UPC Barcelona, re-
sulting in the already referenced Arts, which would lay the foundations for the New Brutalism and
publication Upper Lawn, 1986 and British Pop Art, and of Team 10, the group of European architects
Delft University of Technology,
resulting in AS in DS, 1983 and that abandoned CIAM, in order to try and revitalize the discourse
much later Team 10 Meetings,
1991. of modern architecture.38 The LCC Architects’ Office was another
37 The until now most extensive such place: ‘a home from home’ as Alison described it: ‘for the first
account of the war experiences
of the Smithsons can be found in job of the provincial in London it gave short hours, no real burden,
Beatriz Colomina, ‘Friends of the
Future: A Conversation with Pe- leaving time for floodlit evenings, theatre queues, competitions’.39
ter Smithson’, in: October nr. 94,
Fall 2000, pp. 3-30.
38 For an account of the history It is through those ‘indeterminate fables’ that one might
of the Independent Group, see:
David Robbins (ed.), The Inde- provisionally define the Smithsons’ idiosyncracies, or what one
pendent Group: Postwar Britain
and the Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT
could call the Smithson-ness of the Smithsons – may be in a
Press, Cambridge MA, 1990, and similar vein as the ‘woodness of wood’ or the ‘sandiness of sand’
Anne Massey, The Independent
Group. Modernism and Mass Cul- the Smithsons were after when they defined their ideas for the
ture in Britain 1945-59, Manches-
ter University Press, Manchester, New Brutalism and the As Found-aesthetics in the 1950s.40
1995; for the history of Team 10
see: Max Risselada and Dirk
van den Heuvel (eds.), Team 10.
In Search of a Utopia of the
Present 1953-81, NAi Publishers,
Rotterdam, 2005. The anecdotes
naturally come up in the many Two People Writing, Observing and Reflecting
interviews with the Smithsons
and contemporaries. The one who
made most extensively use of oral Part of this Smithson-ness is the couple’s extensive writing
history would be Mark Girou-
ard for his biography of James practice, the way they developed historiography as a means for
Stirling, Big Jim. The Life and
Work of James Stirling, Chatto & transforming and controlling the architectural discourse, as
Windus, London, 1998, especially
the chapter ‘London in the 50s’ is
well as the way they consciously positioned themselves within
worth reading. the tradition of modern architecture. Early 1970s the Smithsons
39 I. Chippendale (Alison
Smithson), ‘The LCC Was Our would reach the zenith of their fame. Peter Eisenman claimed
Uncle’, in: Architectural Design, that to him the couple ‘represent an intellectual and ideological
September 1965, p. 428
40 Alison and Peter Smith- position, confirmed in a weight of writing, polemic, and criticism
son, ‘The “As Found” and the
“Found”’, in: David Robbins (ed.),
which is unparallelled since World War II’ and Kenneth Frampton
The Independent Group: Postwar wrote that the Smithsons’ book publication Without Rhetoric
Britain and the Aesthetics of
Plenty, 1990, p. 201. from 1973 was to be classified under that rare kind of essayistic
dvdh10PRINT.indd 40 21-04-13 16:56

writing as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture
or Adolf Loos’ polemics.41
The writings of Alison and Peter Smithson were in service of

many things at the same time. Prominent among those were
the self-fashioning of their identity as architects, including the
consistently explaining and propounding of their work and ideas, as
well as their opinions about the role and position of the architect
in society-at-large. Next to such discursive functions one should
mention the consistent exchange between the practice of writing
and the design and building practice of the couple, two practices
that not always ran parallel. The writing could either reflect on
earlier building and design production, but also speculate on new
concepts yet to be tested in the actual building practice.
As a conclusion to the 1993 booklet Italian Thoughts, which brings

together a first series of texts produced in the context of the
summer schools as organized by their Team 10 friend Giancarlo
De Carlo, the Smithsons wrote a brief piece on their ‘set of mind’
explaining the reciprocity between design and writing:
‘Our work does not follow an even ideological track; the essays (...)
are a necessary, integral, part of any understanding of our activities.
The jumps, the re-appearances of earlier ideas often occur for
chance reasons (...).
This pattern of persistance has been clouded by what appears to be
a characteristic of the human brain. The brain seems to have a new
insight; but frequently this turns out to be an old insight which has
been newly arrived at in an entirely new set of circumstances, and
through different thought processes.
Then there is the persistance of habit; the habit of writing down
one’s insights, and the habit of writing ahead, putting down on paper
the theoretical underpinning of what one will try to do next. We
have continued, in a way, a student existance of alternating essay
writing and drawing work ... essays which are consequent of the
insights gained during the previous period of construction ... more
essays as the work load drops, less essays when the heavy load of
construction drawings and the supervision of construction is being
carried. Or seen another way, we are entirely traditional to a certain
sort of architect where reflection and construction go hand-in-hand:
41 Peter Eisenman in: Architec- to Francesco di Giorgio Martini; to Le Corbusier above all others.’ 42
tural Design, September 1972,
p. 592; Kenneth Frampton in Op-
positions, nr. 6, 1976, pp. 105-107.
Such self-conscious and self-explanatory remarks can be
‘Set of Mind’, in: Alison and found at many places in the Smithsons’ publications. In the
Peter Smithson, Italian Thoughts,
Stockholm, 1993, pp. 100-103. introductions to Urban Structuring they speak of a ‘record of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 41 21-04-13 16:56

a search’, from which they did not:
‘eliminate (...) conclusions and opinions which we do not now
regard as completely valid. It is felt to be more important to leave in
apparent contradictions than to eliminate steps which are necessary
to an understanding of the processes and intentions of the whole.’ 43
And as part of the opening lines of Ordinariness and Light we read:

‘It is a tumultuous rag-bag of a text, naive, embarrassingly rhetorical,
but stuffed with good things.’ 44
The Smithsons were uncommonly aware of the function of books

and writings as part of the discourse, how ideas travel by way of
books, not just in terms of space and culture, but also in terms of
time, generations and centuries. Books are like ‘wrapped gifts’
waiting to be unwrapped and once again inspire students as well
as working architects. In his ‘Three Generations’ essay Peter
Smithsons remembered:
‘Our own alignment with the modern movement was (...)
instantaneous but not by direct contact; it reached us through
books: for P.S. at the end of the nineteen ‘thirties, there was a small,
almost read-out copy of Gropius’ The New Architecture and the
Bauhaus in our architecture school’s library in Newcastle upon Tyne;
for A.S., at the beginning of the nineteen ‘forties, the University
library’s book on Bauhaus graphics, the school library’s Cahiers and
Oeuvre Complète of Le Corbusier.’ 45
And Smithson extensively further explained how ideas traveled

and how books and writing are crucial in this respect:
‘The architects of the early Renaissance published their books
with difficulty: Francesco di Giorgio’s were not printed until 1967;
Serlio’s waited around in Italy and France and Book VI: Domestic
Architecture had to wait until 1978. Our own experience from
crystalization of an idea, through completion of the written work,
to a printed book, has extended to a twenty year span: with this
delay, the work when finally published seems curiously inert for its
messages had already passed fresh across the generations in the
artisan way each generation speaks to the other ... through the single
Urban Structuring. Studies of image half understood; the thought half heard; the detail seen in
Alison and Peter Smithson, Studio passing on a site or drawing board; the detail seen in a magazine
Vista, London / Reinhold Publi-
shing Corporation, New York, studied and reflected upon. But the published work is only dormant:
1967, p. 8.
responses and past speculations when printed become an artifact
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 11. and as a “wrapped gift”, remain to be discovered, unwrapped
Italian Thoughts, 1993, p. 11. in wonder, treasured and interpreted again and again by later
46 Idem, pp. 14-15. generations.’ 46
dvdh10PRINT.indd 42 21-04-13 16:56

Clearly, the autobiographical is never far away in the Smithsons’
work, especially from the mid-1960s onward the autobiographical
seems to become an inevitable element of the writings. It is very
hard to pinpoint the exact range of this quality, but it is impossible
not to notice this while going through the books, articles and other
texts, looking at the competition entries and most importantly,
their designs for houses. This might be partly due to the fact that
the Smithsons are two people communicating with each other as
much as with an audience, as some critics have suggested. In their
case, to write is also to negotiate and produce the territory they
hold and share together, and within their relationship probably also
the territory they held individually.
The couple as author is hardly problematized in architectural

historiography. Who did exactly what, where and when? And what
would it mean to distinguish between the two persona that make
up the one couple? The Smithsons published as much under their
own name, as they did as a couple. Their design work and the major
book publications, especially the anthologies, however, are always
published under the banner of their collaborative efforts: Alison
and Peter Smithson, and always in that order, and never Peter
and Alison. Spanish-American historian Beatriz Colomina is one
of the few, who has put this question of the double author on the
table in her essay ‘Couplings’, discussing the Smithsons work and
writing practice. Yet, the inherent methodological issues that come
with investigating the work of a double author remain unresolved.47
The Smithsons were among the first husband-and-wife

collaborations that have become common practice in architectural
design during the latter half of the twentieth century. Charles
and Ray Eames are probably the most famous partnership in this
respect, albeit that they are not exclusively architecs but rather
designers. Another ‘power couple’ of an earlier generation was
formed by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. But it is probably Alison,
who was the first female architect to be recognized as a force
of her own and to gain an international reputation during her
lifetime while being one of two equals in a partnership.48 Only
47 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Couplings’ after Alison’s death Peter Smithson remarked a few things about
in: Oase, nr. 51, ‘Re-arrange-
ments. A Smithsons Celebra- their collaboration. This is what he said in conversation with
tion’, pp. 20-33. students of the Arizona State University in Phoenix, responding
48 Still, it should also be noted
this is not undisputed; especially to the straightforward question ‘How would you describe your
in the oral history, talking with
contemporaries and with colle-
collaboration with Alison?’:
agues, I found that there is a de- ‘It was friendly enmity. We were very reciprocal, each other half.
finite desire to question Alison’s
reputation and her contribution. Her talents and mine were completely different. I think it’s a normal
dvdh10PRINT.indd 43 21-04-13 16:56

thing with partnerships. Even the family side was not alike, but
reciprocal. The books with Monacelli Press are an example of this
reciprocity. It is not like the Eames’s book, where the complete list of
their assistants is running along the top of the page for each job. We
don’t have a record like that, but every drawing is attributed, and it says
49 Catherine Spellman and Karl whether Alison or I was the lead architect. On a big project we would
Unglaub (eds.), Peter Smithson:
Conversations with Students. both work on it, yet someone was making the major contribution; some-
A Space for Our Generation,
Princeton Architectural Press, body invented the format and became the lead. It is not a conscious act
New York, 2005 p. 29; a couple
of pages further in the book, on
– as you are developing a project, someone takes the lead.49 ’
page 46, Peter Smithson adds:
‘The difficult thing is explaining
the reciprocal nature of Alison’s After a while, as a researcher one gets familiar with those
and my talents. We were totally
different, professionally. That’s differences and the reciprocities at play – Peter writing in a more
fairly normal in a partnership.
In an English public school, the
aphoristic way, Alison more narrative, and both with undeniably
school has the children throug- literary ambition. Also in the design work the handwriting becomes
hout the day and is imprinting
them with things beyond the readable. There are a couple of instances where the reciprocity
home. It is the same when you
live and work with somebody, you becomes most lucid. For instance, the two entries for the Japanese
are with them twenty-four hours
a day. It becomes a question of
Shinkenchiku competition of 1977 with Peter Cook as juror. Both
looking and reflecting on the no- Alison and Peter submitted a proposal. Alison presented an
tions of the other. You have time
for it. With all the social things, urban ‘pad’ that was intended as ‘an appliance apartment for the
like being prepared to do without
money and having the children in commuting man’ calling it ‘Cookie’s Nook’ while re-inventing once
ordinary schools, we were similar.
We did not want to have to do
again the fluid form language that she had devised for the House
something just to earn money to of the Future of 1956, and which was to be so influential for the
keep going.’
Another informative example re- Archigram members. Peter on the other hand submitted an urban
garding both the writing practice
of the Smithsons and the nature version of his entry of the year before, the suburban ‘Yellow House
of the collaboration between
Alison and Peter Smithson is the
at an Intersection’, which was awarded a first prize by the juror of
interview Kester Rattenbury had that particular edition of the competition, namely Richard Meier.
with Peter: ‘Think of it as a farm!
Exhibitions, books, buildings. An The 1977 entry by Peter was ‘A House with Two Gantries’ and is
interview with Peter Smithson’,
published in: Kester Rattenbury explicitly described as being autobiographical ‘intended for a man
(ed.) , This is not Architecture.
Media Constructions, Routledge,
like myself who sometimes wishes to put things away that he is
London, 2002, pp. 91-98. not at the moment using’.50 This design is much more Miesian
50 The house designs are
documented in The Charged than Alison’s submission; it maintains an urbane, neo-classicist
Void: Architecture, including brief outlook, albeit in a transformed language with diagonal braces
descriptions: see pp. 394-395 and
419-421. in the street facade which go back to the facade design of the
51 There are many more instan-
ces one could mention; take the
Smithsons’ realised project for the Oxford St Hilda’s College of
design for the facades of the the late 1960s.
competition entry for the Lüt-
zowstrasse in Berlin of 1980. The
north facade was done by Alison
in a fairy-tale like fashion with a Apart from the ‘reciprocities’ at work between husband and
lively pattern of coloured, window
shutters, whereas Peter drew the
wife, this instance is quite fantastic in the sense that it is also
screen-like south facade, which a demonstration of the reciprocities between the generations:
again reads as a reworking of
Miesian repetition with an added Peter Cook having had Peter Smithson as his teacher, and having
flavour of traditional Japanese
architecture. The competition was appropriated and further elaborated Alison’s form language of
part of the IBA Berlin (Interna-
tionale Bau Ausstellung Berlin);
the House of the Future. Yet, in this case, the ‘mother’ is not quite
eventually Vittorio Gregotti and acknowledged, only the ‘father’ was awarded with an honourable
others would build a housing
block on the available site. mention by Cook.51
dvdh10PRINT.indd 44 21-04-13 16:56

Finally, it should be mentioned that the autobiographical, familiar
and personal are also ways to address and integrate in a most
natural way the everyday into their work and thinking. Most
evidently, in the case of their Upper Lawn weekend home and the
book Alison Smithson compiled based on their life there.52 But
this is only one way of attending to the everyday as can be found
in the Smithsons’ oeuvre. Throughout their texts and projects one
finds a consistent reflection on and critique of the way everyday
patterns evolve under the influence of the ongoing processes
of modernization, and how architects might respond to such
transformation. As such, the body of work of the couple represents
a rich register of possibilities for attending to the everyday
patterns of modern life, both in terms of media and in terms of
design strategies. With regard to writing on the everyday, or
inserting the everyday into the architectural discourse, one comes
across the by now most familiar methods of approaching the topic:
the anecdote again, most notably in Team 10 Meetings (1991), the
diary is used as a format for the Upper Lawn publication, mapping,
serial photography and an écriture automatique are tried in
AS in DS (1983), a ‘stream-of-consciousness’-like writing approach
in the one published novel by Alison, A Portrait of the Female Mind
as a Young Girl (1966), collage can be found in Imprint of India
(1994), and drawing up lists would be one more method used by
the Smithsons among others for their ‘Criteria for Mass Housing’
(1957, 1960), and so forth and so on.
From the abovementioned examples it becomes clear that Alison,

in particular, must have been acutely aware of the possibilities
and implications of the various methods of writing, also with
regard to the limits of capturing the everyday and conveying lived
experience. For instance, the brief introduction to her ‘record of
Team 10 meetings’ mentions:
‘In this carrying text I will not be dealing so much with
52 Alison and Peter Smithson, Team 10’s ideas, as with people and places ... that is,
Upper Lawn, 1986.
attempting to make events come alive in the mind of readers:
53 Alison Smithson (ed.),
Team 10 Meetings, Rizzoli, anyone who hates Proust or find the Iliad’s list of ships boring,
New York, 1991, p. 17. The Proust
reference is of course to some will not enjoy themselves.’ 53
of his subtitles of the novels
in his series A la Recherche du
Temps Perdu: ‘names and places’, And in AS in DS. An Eye on the Road we read:
‘places and names’; apparently
Smithson liked to think of her ‘In the original introduction I tried to describe the recording
record of the people and places of
Team 10 as an analogy to Proust’s of the seeing as being – as near as intention could make it –
way of writing and concept of
memory – the reference to lists in
as faithful as the pen of a seismograph. A decade later I stumble
the Iliad is probably clear enough, on J.J. Rousseau stating in 1776-8: “I shall perform upon
although much more plain than
the one to Proust. myself the sort of operation that physicists conduct upon the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 45 21-04-13 16:56

air in order to discover its daily fluctuations. I shall take the
barometer readings of my soul, and by doing this accurately
and repeatedly ...”’ 54
For the Smithsons to attend to the everyday is to find ways of

registering in the first place. It is in this sense that the writing of
the Smithsons can be seen as a form of survey. To attend to the
everyday becomes a project of closely watching, documenting
and archiving in such a way that the everyday and its evolving
patterns and practices may appear. However, this survey might
have been seismographic as Smithson suggested – an écriture
automatique produced from within – the acual publications were
cleverly edited books: ‘sensibility primers’ as the Smithsons
would say. AS in DS is a mix of short programmatic statements,
comments and long descriptions, serial photographs, sketches
and fragments of road maps. This layering of texts and images is a
technique that is characteristic of publications by the Smithsons.
The documentation of their life in their weekend home Upper
Lawn: Solar Pavilion, Folly (1986) uses the same techniques.
But the Team 10 Primer (1962, 1964 and 1968), and lesser known
publications such as The Euston Arch (1968) or The Shift (1982)
might serve as perfect examples as well.
These examples as well as others from the Smithsons’ writing

54 Alison Smithson, AS in DS. production highlight the fact that to consistently attend to the
An Eye on the Road, Delft Univer-
sity Press, 1983; reprinted in 2001 everyday is a practice fraught with paradox and contradiction.
by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden,
with an afterword by Christian An insider’s perspective is always coupled with an outsider’s
Sumi, p. 16; interestingly enough, one. At some point, exoticism and nostalgia inevitably creep in,
as can be deducted from the
dates mentioned by Smithson, whilst surveying and mapping the everyday bring up the impossible
the reference is to Rousseau’s
‘Reveries of a Solitary Walker’, question of the formal qualities of the everyday. It is this very
1776-78, posthumously published
in 1782 (Rousseau died in 1778). formalization necessary to describe the everyday and its plural
One should read this interest practices, that threatens to erase the very qualities one celebrates
in movement next to Peter
Smithson’s walking guides for and seeks to salvage.55
Bath, Oxford and Cambridge,
written more or less in the vein of
Ruskin’s ‘Mornings in Florence’,
Geddes’ walks in London (in ‘Our In addition, with De Certeau’s remarks on historiography and
Social Inheritance’), or Pevsner’s the everyday in mind, the very functionality of the attending to
exhaustive series of guidebooks
to English architecture. They the everyday should be considered here as well. The first one is
were first published in Architec-
tural Design, October 1969 and the already noted collection of discursive functions including the
June 1976; Bath. Walks within the
Walls was republished in 1971 revitalization of the discourse of modern architecture and the
by Adams & Dart, Bath. Smithsons’ self-fashioning. The second function is more specific
55 See also Ben Highmore,
Everyday Life and Cultural The- to the Smithsons’ architectural agenda, to seek what they called
ory. An Introduction, Routledge,
London and New York, 2002, in
the heroic and the poetic, and which will be discussed later
particular the chapter on De Cer- in the dissertation. For now, two key quotes might summarize
teau ‘Michel de Certeau’s poetics
of everyday life’, pp. 145-173. this attitude best. The brief and paradoxical ‘things need to
dvdh10PRINT.indd 46 21-04-13 16:56

be heroic and ordinary at the same time’ is one of the couple’s
most appealing statements.56
The other key quote comes from the New Brutalist debate of
the 1950’s: ‘Brutalism,’ the Smithsons said, ‘tries to face up to
a mass-production society, and drag a rough poetry out of the
confused and powerful forces which are at work.’ 57
The Extra-Ordinary Couple
Attending to the everyday as a source for poetic vision and as an

impetus for discursive renewal is among the key characteristics of
the modern architecture discourse, even while it doesn’t belong to
the modern tradition exclusively. The case of Adolf Loos presents
a great example, just as Le Corbusier. They combined their
passionate argument for re-inventing the architectural discipline
with an exceptional and polemical attentiveness to those everyday
artefacts and phenomena which in their eyes encapsulated key
aspects of modern life. Writing about the media, exhibitions,
fashion, homes and interiors, they brought up anything they
thought to be useful in clarifying their argument – from chairs and
chests to tableware and light fixtures, from cars and aeroplanes
to sports wear, suitcases and other travel equipment. This
peculiar tradition fitted Alison and Peter Smithson like a glove.
Writing about Braun product design, Philips light bulbs, children’s
stories or such mundane things as cupboard doors they sought
to penetrate contemporary everyday life and how an architectural
order should be responsive to its evolving pattern.
Without Rhetoric. An Architec-
tural Aesthetic 1955-1972, MIT It is at this point of polemical attentiveness to the development
Press, Cambridge MA, 1974,
first published by Latimer New of the everyday, that one other key characteristic of the Smithson-
Dimensions, London, 1973; p. 92.
ness of the Smithsons might be pointed out with regard to the
‘The New Brutalism: Alison couple’s self-fashioning and their public personae. Seeking to
and Peter Smithson answer the
criticisms on the opposite page’, celebrate the poetic of the everyday they started to interweave
in: Architectural Design, p. 113.
This quote can be read as a pa- their writings with their personal experiences, something not so
raphrasing of Mies van der Rohe,
in particular the ‘confused’ points
common within the architectural discourse. It is in this sense
to Mies’ statement made during that both the design work and the publications attained a strong
his inaugural address as director
of architecture at the Chicago Ar- autobiographical undercurrent from about the early 1970s onward.
mour Institute of Technology: ‘to
create order out of the desperate With respect to this, the importance of the Smithsons’ family life
confusion of our time.’ Published
in: Philip Johnson, Mies van der
at their weekend home in Upper Lawn has already been mentioned.
Rohe, The Museum of Modern Another aspect of the fusing of the discourse on the everyday with
Art, New York, revised edition
1978, p. 199; first edition in 1947. the personal would be the Smithsons’ attentiveness to their own
dvdh10PRINT.indd 47 21-04-13 16:56

appearance, to wear the appropriate outfit at the right occasion.
It is one of the most striking ‘metaphorical practices’ that keeps
emerging in the anecdotal stories about the Smithsons.
From the moment they burst onto the international architecture

scene when their Hunstanton School was built in the early 1950s,
they developed a reputation for their public appearances. Alison
designed and made her own dresses, Peter was famous for
wearing intricately patterned shirts and ties, some of those bought
at Liberty’s in Regent Street, others made by Alison herself. The
formal and informal gatherings of the Independent Group served
as perfect occasions for the Smithsons to dress up as if they were
going to a party. Magda Cordell recalled that Alison was ‘a Mary
Quant before Mary Quant even thought she was Mary Quant’. And
Mary Banham remembered that ‘nobody would miss a party that
Alison was going to, because they all wanted to see what she was
wearing’.58 Men tended to be less taken by the Smithsons’ outfits.
Herman Hertzberger mentioned he felt intimidated by Peter
Smithson when he showed up in a fancy green leather jacket at the
Team 10 meeting in Berlin in 1965.59 Such irritation was also felt
by a young Elia Zenghelis when Alison attended a jury at the AA-
school dressed in a mini-skirt made out of newspapers.60
Fashion seemed to have always been on the Smithsons’ mind.

They wrote about ‘where to walk and where to ride in our bouncy
new clothes and our shiny new cars’.61 When designing exhibition
installations, fashion designers were hired to make a contribution
58 Both quotes are from Mark as in the case of the 1956 House of the Future for the Daily Mail
Girouard, Big Jim. The Life and
Work of James Stirling, Chatto & Ideal Home exhibition, as well as for the 1968 Milan Triennale.
Windus, London, 1998, p. 55.
59 In conversation with the For the latter occasion the Smithsons set up an installation called
author, 2005. ‘wedding in the city’ in celebration of the then new everyday public
60 Story told to author by
Madelon Vriesendorp, 2007. spaces including those of shopping. To the Smithsons fashion and
Vriesendorp spoke of a dress,
according to Elia Zenghelis it was
architecture were part of the same project, since they considered
a mini-skirt; phone conversation both as being involved in the construction of territories, or as Peter
with the author, 2007.
61 Original manuscript, first Smithson stated:
version 28 January 1967, ‘The act of making territory starts with our clothes, with their style
eventually published in: Alison
Smithson (ed.), The Emergence and with our gestures and postures when we wear them.’ 62
of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M.,
The Architectural Association,
London, 1982; almost the same
version, but without the catchy To fully understand the Smithsons’ wit with regard to fashion
title was published as part of the and dressing – of oneself, of architecture and the city – one
re-edition of the Team 10 Primer,
1968, pp. 6 and 8. might keep in mind that their deadly seriousness was always
Changing the Art of Inhabitation,
combined with a typical feeling for the ironic and even plain
Artemis, London, 1994, p. 144; silliness. Peter’s flowered shirts are but one example. But there
stated in 1985 according to the
Smithsons’ reference. are other anecdotes, such as the one claiming that Peter showed
dvdh10PRINT.indd 48 21-04-13 16:56

up dressed as Rupert Bear, and Alison clad in a dress made out
of a large Union Jack.63 When Peter died in 2003, Monica Pidgeon
remembered Alison and Peter Smithson in an oddly cheerful way:
‘The first time I ever saw them was in 1953. We were at a CIAM
conference in Aix-en-Provence. We went down to the sea in the
evening (...) There in the water were Peter and Alison, and Peter was
wearing the most ghastly knitted shorts which Alison had made for
him. After that, of course, we published them a lot in AD.’ 64
At the time Pidgeon was the editor of ‘AD’, or Architectural

Design, and indeed, she would publish just about anything that
the Smithsons wrote.65 The Smithsons’ writing was definitely
another way of fashioning their public personae. Next to the
polemical statements (for instance about the New Brutalism),
there are serious historical studies (such as of classical Roman
and Greek sites, the city of Bath), discussions of topical and acute
issues (among others mobility and consumption culture), special
issues such as the one dedicated to the ‘The Heroic Period of
Modern Architecture’ and the ‘Eames Celebration’, as well as
biting and funny columns written under pseudonym.66 The by now
seminal Team 10 publications too, would all be published in the
63 George Toynbee-Clarke, ‘Lives pages of AD.
remembered’, The Times, Wednes-
day March 19, 2003.
64 Monica Pidgeon in: ‘Peter
Smithson remembered’, Archi-
tects’ Journal, 20 March 2003,
p. 22.
Fashioning History and Identity
65 Besides Pidgeon one should
make mention of the ‘technical
editors’ of Architectural Design:
Theo Crosby, Kenneth Frampton To think of writing, and in particular writing history, as a way of
and Robin Middleton; see for
two personal accounts: Kenneth
fashioning one’s identity, as dressing up, may be contrived and
Framtpon, ‘Homage à Monica highly problematic, if not outright improper. Yet, to architects any
Pidgeon: An AD Memoir’, and
Robin Middleton, ‘Working for reconstruction and re-invention of tradition is in function of one’s
Monica’, both in: AA Files, nr. 60,
2010, pp. 22-27; for a history on the design practice. It is a form of operative criticism which usually
magazine and Monica Pidgeon’s
role, incl. her professional
raises objection from the more orthodox historians in particular,
relationship with the Smithsons, but to architects it is common practice. Next to past fact and social
see: Steve Parnell, Architectural
Design, 1954-1972, PhD Thesis, construction, history is also a treasury of allegory to re-invent the
University of Sheffield, 2011.
discipline and regenerate architectural practice. Alison and Peter
66 Peter Smithson would
write under the name of Waldo Smithson were quite a special case in this respect. When jobs
Camini, Alison under the names
of Chippendale and Margaret were halted, or new clients stayed away the Smithsons devoted
Gill; also the column ‘Not Quite
Architecture’ in the Architect’s their time and energy to writing rather than job acquisition. Alison
Journal was taken care of by the especially, loved making books, something that is immediately
Smithsons, mostly Alison, for a
couple of years. clear from the many unpublished manuscripts kept in the archive.67
67 Among others 1916 ASO, the
full manuscript of India Imprint
To underscore the specifics of the Smithsons’ intentions behind
including the numerous collages, their writing it might suffice to reread the opening lines of their
Maigret’s Map, and Paradise
Eloigne. final book The Charged Void, which displays quite some resentment
dvdh10PRINT.indd 49 21-04-13 16:56

at conventional historiography and improper acts of interpretation.
Among other things, Alison Smithson stated:
‘We write – and publish – in an attempt to help architects who intend
to build to make another “jump” themselves. After the architect is
dead, one receives another sort of “catalogue”, with every scrap
of paper interpreted by historians. But building architects ask of
the detritus of a working, thinking life completely different kinds of
questions that wish to receive totally different kinds of answers.’ 68
But it was not just other colleagues that needed help with their
questions. Going through the extensive writings of the British
couple, it becomes clear that the first goal was to find firm ground
for one’s own design practice. As they had stated in The Heroic
Period of Modern Architecture, they needed a ‘rock to stand on’,
a rock through which they felt the continuity of history and the
necessity to achieve their own idea of order.69 This tribute to
the first generation of modern architects is a highly visual and
essayistic documentation with an emphasis on the four basic
sources of modern architecture according to the Smithons:
De Stijl, Bauhaus, Esprit Nouveau and Russian Constructivism,
complemented with among others Czech Functionalism, the
Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen, and various other individual examples such
as Hugo Häring and Pierre Chareau. Basically, The Heroic Period
The Charged Void: Architecture, reads as a cleverly composed scrapbook with inserted comments
Monacelli Press, New York, 2001,
p. 13. taken from earlier writings, mostly Peter’s.70 The images included
69 Alison and Peter Smithson, range from Oud’s Hoek van Holland housing project to Leonidov’s
The Heroic Period of Modern
Architecture, 1981, p. 5. Lenin Institute. They are chronologically ordered from 1910 until
70 The predominant, visual 1934, with an emphasis on the 1920s. The scrapbook method is key
dimension is important to note,
because until then the seminal to the Smithson rhetorical techniques. It is directly related to the
historiographies of modern ar-
chitecture, such as Johnson and way they collected their materials and organised their archive
Hitchcock’s, Pevsner’s, as well
as Giedion’s depended on the where they kept lists and projects with such headings as ‘the
textual, intellectual argument. 1930s’, ‘the 1950s’, or ‘the materials sacred to brutalism’: relatively
71 I thank Christopher Wood-
ward, at the time employed at the open-ended inventories that were always under scrutiny and
Smithsons office, for his informa-
tion on the way the publication
continuously subject to editing.
was compiled. This technique is
actually not unlike the way an
earlier collection of images was The chronological ordering suggests an ‘objective’ historiography
presented to the public by the
Smithsons: the 1953 exhibition describing an autonomous development, yet The Heroic Period is
‘Parallel of Life and Art’ that the
Smithsons organised together
nothing of the kind. The page layout is manipulated in such a way
with their Independent Group that an intricate web of real and speculative relations between
friends, the visual artists Nigel
Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, the images appear: for instance Mies’ glass skyscraper on the
which will be more extensively
discussed in Chapter 4 ‘The New same page as Rietveld’s red-blue chair, a double page completely
Brutalist Game of Associations’.
The hanging of this exhibition
devoted to Gropius’ Bauhaus and the Bauhaus houses, Mies’
was inspired by among others Barcelona pavilion opposite of the Salon d’Automne exhibit of
a scheme for a photographic
display by Bauhaus designer Le Corbusier, Jeanneret and Perriand, or Duiker’s Open Air School
dvdh10PRINT.indd 50 21-04-13 16:56

Herbert Bayer, a scheme which
next to works by Melnikov and Van Doesburg, and so forth and so
one finds also included in The on. The chronology and any possible historical ‘telos’ is effectively
Heroic Period as if it were an echo
of this earlier experiment, p. 63 of undermined, and the reader is left to his or her own devices.71
the 1981 re-edition of The Heroic
Period. An earlier version of my
argument was published as: Dirk
van den Heuvel, ‘As Found: The
In hindsight, The Heroic Period was only a prelude toward a much
Metamorphosis of the everyday. more personal kind of historiography. From the 1970s onward the
On the Work of Nigel Henderson,
Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Smithsons developed their idea of three generations of modern
Peter Smithson (1953-1956)’, in:
Oase, nr. 59, 2002, pp. 52-67. architects.72 At that point, they – once again – re-invented the
72 It should be noted that tradition of modern architecture and now, self-consciously
Giedion already used the figure
of three generations. He called inserted themselves and their own work into that tradition.73
Gyorgy Kepes an artist of the
third generation, in a foreword to Ultimately it formed the structure of the 1994 booklet Changing
Kepes’ book Structure in Art and the Art of Inhabitation, in which the Smithsons presented their
in Science, George Braziller, New
York, 1965 to which the Smithsons reflections on Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames as
also contributed a text. Giedion
also called Jorn Utzon an archi- well as their own work in three subsequent chapters.74 The idea
tect of the third generation in the
fifth edition of his seminal Space, of three generations is as simple as it is also classic. It is a direct
Time and Architecture, 1967; the reference to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and
foreword mentioning ‘a new
chapter on the Danish architect Architects of the 16th century, the first historiography of the Italian
Jørn Utzon, “Jørn Utzon and the
Third Generation”’, is dated Sep- artists of the Renaissance, and as might be noted with regard to
tember 1966. By the early 1970s
the phrase ‘third generation’ the web of relations between the everyday and historiography,
had become quite mainstream in a history notoriously awash with anecdote, gossip and tales of
Britain, given the 1972 publica-
tion of The Third Generation. The defamation and celebration. The three generations idea is also
Changing Meaning of Architecture
(London, Pall Mall Press) written part of the ongoing competition between CIAM and Team 10
and compiled by Philip Drew.
Interestingly enough, Alison protagonists and the fight over the legacy of the founding fathers.
and Peter Smithson were not When Giedion updated his Space, Time and Architecture to also
included by Drew, although he
does mention them in the intro- include the ‘third generation’, a term he used before the Smithsons
ductory essay; he documented
work of Smithson rivals, among would, he thought of Jorn Utzon as the ultimate representative.
others James Stirling and Robert
Venturi. The Smithsons are also The Team 10 architects responsible for putting an end to Giedion’s
missing in Giedion’s book. most important project, that of CIAM, were almost completely
73 Smithson’s three generations
idea was developed through vari- neglected by him in his seminal history of modern architecture.
ous lectures, and eventually crys-
tallized at the ILAUD summer
schools organised by Giancarlo In his ‘Three Generations’ essay, which has been published at
De Carlo. Peter Smithson, ‘Three
Generations’, in: Annual Report various places, and which was based on a lecture given at different
1980, ILAUD, 1981; republished in:
Alison and Peter Smithson, Ita- schools and institutions, Peter Smithson drew an analogy between
lian Thoughts, 1993, pp. 8-15, and
Oase, nr. 51, ‘Re-arrangements. three generations of Renaissance architects (Brunelleschi,
A Smithsons Celebration’, 1999, Alberti, Di Giorgio) and a modern variant. The modern three
pp. 82-93.
74 Alison and Peter Smithson, generations were the founding generation (Le Corbusier, Mies,
Artemis, London, 1994.
Gropius), a second, or middle generation (Eames, Prouvé) and
75 There are different variations, the third generation which included the couple itself.75 But after
for instance for a Delft lecture
Smithson drew a line from the that clear and rather bold gesture, any simplicity was left behind.
first generation of among others The two genealogical lines set a field that enabled the Smithson
Duiker and Stam to Woods and
Bakema. to completely re-arrange their favourite subjects as well as
‘Conglomerate Ordering’, and
introduce new ones. Again, new lists were drawn and projects re-
‘The Canon of Conglomerate assembled to make up what they then started to call a ‘canon of
Ordering’, in: Italian Thoughts,
1993, pp. 58-61, and 62-69. conglomerate ordering’.76 This time the heavy brick structures of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 51 21-04-13 16:56

Francesco Di Giorgio and Le Corbusier’s late works in béton brut
figured as the cornerstones of their historiography. These were
complemented by the Smithsons own buildings for the University
of Bath from the 1980s alongside projects of their fellow Team 10
members Ralph Erskine and Giancarlo De Carlo.
The various family trees constructed in these historiographies

served to distribute several major themes of the Smithsons’ work.
The Mies-Eames-Smithson chain of identification was mostly
concerned with the domestic, technology and finding poetic
order in the everyday.77 The unlikely web connecting Di Giorgio,
Le Corbusier and Team 10 evolved around the idea of a project’s
context as ‘fabric’, to which any new building belongs, while at the
same the fabric is reconstructed by such new building.
Church Parents of Modern Architecture
With regard to these issues of identification and fashioning

one’s identity through historiography, one final example might be
mentioned to illuminate what was at stake here. I’m referring to
the piece that Alison Smithson wrote about the life of St Jerome
and the two alternating habitats of the saint, namely the desert
and the study.
The text ‘Saint Jerome, the desert – the study’ was written by
77 Beatriz Colomina has dis- Smithson at the end of her life, and published by Axel Bruchhäuser,
cussed before the Smithsons’
historiographic practice in terms one of the Smithsons’ most faithful and inspiring clients.78 The
of identification and appropri-
ation. In her essay ‘Couplings’ story of Jerome is in the first place a story about inhabitation, as
Colomina analyzed the ‘Three
Generations’ text as well as The so many others of her and Peter’s. The desert stands here for the
Heroic Period, mainly focusing ‘restorative place in nature’, the study for the ‘energizing cell’ in
on the special bond between the
Eames couple and the Smithsons. the city. The story that is immediately recognizable underneath the
Following the various genealogi-
cal lines drawn by the Smithsons one of Jerome, is the story about the Smithsons’ own places: the
Colomina demonstrates the
chains of identification at work, energizing cell in the city would be their Chelsea home and office
eventually arriving at her own in London, Cato Lodge, and the restorative place in nature their
identification as an architect-
writer with the couple’s work; idyllic Upper Lawn weekend retreat. The second, implied story is
Beatriz Colomina, ‘Couplings’, in:
Oase, nr. 51, ‘Re-arrangements. the story of the client and his life in the forests of central Germany,
A Smithsons Celebration’,
pp. 20-33. a single man living with a cat more or less similar to St Jerome and
78 Alison Smithson, Saint his lion. But there’s another telling story hidden underneath, and
Jerome. The Desert – the Study,
TECTA, Lauenförde, 1991; repu- that is the story of writing itself.
blished in: Dirk van den Heuvel
and Max Risselada (eds.), Alison
and Peter Smithson – from the On the cover of the private publication we see Jerome depicted
House of the Future to a house of
today, 2004, pp. 224-229. in one of Rembrandt’s masterful etchings – Jerome at work,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 52 21-04-13 16:56

writing. Of all the symbolic items that Rembrandt included in the
peaceful scene the piece of spectacles that the saint is wearing
seems to be the most surprising as well as hilarious one –
quite another example of historic distortion and appropriation
79 The eight most important
publications on the Team 10
by an author. Yet, the most important symbolic accessory is
discourse as edited by Alison the hat lying beside Jerome in the grass, which is a cardinal’s
Smithson are the following:
‘CIAM – Team 10’, special issue hat of course. As we should remember, St Jerome is among
for Architectural Design, May
1960; ‘Team 10 Primer’, special the foremost of the church fathers. The occupation by which
issue for Architectural Design,
December 1962; ‘Team 10 Work’,
he is still known to us, is the canonizing of the early Christian
special issue for Architectural texts and gospels: which ones should be included in the holy
Design, August 1964; Team 10
Primer, first re-edition, a reprint book of the bible, and which not. While the lion is guarding his
of the two combined issues of
1962 and 1964, without a proper safety, Jerome is translating from original Hebrew sources,
colophon, undated; Team 10 Pri-
mer, MIT Press, Cambridge MA,
as well as writing long letters and reports polemicizing with
1968, second re-edition based on his competitors and opponents.
the first, undated re-edition with
a new, 20 page preface; ‘Team 10
at Royaumont, 1962, a report’, in:
Architectural Design, November This is another way of looking at the Smithsons – as church
1975; The Emergence of Team 10
out of C.I.A.M., The Architectu-
parents of the gospel of modern architecture. Alison’s role in
ral Association, London 1982, particular should be remembered here, since she made Team 10
a selection of documents from
Smithson’s own archive; Team 10 part of the history of modern architecture by producing and editing
Meetings, Rizzoli, New York,
1991, a chronology of the Team 10 the Team 10 Primer of 1962, its two subsequent editions and the
meetings plus reports of the
Royaumont meeting as published
Team 10 Meetings of 1991 among others.79 Discussing her own
before in Architectural Design, intentions behind her most famous document on Team 10, the
and the meeting in Rotterdam,
1974. Primer, Alison Smithson saw part of her job as situating Team 10
80 Alison Smithson (ed.), within the larger tradition of architectural discourse:
Team 10 Meetings, 1991, p. 15.
81 There are quite a few of ‘The Team 10 Primer, in communicating “Team 10 thinking” was,
examples of this, but perhaps the
best known casualty was James
for working architects, maintaining the tradition in architect’s
Stirling, whose participation had documents running through Vitruvius, Frontinus, Serlio, Palladio ...
been written out of the Team 10
history by Smithson. Stirling Adolf Loos, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier ...’ 80
contributed on two occasions to
the Team 10 discourse, and both
times not unsubstantially. The
first was the Dubrovnik congress,
It is all in there: the polemics, the competing, the revisiting of
at which occasion Stirling sources, deciding what and who comes first, and of course, what
himself didn’t attend, although
he delivered a design scheme of and who should be left out – reading, writing and editing. Going
a village infill project based on
the new prerequisites as drawn through the innumerable documents in the various archives
up by the Smithsons. The second
occasion was the Royaumont
related to the Team 10 history, the correspondences and minutes
meeting, at which event Stirling of meetings, which accompanied the course of events, one gets
was the first speaker presenting
his and Jim Gowan’s design some idea of the discourse in action, including the appropriations,
for the Engineering Building of
Leicester University; see for rejections or outright exclusions of ideas, procedures, people
much more on this, and a first
reconstruction of the Team 10 his-
and places.81 History is muddled and messy here, not very heroic.
tory and its meetings our book: Take for instance a simple question as to the exact beginnings
Max Risselada and Dirk van den
Heuvel (eds.), Team 10. In Search of Team 10. The stories about it are far from unequivocal, and a
of a Utopia of the Present 1953-81,
2005; Stirling’s talk in Royaumont singular moment of origin cannot be established. Alison Smithson
has eventually been published
by Mark Crinson: James Stirling.
herself preferred it to be most informally, referring to a dinner
Early Unpublished Writings on event during the CIAM 9 congress at Aix-en-Provence in 1953:
Architecture, Routledge, London,
2010. ‘Georges’ (Candilis) outing to eat camel ham in a Moroccan bar
dvdh10PRINT.indd 53 21-04-13 16:56

was a great success; around that bar table, in the middle of the night,
was the first Team 10 meeting.’ 82
It is because of her editing of the Team 10 publications and

Team 10 history that Alison Smithson compared herself, and has
been compared by others – also by Peter – to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt,
who would edit the official publications of CIAM of the post-
war years. But unlike Tyrwhitt, Alison Smithson was not only a
facilitator, the role Tyrwhitt seemed to have taken on, Smithson
was also an active player. And this can be traced back in all her
writings, as well as in Peter’s as one might add.
With this in mind, we might have another look at The Heroic Period
publication. The Smithsons’ work is not there yet as in the case of
the ‘Three Generations’ essay for instance, but I would suggest
that they themselves are, right there on the cover. We think we’re
looking at Le Corbusier and Mies, deeply engaged in conversation
during one of their visits of the Weissenhof Siedlung, but actually
Team 10 Meetings, 1991, p. 20; we are looking at Alison and Peter.83 If this seems improbable and
when asked various members far-fetched, consider the following two statements.
define different moments, see the
various interviews with Team 10
members by Clelia Tuscano in
Risselada, Van den Heuvel, 2005. Peter about Mies:
83 In fact, it was Robin Middleton ‘My own debt to Mies van der Rohe is so great that it is difficult
who selected the photo for the
cover, letter to the author, 4 for me to disentangle what I hold as my own thoughts, so often
January, 2012.
84 Peter Smithson, ‘For Mies van
have they been the result of insights received from him.’ 84
der Rohe on his 80th birthday’, in:
Alison and Peter Smithson, The
Heroic Period, 1985, p. 61, origi- And Alison about Le Corbusier:
nally published in Bauen & Woh-
nen, May 1966, and republished ‘When you open a new volume of the Oeuvre Complète you find
in Alison and Peter Smithson,
that he has had all your best ideas already, has done what you
1994, p. 14. were about to do next.’ 85
85 Alison Smithson as quoted
by Charles Jencks in his Modern
Movements in Architecture, The exact nature of the Smithson-ness of the Smithsons
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth
/ Baltimore / Ringwood, 1973, will always escape us; that is part of the workings of those
p. 259; taken from: Reyner Ban-
ham ‘The Last Formgiver’, The Ar- indeterminate fables of the everyday. But look at the picture
chitectural Review, August 1966.
again: a couple, intimately and totally preoccupied with
86 As Peter himself described
such moments in ‘Three Gene- themselves in this frozen moment, chatting, gossiping,
rations’. For another mythical
account of the picture bringing in arguing, avowing and disavowing, and everything else that
Mart Stam as a third, repressed
element between Mies and
comes with ‘two separate design impulses walking together’.86
Le Corbusier, see: ‘Mart Stam’s You can almost hear their voices.
Trousers. A Conversation
between Peter Smithson and
Wouter Vanstiphout’, in: Crimson
with Michael Speaks and Gerard
Hadders (eds.), Mart Stam’s
Trousers: Stories from behind the
Scenes of Dutch Moral Moder-
nism, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam,
1999, pp. 121-138.
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dvdh10PRINT.indd 55 21-04-13 16:56

dvdh10PRINT.indd 56 21-04-13 16:56

2 ‘THE SIMPLE LIFE, WELL DONE’
Culture, Ordinariness and Domesticity
In Pursuit of Ordinariness
‘Things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time’ is one

of the most puzzling of Alison and Peter Smithson’s paradoxes.1
It served as the final conclusion of their argument for an
architecture ‘without rhetoric’ and they used it with reference to
Marinetti and Italian Futurism:
‘We have come a long way from Marinetti. We know we are involved
in new levels of sadness and destruction and we have a view of things
unimaginable fifty years ago.’ 2
These lines were followed by comments on how the late twentieth

century city had become a vulnerable ‘mechanism’ due to its
dependence on technology for its services; a power blackout in
New York was mentioned, just as a strike by air-controllers in
France dislocating all air-communications across Europe and a
strike by London dustmen. But this was not quite the ‘new levels
of sadness and destruction’ the Smithsons had in mind when
they stated that the ‘fragility’ of the ‘mechanism-served city’
required ‘more self-discipline’ and ‘more thoughtful involvement
than ever before’. The new levels of ‘sadness and destruction’
were a reference to the machines of war that brought so much
destruction to Europe and England, and its capital London, where
the Smithsons had set up their own practice. When the Smithsons
moved to London, at the end of the 1940s, the destruction was there
for all to see. The bombed neighbourhoods were a dominant part of
the daily décor of the city and living proof of the need for housing,
as also a better kind of society.
As a slogan and call for order, ‘without rhetoric’ was aimed against
a continuation of the Futurist infatuation with the machine and
technology as a force of disruption, and as such it was also aimed
Without Rhetoric. An Architec- at Reyner Banham’s pursuit of an exclusively technology-driven
tural Aesthetic 1955-1972, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1974, architecture:
original edition Latimer New
Dimensions, London, 1973; p. 92. ‘When the few had cars then was the time for rhetoric about the
2 Ibid. machine, of violence as an ideal. When all have machine-energy –
dvdh10PRINT.indd 57 21-04-13 16:56

cars, transistor radios and light – to throw about, then the time has
come for the lyricism of control, for calm as an ideal: for bringing the
Virgilian dream – the peace of the countryside enjoyed with the self-
consciousness of the city-dweller – into the notion of the city itself.’ 3
Here, the heroism of the avant-gardes and the ordinariness

of modern everyday life are connected with picturesque
sensibilities, urban lifestyles, popular culture and technology.
The Smithson statement builds on a web of socio-cultural notions
that encompass not only modern architecture and humble yet
noble simplicity, but also domesticity, the experience of war and
Englishness.
This connection between heroism and ordinariness was also part

of the Smithsons’ framing of the achievements of the modern
movement as evident in their 1965 tribute The Heroic Period.
Heroism and ordinariness summarised to them the well-known
aspirations of the modern agenda: to better the life of the common
man, the working classes and ordinary citizens by deploying
technological innovation and industrial mass production that were
all part of bringing about a new, more egalitarian society. Although
the Smithsons emphasized both the heroic and the ordinary,
eventually the last would receive the most attention when it came
to their own work and writings. The heroic, just as the poetic,
was to be found in the ordinary. Hence, attending to the ordinary,
and the numerous, disparate everyday phenomena that made
up this unwieldy realm, became a large part of the Smithsons’
lifetime project.
A fine example of this foregrounding of the ordinary would be

the short text ‘Beatrix Potter’s Places’ written by Alison Smithson.
It was published in 1967 in Architectural Design, and was one
of those typical short, but revealing pieces of hers. In ‘Beatrix
Potter’s Places’ she discussed the unlikely similarities between
3 Ibid., p. 14; the implicit polemic
with Banham also appears in the the cosy interiors as depicted in the famous children stories about
extensive extracts from Marinet- Peter Rabbit from the early twentieth century and the interiors of
ti’s manifesto of 1909, taken from
Banham’s 1960 book Theory and modern architecture, in particular those of Le Corbusier’s villas.
Design in the First Machine Age
and placed next to the concluding She writes:
remarks of Without Rhetoric.
‘Architects might be surprised that there was a connection
4 Alison Smithson, ‘Beatrix
Potter’s Places’, in: Architectural between the house of Mrs Tittlemouse and that for Mr Shodan
Design, December 1967, p. 573;
re-published in: Dirk van den in Ahmedabad.’ 4
Heuvel, Max Risselada (eds.),
Alison and Peter Smithson – from
the House of the Future to a house Indeed, to compare the avant-gardist Le Corbusier with the English
of today, 010 Publishers, Rotter-
dam, 2004, pp. 213-214. writer of children stories might seem quite an absurd suggestion.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 58 21-04-13 16:56

But Smithson insisted:
‘the same sort of striving towards good container-spaces, and even
the same sort of forms can be found in both the books and in the
post-war works of the architects. A similarity of intention is also
evident in the attitude to objects and possessions.’ 5
She further claimed:

‘In Beatrix Potter’s interiors, objects and utensils in daily use are
conveniently located, often on individual hooks or nails, and are
all “decoration” the “simple” spaces need, or in fact can take.
Those things in secondary use or needing long term storage are
in special storage cubicles whose forms define the house space
proper – as well as being pleasant spaces in themselves.’ 6
And then we arrive at the crucial statement:

‘Here then, we find basic necessities raised to a poetic level:
the simple life, well done. This is in essence the precept of the
whole Modern Movement in architecture.’ 7
In its compactness, the statement remains astonishing, if only for

the apparent contradiction with other essential features of the
modern tradition as proposed by the Smithsons – for instance,
their own introduction to The Heroic Period, written only two years
before ‘Beatrix Potter’s Places’. This introduction ended with the
remark, there is a ‘quite definite special sub-category of modern
architecture’. Referring to Mies’ work in particular, this sub-
category was defined as an architecture of the ‘enjoyment of luxury
materials’, of the ‘well-made’, betraying a ‘shameless bankers’
luxuriousness about materials and a passion for perfection in
detail’.8 The phrase ‘special sub-category’ keeps the Smithson
argument together, just as the ‘well-made’ comes close to the
‘well done’. Behind both statements lies the appreciation of true
craftmanship and the skillful handling of materials by which
qualities of authenticity are brought out. This then keeps Mies
firmly within the tradition as conceived by the Smithsons.
Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few other ‘sub-categories’ of the

modern tradition that don’t exactly fit this adage of ‘the simple life,
5 Ibid. well done’. One might think of technology or the consumer society
6 Ibid.
– key aspects of modern urban lifestyles of the twentieth century,
7 Ibid.
8 Alison and Peter Smithson, of which the Smithsons were intensely aware, and which are far
The Heroic Period of Modern Ar-
chitecture, Rizzoli / Idea Editions,
removed from the uncomplicated idyll of the rural and Picturesque
New York / Milan, 1981, p. 5; origi- that is summed up by the notion of the ‘simple life’. Such friction,
nally published as a special issue
of Architectural Design in 1965. which is at work at all levels of the discourse, is due to the twofold
dvdh10PRINT.indd 59 21-04-13 16:56

function of the riddle-like statement. Apart from drawing a clear
line to demarcate what belongs to the modern movement and what
not, the statement also undermines any kind of formal orthodoxy or
dogma, which is probably best illustrated by the Smithsons’ own
designs, in particular the houses – and of course, Alison Smithson
was speaking of houses when she referred to Beatrix Potter and
Mr. Shodan.
Take the two examples of the House of the Future and the Sugden
House, both from 1956.9 It is clear that the ‘simple life’ was a major
inspiration to the Smithsons in raising the everyday to the level of
poetics – one house being for a client with a relatively small budget
and strict aesthetic control by planning authorities, the other for
an imagined couple occupying the dream of a ‘machine served
society’. Formally speaking, the two are of completely different
worlds: the House of the Future was an elegant set of freely shaped
and smooth interiors around a paradise patio-garden, whereas the
Sugden House, a mono-pitched volume, set on a mound, made out
of rough brick of second stock quality with a rather awkward looking
facade composition the result of the unconventional handling
of the prefab Crittal-window frames. It was only the ambition to
draw a new, poetic order from the patterns of everyday life that
united the designs.10 The Smithsons would investigate their ideas
concerning ordinariness and the ‘simple life, well done’ throughout
life, from the earliest house designs of the 1950s to the later work
in Germany, or the many ‘idea houses’ such as the House with Two
Gantries of the 1970s and the Put-Away Villa of the late 1990s, all of
which dealt with the rearranging of one’s furniture, decoration and
9 See for an overview of the
other domestic objects according to season and need.
Smithson house designs our 2004
publication: Dirk van den Heuvel,
Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and Ordinariness and simplicity were most thoroughly pursued in
Peter Smithson – from the House
of the Future to a house of today, their modest and bare weekend home in Tisbury, the Upper Lawn
Rotterdam, 010 Publishers.
pavillion, which they built between 1959 and 1962. The Smithsons
10 The very different form langu-
age of projects has drawn the also consistently recognized the qualities of ordinariness and
attention of critics before, for ins-
tance: Sarah Goldhagen in ‘Free- simplicity in the work of their colleagues, for instance when they
dom’s Domiciles: Three Projects wrote in admiration about the Kiefhoek housing in Rotterdam by
by Alison and Peter Smithson’,
in: Sarah Williams Goldhagen, J.J.P. Oud and how the ‘ordinary municipal housing estate was
Réjean Legault (eds.), Anxious
Modernisms. Experimentation in built from the bottom up with a love that is still shiningly obvious’.
Postwar Architectural Culture,
CCA, Montréal / MIT Press, To the Smithsons the Kiefhoek project succeeded in inventing a
Cambridge MA, 2000, pp. 75-95. ‘form-language of common use’ despite being ‘mass-housing on
Changing the Art of Inhabitation, the smallest budget’.11 Such invention from the limited means
Artemis, London 1994, p. 130;
remarks originally published as
available was also the task the Smithsons had set for themselves
Peter Smithson, ‘Signs of Oc- (rather than the ‘shameless bankers’ luxuriousness’ they
cupancy’ in: Architectural Design,
February 1972, pp. 97-99. recognized and admired in Mies).
dvdh10PRINT.indd 60 21-04-13 16:56

The pithy phrase of ‘the simple life, well done’ was also most
effective in communicating the morality and obligation involved
that was part of the Smithsons’ rejection of formal orthodoxy. Any
kind of formal rule or prescription as to form, composition or even
planning was deliberately relinquished. In this sense, ‘the simple
life, well done’ was the echo of the earlier, better-known statement
of the Smithsons: ‘We see architecture as the direct result of
a way of life.’ 12 Again, no specificities concerning form were
communicated, rather a moral call to measure the reciprocities at
play between formal configuration and patterns of use.
It was Robin Middleton, then editor of Architectural Design and

a close friend of the Smithsons, who was the first to discuss the
architecture of the couple in the terms as set out by Smithson in
her description of the domestic world of Beatrix Potter’s stories.
He did so in his essay ‘The Pursuit of Ordinariness’, an extensive
review of their project for St Hilda’s College in Oxford, a female
students’ dormitory called the Garden Building (1967-1970).13
The building is still in use as a dormitory, although a new addition
on the premises of the college has distorted the planning of the
ensemble of the college buildings as a whole. The four-storey
building of 51 units is a small block carefully situated in the college
garden between two older buildings. It connects those buildings
while at the same time separating the garden from a service
alley. Its most striking feature is an oak timber screen that is
not structural, yet is wrapped around the building veiling the big
windows of the student rooms. The screen predates the Smithsons’
later interest in layering and lattice works, which they would
develop from the 1970s onward and which would heavily influence
their built work for their German patron Axel Bruchhäuser, owner
of the Tecta furniture factory.
The story goes that the Smithsons got the job, because Stirling to
whom it was offered first, refused to take it on for having too much
work already.14 In his review, Middleton compared the building
to other architectural projects by Smithson contemporaries: in
12 Editorial ‘The New Brutalism’,
in: Architectural Design, January
particular Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis, Denys Lasdun and
1955, p. 1. James Stirling, too. He noted that every one of them realized work of
13 Robin Middleton, ‘The Pursuit
of Ordinariness’, in: Architectural the ‘fullest display of design talents’ seeking to ‘make architectural
Design, nr. 2, 1971, pp. 77-85; when statements of the most spectacular kind’, whereas the Smithsons
not mentioned all subsequent
quotes and references are from apparently had chosen not to invest in ‘iconography’ eschewing
this essay.
14 Mark Girouard, Big Jim. The
the kind of ‘totem architecture’, to which category the Smithsons’
Life and Work of James Stirling, earlier Hunstanton school of 1954 also belonged, according to
Chatto & Windus, London, 1998,
p. 157. Middleton. The Smithson design for St Hilda’s on the other hand
dvdh10PRINT.indd 61 21-04-13 16:56

was ‘calm and reticent’, just as it was ‘unpretentious’. According to
Middleton, they had developed a fitting, modernist vernacular for the
building, full of references to historic and local building traditions
with a few touches of exoticism. Speaking of a fusion of inspiration
Middleton listed the following references: the Tudor example of
sixteenth century Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, of which Peter
Smithson had said it ‘represented the last attempt at making
“jolly” architecture in England’, a nearby decorative timber bridge
at Magdalen Boys School and finally a textile, oriental reference, a
Tunisian yasmak or women’s veil, which the Smithsons’ themselves
had also used as an explanation for the timber screen. Images from
the Smithson archive, photographs by Peter and postcards from
Alison’s scrapbook served as evidence for Middleton’s claims, all
neatly included in the article. For the back facade at the service
alley-side of the building, the Smithsons had also opted for some
sort of recognizable vernacular of a yellow stock-brick. Together with
the added one-storey shed-like volume, which housed the heating
plant among other things, the back facade emphasized the language
and associations with a service alley.
The ‘ordinariness’ of the project was not just limited to the kind of
vernacular as invented by the Smithsons for the garden and back
facades, though. Middleton went on to explain how the tight but
carefully planned lay-out of the building, its rooms and corridors,
the private dressing rooms and common baths and showers, the
designers’ obsession with sound insulation, cupboards, sinks,
draining boards and room to hang dripping tights or knickers, and
so on, all referred back to the sound building traditions of late
Victorian and Edwardian times, the very times of Beatrix Potter,
when ‘the skills and judgements of all workmen could be relied
upon; even an estate carpenter could be expected to turn out
something decent’. The nostalgia for those days and the then
assumedly ‘ordered and settled society’, did not concern the ‘pomp
and splendour’ but the ‘working bits of the architecture, the below
stairs realm’. It was this attention for the below stairs, epitome
of the ordinary, which formed the foremost connection between
Beatrix Potter’s architecture of ‘nooks and cubby holes’ and
Alison’s interest in this well-ordered world.
Middleton concluded his piece by stating that such interest in

ordinariness was too often: ‘scorned by the architects of the
moden movement and has made of their work such a nightmare
of discommodiousness’. Perhaps a pun meant for Stirling, whose
university buildings were heavily criticised for their disrespect
dvdh10PRINT.indd 62 21-04-13 16:56

of considerations of use, the remark highlighted once again the
Smithsons’ obsessions with ordinariness and simplicity and their
search for an architecture of the simple life well done, a form
language developed in direct response to patterns of common use.
This was not only a theoretical position as should be noted here:
the actual requirements for room lay-outs, divisions of cupboards,
private or common baths were all decided upon after extensive
consultation with the users, most notably the college steward,
Marion Taylor, who was even credited as co-designer by Peter
Smithson. Taylor for instance, organised the testing of clothes
storage and dressing rooms by way of mock-ups.15
‘A New Seeing of the Ordinary’
The recognition of the ordinary as a special source of inspiration

or even a force for cultural and moral regeneration was part
of the much broader modernist discourse, and certainly not
exclusively limited to modern architecture, nor the inventions of
the pre-WWII avant-gardes. Once again, one could point to the
picturesque tradition, or note how the architecture of inhabitation
and its humble origins were an intrinsic and constitutive part
of the modernist discourse. One might call to mind the seminal
and didactic examples of the primitive hut of abbé Marc-Antoine
Laugier, which was also a temple at the same time, or the
Carribean hut of Gottfried Semper famously on display at the
Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. But in all those instances, it
might also be recalled that the ‘ordinary’ is never quite as ‘simple’
as suggested, but that the terms used were always part of ongoing
contestations in a cultural battle over values and identities, in
15 Middleton, 1971, p. 80 and p. 85. which the rustic, the vernacular and common were construed as
16 A first enquiry into the pos- pure and authentic versus the mannerisms of an establishment of
sible connections between the
Smithsons’ ideas and the post- cultured and educated classes. It is through such seminal cases
colonial situation of the post-war
situation is an essay by Mark as the one of the primitive hut that one immediately touches on
Crinson, ‘From the Rainforest to other key aspects of the modern tradition as well, namely the
the Streets’, in: Tom Avermaete,
Serhat Karakayali, Marion von profoundly intertwined practices and models of anthropology,
Osten (eds.), Colonial Modern.
Aesthetics of the Past – Rebel- exoticism and colonialism. In the work of the Smithsons one can
lions for the Future, Black Dog
Publishing, London / Haus der retrace the impact of those as well, partly as an inherent element
Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2010, of the intellectual and cultural tradition in which they operated, but
pp. 98-111.
17 Alison and Peter Smithson, also as objects for criticism, auto-critique and further inspection.16
‘Collective Housing in Moroc-
co. The Work of Atbat-Afrique:
The Smithsons were among the first to acknowledge the
Bodiansky, Candilis, Woods’, in: importance of the work of modern architects in the Maghreb,
Architectural Design, January
1955, pp. 2-8. especially of the ATBAT architects in Morocco.17 Throughout
dvdh10PRINT.indd 63 21-04-13 16:56

their writings one finds references to the Far East (the first
New Brutalism statements are full of references to Japanese
architecture),18 and India was a consistently recurring reference, as
part of Peter Smithson’s war experience and in Alison’s writings
on post-colonial conditions and modern travelling.19 Their design
portfolio too, overlapped with the shifting realities of the post-
colonial empire with major projects in Brazil (the British Embassy
in Brasilia), Africa and the Middle East, particularly their project
for Kuwait City and their winning entry for the Pahlavi Library,
Tehran.
The example of the timber screen at St Hilda’s being described

as a yasmak to protect the girls from overexposure is just one but
still telling instance. Middleton did not fail to mention that the
Tunisian influence was the outcome of the Smithsons’ holiday
activity, which involved visits to the vernacular as also the sites of
Roman and Greek ruins.20 Roger Rigby, former business manager
with the Ove Arup office and friend of the Smithsons, who owned a
weekend home in Ansty Plum close to the Smithsons’ Upper Lawn
pavillion, described how Alison and Peter Smithson would make
such visits into truly archaelogical expeditions each armed with
two cameras hanging from their shoulders.21 Yet, this continuation
of the tradition of northern interest in the Mediterranean and the
reappropriations of its vernacular and ancient history through
twentieth century tourism is but the wider, generic cultural
framework. With regard to the Smithsons’ interest in the ordinary
and the ‘simple life’ there are two biographical aspects that should
also be mentioned here: the Smithsons’ upbringing and their
parents, and the experience of war.
That the notion of the ordinary was intrinsically intertwined with

the issue of ethics of architecture was something the Smithsons
were acutely aware of. When confronted by the Dutch-Flemish
historian Wouter Vanstiphout who held that Smithson and his
generation had ‘loaded architecture with a lot of social pretense’
Peter Smithson responded that this was ‘an inheritance’,
and a ‘very deep thing’:
‘The architects of the Gothic Revival believed that the Gothic style
18 ‘The New Brutalism’, in: Ar- was pure in a moral and philosophical and religious sense, therefore
chitectural Design, January 1955.
19 Alison Smithson, Imprint of they were building in the Gothic style. In Oxford you even find
India, AA publications, London,
1994.
ordinary row houses built in Venetian Gothic, under the influence of
20 Middleton, 1971, p. 82. Ruskin. Architecture was regarded a moral force; people would have
21 In conversation with the better lives with it. The direct influence of Ruskin, through William
author during a visit to Ansty
Plum, August 2003. Morris, was alive in my parents’ morality. Therefore, though it began
dvdh10PRINT.indd 64 21-04-13 16:56

in the 1840s, it hadn’t died out until probably the thirties or forties
of this century. You see the Renaissance was the same; architecture
was a force to change society. And certainly, as far as the courts were
concerned, it worked. There was more gentle, thoughtful culture.
Remember, this is all an exaggeration. You could say that was the
beginning of their decline; it was probably the same with the Van der
Leeuws. Yes, we continue to load architecture with that notion. But
we didn’t invent it.’ 22
Alison’s call for the simple life well done perfectly built on this,
too. Indeed, her father’s education under William Lethaby at
the Royal College must have had a tremendous influence, quite
comparable to the influence of Peter’s parents and their morality,
which stemmed from William Morris as remarked by Smithson
himself. Lethaby’s ideas on design resonate all too clearly in
Alison’s phrase of the ‘well done’. According to Lethaby the source
of true art was found in common labour; as he put it in 1917, ‘a
work of art is a well-made boot, a well-made chair, a well-made
picture’.23 And in 1920 he stated that ‘design (...) is simply the
arranging how work shall be well done’, and that ‘high utility and
liberal convenience for noble life are enough for architecture’.24
The Arts and Crafts legacy was not an explicit reference for the
Smithsons in their writings, but its moral values regarding design
(and not so much its formal inventions), including the view on
how architecture was embedded in the production of the domestic
and domestic goods, was a strong albeit implicit force in the
Smithsons’ thinking. Why the indebtedness to Arts and Crafts
thinking was suppressed by the Smithsons in their writings is a
matter of speculation. Next to the one biographical reference to
Alison’s father being trained by Lethaby, and the interview of 1999,
there is one other remark, between brackets, in the 1972 lecture on
22 Wouter Vanstiphout, ‘Mart
Stam’s Trousers. A Conversa- ‘Architecture as Townbuilding’ by Peter referring to William Morris:
tion between Peter Smithson &
Wouter Vanstiphout’, in: Crimson ‘(Where others see “News from Nowhere” as about socialism,
with Michael Speakes and Gerard
Haddes (eds.), Mart Stam’s I see it as about sensibility.)’ 25
Scenes of Dutch Moral Moder-
nism, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, A first, obvious suggestion why any reference to the Arts and
1999, p. 134.
23 W.R. Lethaby, Form in Civili-
Crafts was suppressed might be the way William Morris cum suis
zation. Collected papers on Art was already appropriated by Pevsner and the defenders of the
and Labour, Oxford University
Press, 1957, second edition with New Empiricism, in the pages of the Review, but also within the
a Foreword by Lewis Mumford,
pp. 171-180; original edition 1922. LCC architecture department. Also the association of the Arts
24 Ibid., p. 7 and 9. and Crafts with the Garden City movement and how the planning
25 Peter Smithson, ‘Architec-
ture as Townbuilding – The Slow
of the post-war New Towns were based on its ideology must have
Growth of Another Sensibility’, made a straightforward discussion of the affinities with Arts
typoscript of lecture in the Smith-
son archive, p. 3. and Crafts notions most problematic for the younger architects
dvdh10PRINT.indd 65 21-04-13 16:56

who were vociferous critics of the way the New Towns were
planned. Next to Morris, John Ruskin was occasionally mentioned
by the Smithsons, but rather as a general cultural reference,
not quite as support of one’s own argument.26 Still, Lethaby
seems to be the crucial connection, not just because he taught
Alison’s father but because of his writings, especially the proto-
Functionalist argument which he provided in the texts compiled
in Form in Civilization. Collected Papers on Art and Labour,
originally published in 1922, republished in 1957 with a foreword
by Lewis Mumford.27 As a younger representative of the Arts
and Crafts Lethaby also held a much more positive appreciation
of modernization and industrialization (albeit still ambiguous
perhaps) than the older Ruskin and Morris.28 In a text from 1920,
‘Housing and Furnishing’, he stated for instance:
‘Housing, of course, is not merely a cottage question; it is an
immense national question and also an immediately individual
question in which we should all be decidedly interested. (...)
Our aim should be to develop a fine tradition of living in houses.
It is a matter for experiment, like flying. We should seek to improve
in detail point by point. (...) Exquisite living on a small scale is
the ideal. “House-like” should express as much as “ship-shape”.
Our airplanes and motors and even bicycles are in their way perfect.
We need to bring this ambition for perfect solutions into housing
of all sorts and scales.
26 For instance, in the same 1972
lecture there is also an apprecia- (...) A motor-car is built with thought for “style”, that is finish
tive reference to Ruskin and how
he looked at Bath, on p. 2. and elegance, but it is not built to look like a sedan chair or a
27 Although there are quite a few stage coach.’ 29
of publications on Lethaby avai-
lable the profound impact of his
teachings remain underestima-
ted; see for more: Julius Posener
And:
(ed.), Anfänge des Funktionalis- ‘We must aim at getting the small house as perfect as the bicycle.’ 30
mus. Von Arts and Crafts zum
Deutschen Werkbund, Bauwelt
Fundamente Vol. 11, Verlag
Ullstein, Berlin, 1964; Charlotte The issue of style was called a ‘superstition’ and a ‘chief
Vestal Brown, W.R. Lethaby: Ar-
chitecture as Process. Implicati-
obstruction’ to arrive at ‘having better houses’. If style had to be
ons for a Methodology of History a matter of concern to architects, it should be ‘an efficiency style’
and Criticism, Ph.D.-dissertation,
University of North Carolina, that was a substitute for the ‘trivial, sketchy picturesqueness’ of
1974; Sylvia Backemeyer, Theresa
Gronberg (eds.), WR Lethaby the ‘style imitations and what the Americans call period design’.31
1857-1931. Architecture, Design
and Education, Lund Humphries,
Any sort of formalism was to be rejected, as already stated
London, 1984; Godfrey Rubens, by Lethaby in 1915 in a talk for the new Design and Industries
William Richard Lethaby. His Life
and Work 1857-1931, The Architec- Association, co-founded by himself and partly modelled on the
tural Press, London, 1986.
28 Lethaby was born in 1857,
example of the German Werkbund:
Ruskin in 1819, Morris in 1834. ‘Design is not some curious contortion of form, or some super-
29 W.R. Lethaby, 1957, pp. 29-30.
added atrocity, but it should rather be conceived of as the fitting of
30 Ibid. p. 33.
31 Ibid. p. 30. means to ends in the production of works which are good each in
32 Ibid. p. 41. their own order.’ 32
dvdh10PRINT.indd 66 21-04-13 16:56

This was said when the Great War had just started, and the
German-English exchanges between the pre-modernist architects
of the Arts and Crafts and the Werkbund were disrupted. Five
years later in 1920 – war had ended and revolution scourged the
Continent in its aftermath – the moral imperative had become
even stronger and Lethaby defined architecture now as:
‘a living, progressive structural art, always readjusting itself to
changing conditions of time and place. If it is true it must ever be
new. This, however, not with a willed novelty, which is as bad as,
or worse than, triumphal antiquarianism, but by response to force
majeure. The vivid interest and awe with which men look on a ship
or an engine, an old cottage or a haystack, come from the sense of
their reality.’ 33
These notions of Lethaby prefigured the Brutalist ethic of the

1950s and the call for an ‘architecture of reality’ as propounded by
the Smithsons. These notions were most radical in a time when
a Beaux Arts training for architects was still the norm of course,
and they were to have a profound impact on design education in
England through Lethaby’s teachings at the Royal College and
the Central School of Arts and Crafts, which he founded in 1896.
The latter in particular, seems crucial, since in the first years after
the Second World War the Central School was to become one of
the original meeting places of the Independent Group members,
next to the Slade School of Art and before they would meet at
the ICA from 1952 onward. Lethaby’s methodology was aimed at
reconnecting the design with the actual production; designers
and craftsmen should work together, so that designers better
understand the craft behind the making the very things they would
design. In his talk for the RIBA, ‘Education of the Architect’ of
1917, he called a ‘real school of architecture’ the kind of school
where ‘the young craftsman, builder, and architect would work
together’.34 Only from this a ‘true’ and ‘living’ architecture and
art could grow. This is a common art shared and produced by all,
an intrinsic part of the everyday life of ordinary people – a popular
or even democratic kind of art, although Lethaby would not use
such words. He would say:
‘What I mean by art, then, is not the affair of a few but of everybody.
It is order, tidiness, the right way of making things and the right way
of doing things’.35
And:
33 Ibid. p. 6.
34 Ibid. pp. 103-104. ‘This common art (...) is concerned with all the routine things
35 Ibid. p. 15. of life – laying the breakfast table and cleaning the door-steps of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 67 21-04-13 16:56

our houses, tidying up our railway stations, and lighting the High
Streets of our towns.’ 36
At another occasion Lethaby mentioned how ‘common art (...)

is concerned with all the ordinary things of life’.37
Still, as much as they relied on such Arts and Crafts notions and
built on the moral lessons of the spokesmen of the movement,
the Smithsons’ interest in the ordinary and what they called a
‘new seeing of the ordinary’ must eventually be situated in its
connection with the experience of the Second World War and
the subsequent years of scarcity before a new sort of consumer
society arrived in England and Western Europe in the mid-1950s.
Although others, most notably Beatriz Colomina, have pointed
out the importance of the wartime experience as well, until
now, this has been most clearly argued for by cultural theorist
Ben Highmore.38 Whereas Colomina highlights the interrelations
between new concepts of domesticity and the strategies of total
mobilization, Highmore’s contribution foregrounds the connection
between wartime experience, the interest in the everyday as
a source of innovation, and the ethical imperative directing
Brutalist aesthetics.
36 Ibid. p. 115.
37 Ibid. p. 125.
As noted, in post-war London the bombsites formed an
38 Ben Highmore, ‘Rough Poetry:
Patio and Pavilion Revisited’, in: impressive part of the urban fabric, and nagging evidence of
Oxford Art Journal, nr. 2, 2006, pp.
269-290; and Ben Highmore, ‘Res- the fragility of ordinary, daily life when under consistent attack
cuing Optimism from Oblivion’,
in: Max Risselada, Dirk van den from a modern war machine. This was also very different from
Heuvel (eds.), Team 10. In Search the event of the Great War, the First World War, which was on the
of a Utopia of the Present 1953-
1981, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, Continent and left the island at least physically untouched; not so
2005, pp. 271-275. For Colomina’s
investigations into the relations in the case of the Second World War. The country and its capital
between war and twentieth cen-
tury domesticity see her Domesti- had only narrowly escaped complete collapse during the Blitz of
city at War, Actar, Barcelona 2006, 1940-1941. In his rereadings of the Independent Group history and
and Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie
Brennan, Jeannie Kim (eds.), the work of the Smithsons and their artist friends Henderson and
Cold War Hothouses. Inventing
Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Paolozzi, Ben Highmore has suggested that wartime experience
Playboy, Princeton Architectural
Press, New York, 2004. had profoundly and irreversibly changed the meaning of the
39 As is well-known, this has ordinary and the everyday. On the one hand the ordinary had lost
become one of the key tropes of
English identity; during the IRA the comfortable feeling of the things one took for granted, while
bombings of the 1970s and later,
as well as more recently with the
on the other hand, keeping up daily routines, getting on with life
Al Qaeda attacks in 2005, the under threat of total annihilation had also become something of
stoicism of the English and the
Londoners was once again poin- an heroic act of resistance, but then without the expressions that
ted out in the many news reports.
Highmore also demonstrates normally come with such heroism. ‘Keep calm, and carry on’ was
the more ambiguous view on this
notion ‘to keep on keeping on’ re-
the famously stoic government war slogan during the bombings
ferring to George Orwell and Sa- of London.39 From this perspective Highmore speaks of an
muel Beckett, see Ben Highmore,
‘Rough Poetry’, pp. 275-276. ‘obligation toward the ordinary’, and the ‘fabrication of a practice
dvdh10PRINT.indd 68 21-04-13 16:56

that is simultaneously critical and generative’.40 Out of the ruins
a new optimism was to be rescued. To Highmore the everyday
should be regarded as a locus of both trauma and hope.
The Smithsons’ collages of the early 1950s, their Golden Lane

housing scheme and their Coventry cathedral competition entry,
captured this most dramatically.41 In the Golden Lane collages
we see a new, white and transparent city emerge out of the
rubble of the devastated city. The exact relationship between the
two is suspended. Looking at those collages, it is as if the new
architecture is not simply going to replace the old society, it is
projected onto the ruins enjoying its own liberated, autonomous
geometry, the very distance between the two worlds acting as a
generative principle. Looking at the figures pasted into the new
post-war landscape of Golden Lane, the inhabitants seem very
different from any parochial English character; the first prime
minister of independent India, Nehru, appears in the ‘streets-in-
the-air’, just as French and American movie stars, Gérard Philipe
and Marilyn Monroe together with Joe DiMaggio, recognition of the
new post-war reality of a country that had lost its colonial empire,
and that culturally speaking was invaded by both American and
Continental sensibilities.
Wartime experience consistently emerges in the work of the

Smithsons, as when they explained their interest in the ordinary
and the As Found aesthetic they derived from it. Peter Smithson,
in an interview with Kester Rattenbury as late as 2002, explained:
‘I was thinking yesterday about the war itself. There’s a little school
on the corner, Bousefield School, where a landmine was dropped
40 Highmore does so by referring on Beatrix Potter’s house. How is it that you can train an eighteen-
to Michel de Certeau’s writings, year-old to drop a bomb on Beatrix Potter’s house? It’s unimaginable.
see: Ben Highmore, ‘Obligation
to the Ordinary: Michel de Cer- I mean – incredible cruelty propounded as normality. If you can’t
teau, Ethnography and Ethics’,
in: Strategies, Vol. 14, no. 2, 2001, imagine the condition of that boy who dropped the bomb, you can’t
pp. 253-263.
also imagine the period of the “as found”. It’s just as removed, just
41 See also Ben Highmore,
‘Rough Poetry’, p. 283. as difficult to reconstruct.’ 42
42 ‘Think of It as a Farm! Exhi-
bitions, Books, Buildings. An
Interview with Peter Smithson’, Regarding the As Found, the Smithsons’ friendship with fellow
in: Kester Rattenbury (ed.). This
Is Not Architecture. Media Con- Independent Group members Nigel Henderson and Eduardo
structions, Routledge, London,
2002, p. 96. Paolozzi were formative, including their wartime experience –
43 These biographical data Henderson being traumatized as a fighter pilot, Paolozzi through
can be found at various places;
Highmore recounts them for his imprisonment after the death of his father, an Italian migrant,
instance in his ‘Rough Poetry’,
for a biography on Henderson see
who made the mistake of having a picture of Mussolini in his
Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson. shop in Edinburgh, for which he was imprisoned on a boat that
Parallel of Life and Art, Thames &
Hudson, London, 2001. was subsequently sunk by a German U-boat.43 Alison and Peter
dvdh10PRINT.indd 69 21-04-13 16:56

Smithson attributed their way of seeing the ordinary and their
As Found aesthetic to Henderson in particular, although Paolozzi’s
collage work and sculpture must have been tremendously influential,
too.44 The Smithsons would go as far as to state that Henderson
taught them a whole new way of looking at things around them.
He did so with his photographs of street life, his collages and the
walks they undertook together in the working class neighbourhoods
of East London, where Henderson resided and which had suffered
most from the Blitz. The Smithsons in 1990 said:
‘In architecture, the “as found” aesthetic was something we thought
we named in the early 1950s when we first knew Nigel Henderson
and saw in his photographs a perceptive recognition of the actuality
around his house in Bethnal Green: children’s pavement play-
graphics; repetition of “kind” in doors used as site hoardings;
the items in the detritus on bombed sites, such as the old boot,
heaps of nails, fragments of sack or mesh and so on.’ 45
And explaning the ‘As Found’ as both critical and generative,

44 Only recently the connections
between New Brutalism and Edu- they stated:
ardo Paolozzi’s work were subject ‘… the “as found” was a new seeing of the ordinary, an openness as
of research, see the special issue
of October, nr. 136, Spring 2011, to how prosaic “things” could re-energise our inventive activity.’ 46
edited by Alex Kitnick and Hal
Foster, and the PhD Thesis by
Kitnick, Eduardo Paolozzi and
Others, 1947-1958, Princeton As will be demonstrated in the following chapters, this idea of
University, November 2010; Nigel ‘re-energising’ or regeneration was key to the Smithsons project
Henderson’s work and its rela-
tions to the New Brutalism and for modern architecture, the house and the city, where each
Alison and Peter Smithson was
the subject of Victoria Walsh’s moment of modern life held the possibility of a new beginning.
book of 2001.
45 Alison and Peter Smith-
“Found”’, in: David Robbins
(ed.), The Independent Group.
Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics
of Plenty, MIT press, Cambridge The Everyday in Recent Architectural Criticism
MA, London, 1990, pp. 201-202.
46 Ibid.
The notions of re-energizing and invention identified by the
47 Henri Lefebvre, ‘L’urbanisme
aujourd’hui: Mythes et réalités: Smithsons with the ordinary seem to bring them close to the French
Débat entre Henri Lefebvre, Jean
Balladur et Michel Ecochard’ philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), just as
in: Henri Lefebvre, Du rural à
l’urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 1970, Lefebvre’s definition of dwelling as appropriation seems akin to
p. 222; as quoted in: Lukasz the Smithsons’ position, in Lefebvre’s words: ‘For an individual, for
Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space:
Architecture, Urban Research, and a group, to inhabit is to appropriate something (...) making it one’s
the Production of Theory, Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2011. own’.47 Yet, from a historiographical point of view this observation
48 In his Henri Lefebvre on Space must be measured against the various discursive contexts at stake.48
Lukasz Stanek demonstrates how
Lefebvre’s ideas were formulated Moreover, Lefebvre’s definition of appropriation assumed conflict
in the French context of a debate
that was polarised between the in the first place, whereas the Smithsons’ view could be best
models of the grands ensem-
bles on the one hand, and the
described as built on an idea of accommodation. Still, Lefebvre’s
‘petit-bourgeois’ desire for (semi) work has enjoyed a revival in architecture theory for quite a
detached housing, the so-called
pavillon model, on the other hand. couple of years now, and has become the common reference in an
dvdh10PRINT.indd 70 21-04-13 16:56

international debate regarding the interrelations of the everyday
and architecture. This revival ran parallel – and probably not
incidentally – to a renewed interest in the post-war avant-gardes,
including the Independent Group and the work of the Smithsons.49
It was the American art historian Hal Foster who was one of the
first, if not the first indeed, to point to what he called the ‘return
of the real’ and the ‘ethnographic turn’ in late twentieth century
avant-garde practices.50 The revival of the everyday and the parallel
rereadings of the post-war avant-gardes, also in architecture circles,
neatly fit this return to the real including the resurgent interest in
anthropology and sociology and the concomitant redefinitions of the
object, authorship, subjectivity and agency, something that is still
very much part of today’s discourse, if not at its heart.51
American theorist Mary McLeod has written an insightful

essay (published in 1997) on Lefebvre’s notion of the everyday,
49 The publications on the Inde- both (re-)introducing his ideas to an architecture audience and
pendent Group include: David
Robbins (ed.), The Independent contextualizing his slightly shifting position from the 1920s until
Group. Postwar Britain and the his death in 1991. One of the things highlighted by McLeod is how
Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT press,
Cambridge MA, London, 1990; in Lefebvre’s view everyday life ‘harbors the desire that generates
Anne Massey, The Independent
Group, Modernism and Mass transformation. Nature, love, simple domestic pleasures,
Culture in Britain, 1945-59,
Manchester University Press, celebrations, and holidays all erode any prospect of total, static
Manchester, 1995; Modern systematization’. According to McLeod the value of Lefebvre’s
Dreams. The Rise and Fall and Rise
of Pop, MIT Press, Cambridge thinking would lie in his ‘emphasis on the concrete and the real,
MA, 1988; Claude Lichtenstein,
Thomas Schregenberger (eds.), the humble and the ordinary, as reservoirs of transformation’.52
As Found. The Discovery of the
Ordinary, Lars Müller Publishers,
Baden, 2001; my own research Until the 1990s, in architectural criticism the ‘everyday’ was hardly
also fits this revival with various
publications in Oase, nr. 51, used as an explicit category. ‘Vernacular’ and ‘popular’ were the
1999 (editorial), and in Oase,
nr. 59, 2002 (‘As Found: The more conventional terms. The terms do not cover the same fields,
Metamorphosis of the Everyday.
On the Work of Nigel Henderson, but they do overlap, especially with regard to the identification of
Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and practices assumed to be outside of and parallel to modernism,
Peter Smithson (1953-1956)’).
50 Hal Foster, The Return of modern architecture and the conditions of modernity. And although
the Real. The Avant-Garde at the
End of the Century, MIT Press,
pertaining to phenomena outside modernism, the terms
Cambridge MA, 1996, especially themselves are constituents of the larger modernist discourse.
the chapters 5 and 6; Hal Foster,
Design and Crime (and Other Dia- Within the discourse, the terms of the everyday, vernacular, and
tribes), Verso, London, 2002.
popular are generally used to resituate the conditions of modernity
51 One could think of the work
of Bruno Latour, or the journal and modernism’s various practices, not unlike the (so worn-
Footprint, nr. 4, ‘Agency in Archi-
tecture: Reframing Criticality in out) polarity of tradition and modernity, which still remains a
Theory and Practice, Spring 2009,
TU Delft, www.footprintjournal. key rhetorical firgute in the architectural debate. The everyday,
org. vernacular, and popular are used to try to define what escapes the
52 Mary McLeod, ‘Henri Lefeb-
vre’s Critique of Everyday Life: mechanisms of modernity and capitalist production, the largely
An Introduction’, in: Steven
Harris, Deborah Berke (eds.),
anonymous and assumedly spontaneous patterns of community
Architecture of the Everyday, and family life, inhabitation, festive uses of the city, of rural
Princeton Architectural Press,
New York, 1997, pp. 9-29. communities or so-called non-western and pre-modern societies.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 71 21-04-13 16:56

Charles Jencks, in his ‘Evolutionary Tree to the Year 2000’ (of 1969),
lumped all these together under the category of ‘unself-conscious’
(a term borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss), which was assumed
to encompass 80% of the built environment and, of course most
characteristic of Jencks’s position, this entailed largely capitalist
and so-called state-capitalist production itself, the ultimate
modern vernacular if one were to follow the American-English
historian of postmodernism in architecture.53 More commonly
understood though, vernacular refers to the collection of practices
and production that fell (and fall) outside of modern, capitalist
logic, and pertain to pre- or non-modern communities. Popular as
a term in the architecture discourse usually refers to the modern
age and is rooted in 19th century discussions in Europe on culture
and identity in relation to the invention of the nation state vis-
à-vis processes of modernization, including the issue of class.
Part of the underlying presumption, and why the terms are used
to resituate modernism itself, is the assumption that authenticity
and authentic meaning and identity are identified with the popular,
vernacular, or the everyday – rightly or wrongly. Authentic meaning
and identity emerge from the unself-conscious, from the fleeting,
yet repetitive and cyclical patterns of life, and not from the
artificially fabricated, which comes with capitalist production and
the modern consumer society, nor from its educated and cultured
lifestyle classes.
When in the late 1990s, the notion of the everyday gained wide
currency in architectural circles, the terms of the popular and
vernacular were largely abandoned.54 This was probably for two
reasons. First, vernacular and popular more or less lost their
critical purposes after the postmodernist debates of the 1970s and
1980s. The everyday offered the possibility of continueing some of
the initial social and ideological concerns that were part of those
53 Charles Jencks, Architecture
debates. At the same time the everyday was used to depart from
2000 and Beyond. Success in the the postmodernist turn to disciplinary autonomy under the guises
Art of Prediction, Wiley Academy,
London, 2000, pp. 46-47. of neo-rationalism, post-structuralism and its various formalist
54 The term is currently revived elaborations in favour of a renewed engagement with social
through historical, postcolonial
studies esp. with regard to the concerns. The urge to once again bring up issues of sociology and
sources of the development of
modern architecture, see for politics in relation to architecture and planning was encouraged
instance Modern Architecture and
the Mediterranean. Vernacular Dia- by the publication of the 1991 translation of Henri Lefebvre’s well-
logues and Contested Identities, known Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (1947), supported by the much
edited by Jean-François Lejeune
and Michelangelo Sabatino, earlier translation of his La Production de l’Espace (1974).55 During
Routledge, London, 2010.
55 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la
the 1990s, Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life would become the
vie quotidienne, Grasset, Paris, main reference for most of the studies into the relation between
1947; La production de l’espace,
Anthropos, Paris, 1974. the everyday and architectural discourse.56 The book is by now
dvdh10PRINT.indd 72 21-04-13 16:56

relatively well integrated into (parts of) architectural discourse,
at first through the American academia, and shortly thereafter
through the European as well.57 Lefebvre’s interest in urban space
as a site for social and political engagement – embodied by his
famous Le droit à la ville of 1968 and La production de l’espace of
1974 – adds to the firm, central position of his thinking in current
architectural debates.58 Another reason for the renewed interest
in Lefebvre’s position was and is due to his connections with
radical (neo-)avant-garde groups, such as the Surrealists, the
Situationist International and Utopie, and his involvement in
the 1968 student revolts. Lefebvre thus represents a very real
bridge between the sociological, political discourse and avant-
garde architecture production.
Still, despite the central position that is given to Lefebvre’s

thinking in this discourse on the everyday and architecture,
the possible connections between his work and the problematic
of architectural practice remain rather elusive, not to mention
the risk of the construction of a meta-historical discourse of
the everyday and architecture itself. Basically, this troubled
connection arises from Lefebvre’s dialectic understanding of
the everyday. To Lefebvre the everyday held a double potential:
it is the realm of continuous alienation of the human subject
(through the relentless processes of modernization, capitalist
rationalization and commodification resulting in routine and
56 Besides Lefebvre, mention
should be made of Michel de boredom of a mechanized world, and the obliteration of the
Certeau and his seminal work, very everydayness of everyday life), as well as the realm of
L’invention du quotidien, Vol. 1,
Arts de faire (1974), which also possible moments of critique, that might become moments of
regained some attention being
already translated into English dialectically overcoming this very alienation, such as the moment
by 1984 as The Practice of Every-
day Life. of the popular fête, or festival. Attending to the everyday and its
57 See for instance Kanishka multitude of moments by which it is constituted, then becomes
Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer,
Richard Milgrom, and Christian an ethical imperative. By devising ways of attending to everyday
Schmid (eds.), Space, Difference,
Everyday Life. Reading Henri
life ways of transformation might be opened up.59 Architectural
Lefebvre, Routledge, New York, practice and production and their larger dispositif (to use
2008; latest fruit is Lukasz
Stanek’s Henri Lefebvre on Space. Foucault’s term), how these are embedded in power structures and
Architecture, Urban Reserach,
and the Production of Theory, how they reproduce those, are conventionally situated on the side
University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2011.
of alienation, not its revolutionary overcoming. Perhaps inherently
58 For a discussion of Lefebvre’s contradictorily then, within the multifarious interpretations of the
ideas regarding dwelling and ur-
ban space: Lukasz Stanek, 2011. Lefebvrean conception of the everyday two different approaches
59 Next to McLeod’s reading in architecture can be discerned, one concerned with pragmatics
of Lefebvre, I largely follow
Ben Highmore: see his ‘Henri and one with poetics, and which seem to be considered under
Lefebvre’s Dialectics of Everyday
Life’, in: Ben Highmore, Everyday
consistent negotiation in the actual architecture project.
Life and Cultural Theory. An Intro-
duction, Routledge, London 2002,
pp. 113-144.
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Publications of the late 1990s that attempted to operationalise
the notion of the everyday in such ways were, among others,
Architecture of the Everyday (1997) by Steven Harris and Deborah
Berke, and Everyday Urbanism (1999) by Margaret Crawford and
John Kaliski.60 In his introductory text Harris positioned the
new interest in the everyday against the ‘virtual abandonment of
architecture’s social and political ambitions and the estrangement
of direct experience from architectural discourse’. And he
continued: ‘Textual “readings” of the architectural project and a
tendency toward formal hermeticism exacerbated the alienation
of architecture from lived experience’.61 Crawford, too, equalled
the everyday with Lefebvre’s concept of ‘lived experience’ stating
that ‘lived experience should be more important than physical
form in defining the city’. According to her the issue at stake was
not ‘to make beautiful cities or well-managed cities, it is to make
a work of life’.62 This ethical stance was entirely in line with the
champion of everyday city life, the American writer Jane Jacobs,
who opposed any (neo-)avant-gardist approach toward the
city and its planning. In her seminal The Death and Life of Great
American Cities of 1961 Jacobs provokingly addressed designers
stating that ‘a city cannot be a work of art’.63 Eventually, it is also
60 Other publications include: in contrast with the Lefebvrean project itself, the revolutionary
‘The Everyday’, a special issue of
the German magazine Daidalos fervour of 1968, and his slogan ‘Let everyday life be a work of art!’.64
(nr. 75, 2000); Alan Read (ed.),
Architecturally Speaking. Prac- Apparently, this part of his legacy is not valid for these specific
tices of Art, Architecture and the
Everyday, Routledge, London and
reactualizations by current theorists.
New York, 2000; Lynn Gumpert
(ed.), The Art of the Everyday. The
Quotidian in Postwar French Cul- In contrast to these pragmatist American positions one also
ture, New York University Press,
New York, 1997. finds examples that continue the idea of merging everyday
61 Steven Harris, ‘Everyday life and art through a practice of poetry that is derived from
Architecture’, in: Harris, Berke
(eds.), Architecture of the Every- the everyday, although not quite as revolutionary as the early
day, p. 2.
avant-gardes might have wanted it. In this regard two Swiss
62 Margaret Crawford, ‘Introduc-
tion’, in: Chase, Crawford, Kaliski publications deserve some of our attention here: As Found. The
(eds.), p. 10.
63 Jane Jacobs, The Death and
Discovery of the Ordinary (2001) edited by Claude Lichtenstein
Life of Great American Cities, and Thomas Schregenberger, and Complex Ordinariness (2002) by
1961, Vintage Books edition,
December 1992, p. 372. Bruno Krucker.65 Quite remarkably, both studies take the work of
64 As quoted in Highmore, p. 130; the Smithsons as their point of departure, especially their idea
Mary McLeod deems Lefebvre
less revolutionary in comparison of the As Found. Krucker looks exclusively at the Smithsons’
with the Situationist Internati-
onal. work, while considering their Upper Lawn weekend home to be
65 Claude Lichtenstein, Thomas the most enigmatic project of the Smithsons’ approach toward
Schregenberger (eds.), As Found.
The Discovery of the Ordinary, the ordinary. Lichtenstein and Schregenberger’s study include
Lars Müller Publishers, Baden,
2001; Bruno Krucker, Complex Or- a range of examples from British art and architecture from the
dinariness. The Upper Lawn Pavi-
lion by Alison and Peter Smithson,
1950s. Both studies don’t look into sociological issues, but rather
GTA Verlag, ETH Zürich, 2002. re-investigate the everyday from an ethical-aesthetical design
Both publication accompanied
exhibitions. perspective without properly defining what is considered as
dvdh10PRINT.indd 74 21-04-13 16:56

‘ordinary’. Throughout, the two realms of ethics and aesthetics are
consistently intertwined. The scrupulous editorial selections are
nothing less than an attempt to revive the Brutalist programme
as defined by the Smithsons in the 1950s, yet under very different,
historical circumstances, but still with a profound interest for
that ‘which is’, for ‘reality’, for the ‘here and now’, ‘the real and
the ordinary’ including all that is considered to be the ‘unfit’.66
By aptly foregrounding the As Found as an ‘approach’ and not so
much a method, the editors succeed in updating the As Found
by inserting the selected black and white photos of 1950s British
art with high-class Swiss architecture of the 1990s (Herzog & de
Meuron among others), albeit in a most modest way. Although
supportive of the whole undertaking, Peter Smithson himself
seemed to have been slightly suspicious of this revival, too. At
the AA School in London, at a seminar held at the occasion of the
publication of the As Found book, he explained that at the time
of origination the idea of the As Found was an important thing,
because the As Found was also a way to make the most of the very
little that was available. The early 1950s were a time of tremendous
scarcity, very different from the society of the late twentieth, early
twenty-first century, which was characterised by an abundance of
possibilities.67
Culture is Ordinary
Whereas current academic discourse holds a preference to

66 Lichtenstein, Schregenberger,
2001, p. 9. construct a connection between Lefebvre and architectural
67 At the AA School in London, practice regarding the issue of the everyday, the contemporary
2 November 2001.
68 As yet, I haven’t come across British discourse seems much more appropriate as well as
any architectural study that looks productive when historicizing the Smithson position, most notably
into the intellectual context of
British cultural studies with that particular tradition of British cultural Marxism as developed
regard to the discourse on the
ordinary and the everyday, not in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and cultural studies.68
even the Anglo-American publi-
cations. One explanation might The work of the writer and critic Raymond Williams, one of the
be that British cultural studies spiritual fathers of British cultural studies and a contemporary
grew out of literary criticism and
not sociology, as in the case of of the Smithsons, holds a crucial position here. To understand
the French tradition, or that other
well-known referent for architects the concept of ordinariness as developed by Alison and
and planners, the Chicago School.
Peter Smithson, as well as the mentality that was behind the
69 Raymond Williams, ‘Culture
is Ordinary’, originally published pursuit of ordinariness, Williams’ writings are as eloquent as they
in: Norman Meckenzie (ed.),
Convictions, MacGibbon and are elucidating, especially the essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958)
Kee, London, 1958; republished
in many later volumes, among
and his more extensive studies Culture and Society (1958),
others in: Ben Highmore (ed.), The Long Revolution (1961) and The Country and the City (1973).69
The Everyday Life Reader, Rout-
ledge, London, 2002, pp. 92-100. At the same time, it should be noted that we are again looking at
dvdh10PRINT.indd 75 21-04-13 16:56

parallel projects, even though the Smithsons did refer to Williams,
albeit as late as the 1970s.70
A first observation would be that the Smithsons themselves just like

Williams did not use the term ‘everyday’, but spoke of the ‘ordinary’,
a first hint that the ‘ordinariness’ the Smithsons wrote so much
about, is part of a tradition different from the French one. With
regard to the current discourse on the everyday based on French
theory, another observation would be that the Smithsons didn’t refer
to the French intellectual discourse at all. They made few, sparse
references to French novels, film and painting, but none whatsoever
to the then so fashionable thinkers, the intellectual heavy-weights
such as Sartre or Barthes, let alone Lefebvre. The occasional
reference the Smithsons made to the general cultural discourse
outside the realm of architecture were usually of English or
American origin, and usually these were from mainstream authors,
such as Karl Popper and his idea of an open society, the sociologists
Michael Young and Peter Wilmott and their famous Family and
Kinship in East London, Kenneth Galbraith for his The Affluent
Society, or William Whyte for The Organization Man. The Smithsons
would almost casually insert these references in their own writings,
their function being to point out their intellectual affinities, rather
than rigourously reconceptualizing a political-philosophical
discourse. It may be noted too, that this was quite in contrast with
the way they consistently and precisely rethought the discourse of
their own profession, and that of modern architecture in particular.
To situate the Smithsons in the debates on either the everyday or

the ordinary then is to speak of affinities indeed, or a sensibility,
as they themselves would put it. Here, at this point, British cultural
studies of the second half of the twentieth century and Williams’
writings in particular, provide the historical and contextual
background for a better understanding of the specific Smithsons’
sensibility, especially since Williams forged a crucial connection
between culture and the ordinary when explaining the English
identity of the twentieth century and the condition of modernity.
Williams distinguished two meanings that according to him
were always simultaneously at work, both the high-brow, ‘elitist’
70 Alison Smithson, ‘The Violent
Consumer, or Waiting for the meaning, as well as ‘a whole way of life’, he wrote:
Goodies’, in: Architectural De- ‘We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way
sign, May 1974, pp. 274-279.
71 Raymond Williams, ‘Culture of life – the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning –
is Ordinary’, 1958, republished in:
Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday
the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers
Life Reader, Routledge, London, reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both,
2002, pp. 92-100, for quote see
p. 93. and on the significance of their conjunction.’ 71
dvdh10PRINT.indd 76 21-04-13 16:56

The double meaning attached to culture – the common, as well
as discovery and creativity, and both of equal importance – was
close to the double meaning the Smithsons sought to deliver when
they said that things needed to be both ordinary and heroic, both
ordinary and poetic Williams’ double meaning also came close to
the double meaning the Independent Group deployed in its attempt
to reverse hierarchies and seek a new ‘continuum’ between the
popular and the fine arts as formulated by Lawrence Alloway.72
However, once again, it must be stressed we are not looking at
an unified project here. For instance, the almost carefree way
of absorbing American culture by Independent Group members
differed substantially from the anti-Americanism prevalent in the
circles of British cultural studies, in which the general view was
that commercial American culture (the Hollywood film industry
for instance) perverted authentic British working class culture,
most notably in the case of Williams’ colleagues Richard Hoggart
and E.P. Thompson who entertained a much more orthodox neo-
Marxism compared to Williams.
For Williams, to deploy the term ‘culture’ was a deliberate

discursive strategy within the Marxist discourse of British cultural
studies; in doing so he succeeded in ridding himself of the
category of ‘ideology’. His classic Culture and Society (1780-1950)
of the same year as the essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’, and which
discussed the five terms art, class, democracy, culture and industry
and their interrelatedness, was consciously framed to move away
from orthodox Marxist doctrine and terminology such as base
and superstructure. After all, Williams, who was a member of the
Communist party in his younger years, was not a revolutionary, he
was a reformist. For this, he would be heavily criticized from within
British cultural studies. He was pejoratively called a ‘culturalist’,
and Thompson would state that culture was not a ‘whole way of
life’, but a ‘whole way of struggle’. To the neo-Marxist position the
‘culturalist’ approach of Williams was taking too distant a position
72 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Arts
and the Mass Media’, in: Archi- when speaking of the ‘long revolution’, while glossing over the
tectural Design, February 1958, immediate conflict and strife at stake.73
pp. 84-85, and: ‘The Long Front of
Culture’, in: Cambridge Opinion,
nr. 17, 1959.
73 I follow Dennis Dworkin here,
Were Alison and Peter Smithson culturalists in the vein of
see: Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Williams? Yes and no, of course. First, the Smithsons never even
Marxism in Postwar Britain. Histo-
ry, the New Left, and the Origins of flirted with Marxism, at times they would try to maintain a firm
Cultural Studies, Duke University
Press, Durham and London, 1997; a-political stance, but never quite succeeded in doing so, since
E.P. Thompson’s quote is from
his book review of Raymond Wil-
their consistent emphasis on ethics and the role of the architect
liams’ The Long Revolution, 1961, in society at large would raise all sorts of ideological issues,
in: The New Left Review, no. 9,
May-June 1961, pp. 24-33. too. Also, by the early 1940s, culture as a notion to diagnose
dvdh10PRINT.indd 77 21-04-13 16:56

contemporary society had become a widely used concept. For
instance, Lewis Mumford published his Culture of Cities in 1938,
and Ruth Benedict had popularized the term with her Patterns of
Culture of 1934.
Still, between the intellectual trajectories of the Smithsons

and Williams, there are quite a few overlaps to note, starting
with Williams’ concept of culture as ‘a whole way of life’, which
comes very close to the Smithsons’ credo for the New Brutalism:
‘We see architecture as the direct result of a way of life’.74 Some
authors have taken this quote as a plea for a surrealist practice
of architecture, like an écriture automatique, which seems not
wholly unjustified looking at the web of artists’ connections the
Smithsons maintained.75 However, when thinking of the sensibility
or mentality as propounded by the Smithsons, the Brutalist credo
must be understood as being in the first place a ‘culturalist’ one.
In the Smithsons’ writings the ‘whole way of life’ re-appears as
‘the whole problem of human associations and the relationship
that building and community form has to them’.76
The American historian Dennis Dworkin gave a lucid and

succinct summary of culturalism and culture as a whole way of life.
He explained that:
‘(...) lifestyle, “the whole way of life”, and culture, (...) was often
referred to (...) as “culturalist.” There were two dimensions to
culturalism. On the one hand, it was a rejection of Marxist economic
determinism. Culturalists saw the social process as a complex result
of economic, political, and cultural determinations, and they insisted
that none of these determinations was primary. On the other hand,
they saw culture in broader terms – as a whole way of life. From this
point of view, culture was the social process itself, economics and
politics constituent parts.’ 77
74 ‘The New Brutalism’, in: Ar-
chitectural Design, January 1955.
75 Irénée Scalbert did so in his The social as process is key, especially with reference to the
essay ‘Toward a Formless Archi- Smithson position – and how they would use this notion for their
tecture: the House of the Future
by A+P Smithson’, in: Archis, own definition of the modern tradition. The notion of the social as
September 1999, pp. 34-47.
process will return later, when discussing the principles of order
manuscript ‘Brutalism A.D.’, 23 at stake in the Smithsons’ rethinking of modern architecture, for
February 1957, published as part
of ‘Thoughts in Progress. The which they built on John Summerson’s propositions for a possible
New Brutalism’, in: Architectural
Design, April 1957, p. 113. theory of modern architecture, among others his suggestion that
77 Dennis Dworkin, 1997, p. 60. ‘the source of unity in modern architecture is in the social sphere,
78 John Summerson, ‘The Case
for a Theory of Modern Architec-
in other words in the architect’s programme’, a programme that
ture’, in: RIBA Journal, June 1957, was summed up as a ‘local fragment of a social pattern’ and a
pp. 307-313; lecture given at the
RIBA, 21 May 1957. ‘process in time’.78 Here, meaning and identity are (re)produced
dvdh10PRINT.indd 78 21-04-13 16:56

and transformed in the ‘long’ or slow unfolding of this process, as
consistently pointed out by Williams. While Williams spoke of the
‘long revolution’ referring to the long term effects of the Industrial
Revolution, Peter Smithson would talk of ‘the slow growth of
another sensibility’, arguing for the coming to terms with what he
called the ‘machine-served society’, Smithson’s idea for the late
twentieth century variant of the early Industrial Revolution.79
Between Williams and the Smithsons another handful of rather

striking similarities can be pointed out. Williams and the
Smithsons viewed modernization as a positive force of progress,
despite its many negative sides, such as pollution, exploitation
and commodification, something that is most important to note
with regard to the postmodern and post-structuralist turn of the
1970s. Both were unequivocally explicit about this; to them positive
effects included a higher standard of living and education for all.
Both mentioned social mobility as well. This positive appreciation
stood in profound contrast with key positions in the French
discourse, including the one of Lefebvre, or the Situationists, who
regarded modernization as a process of continuous alienation.
Partly because of this positive evaluation of the achievements of
modernization, the Smithsons were inclined to take on a reformist
position, rather than a revolutionary one, again similar to Williams.
Incidentally, this also explains why the classic difference between
‘culturalism’ and a so-called ‘progressivism’ in the architecture
discourse of the 1960s and 70s as introduced by Françoise Choay
falls short of the Smithson’s position.80 If one were to follow
Choay the Smithsons could paradoxically be categorized within
both models, their work and thinking including elements of both
a nostalgically regressive existentialism and a forward-looking
positivism, to put it in crude terms.
With regard to working class culture they held an ambiguous

position, the Smithsons more so than Raymond Williams. On
the one hand working class communties were positively held
against the bourgeoisie for such values of ‘neighbourhood, mutual
79 Peter Smithson, lecture given
at Cornell University 1972, inte-
obligation, and common betterment’, as listed by Williams.81
grated in Without Rhetoric, 1973. Yet, there was also a deep aversion to the vulgarity and the
80 Françoise Choay, L’urbanisme.
Utopies et réalités, Le Seuil, cultivation of working class attitudes, the vandalism, and the anti-
Paris, 1966; see also Françoise intellectualism. In the case of Alison and Peter Smithson this
Choay, ‘Urbanism & Semiology’,
in: Charles Jencks and George ambiguous appreciation of working class culture would result in
Baird, Meaning in Architecture,
George Braziler, New York, 1970 profound disappointment with regard to the whole project of the
(original edition 1969), pp. 26-37.
welfare state. By the late 1960s, early 1970s the Smithsons viewed
81 Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’,
1958, p. 96. the initial project of the post-war years as morally perverted and
dvdh10PRINT.indd 79 21-04-13 16:56

they would speak most disdainfully of the ‘Labour Union Society’
and its all-pervasive materialism.82 It is perhaps also at this
point that one might locate the definitive shift of the Smithsons’
attention from the street as a trope of the ordinary to the domestic.
The New Model House
Within the general discourse on the everyday, the house and

the street are clearly the preferred sites for observing and
intervention. The house and housing design hold a crucial place
in the modern architecture discourse, and they are almost always
linked to the issue of large scale city planning. Especially, the
house is regarded as the paradigm by which new traditions
establish themselves. Thus, the house, its planning, notions
of domesticity, and its relation to the city constitute a site of
consistent contestation.83 It was Peter Collins who was the first
to define the house as the paradigm of the larger modern era. In
his classic but not so often referred to Changing Ideals in Modern
Architecture of 1965, the English-Canadian historian put this
82 For instance in Alison hypothesis of the home as the site specific to modern architecture
Smithson (ed.), Team 10 Meetings
1953-1984, Rizzoli, New York, 1991; in the most eloquent of terms:
the report on the 1974 Rotterdam ‘In each architectural era there is usually one building-type which
meeting.
83 To my knowledge the exact dominates all others, and which, because of the attention lavished
relationship between the deve-
lopment of the modern architec-
on it by influential patrons, tends to affect the design of buildings
ture discourse and the house contemporary with it. In ancient Greece the dominant building-
as a paradigm has not been the
subject of a comprehensive study, type was the temple; in mediaeval Europe it was the church;
although there is an exhaustive
number of publications available in Renaissance Europe it was the palace. After 1750 the dominant
that address the topic, mostly
through specific case studies
building-type is not so obvious, since the variety of different
(just as this dissertation actu- building-types became suddenly more numerous – a development
ally). Examples of a tentative
overview are: Hilde Heynen, ‘Mo- which in itself was yet another characteristic distinguishing the
dernity and Domesticity: Tensions
and Contradictions’, in: Hilde modern age. But in so far as any one building-type could, more than
Heynen, Gülsüm Baydar (eds.),
Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial
another, be said to influence the general theory of architecture after
Productions of Gender in Modern 1750, it was the villa, defined by J.C. Loudon, in his Encyclopedia of
Architecture, Routledge, London,
2005, pp. 1-29; Beatriz Colomina, Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, as “a country residence with
‘The Exhibitionist House’, in:
Russell Ferguson (ed.), At the End pleasure garden attached.” (...)’
of the Century. One Hundred Years
of Architecture, The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, And Collins continued:
and Harry N. Abrams Publishers,
New York, 1998, pp. 126-165; Helen ‘Villas, because of their multiplicity, their relatively modest
Searing, ‘Case Study Houses. In
the Grand Modern Tradition’, in: dimensions and their unrestricted sites, allowed the current
Elizabeth A.T. Smith, Blueprints
for Modern Living. History and
propensity for romanticism to be most fully exploited and expressed,
Legacy of the Case Study Houses, and the importance of their subsequent influence cannot be
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1989,
pp. 106-129. exaggerated. Not only at the beginning of the modern era, but
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throughout the whole period from 1750 to 1950, architectural
theory was dominated by factors more strictly appropriate only to
domestic architecture; and it is by no means coincidental that the
most influential architectural pioneers of the present century, such
as Wright, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, originally
gave expression to their theories by building either villas for wealthy
connoisseurs or, after the 1918 war, modest dwellings for artisans or
impecunious artists. The romantic suburban villa was not so much
a minor building-type characteristic of the early nineteenth century,
as a paradigm for the architecture of the whole age.’ 84
In itself, Collins’ hesitance to apply the modernist concept

of Zeitgeist to the modern era remains interesting to note.85
Yet apparently the conclusion is inevitable, with the event of
the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle classes,
the individual home becomes both the ultimate outcome and
the register of the processes of modernization at play.86
The Spanish-American historian Beatriz Colomina too,

identified the home as the site par excellence for the invention
of modern architecture stating ‘that the history of the architecture
of the [twentieth] century is the history of the search for a house’.87
Discussing the work of Alison and Peter Smithson and the way
their work is embedded within the wider web of the modern
architecture discourse, she identified a ‘pervasive sense of
domesticity’ with the Smithsons, and their predecessors:
‘Literal domesticity, as when the Smithsons reflect on the Eames’
breakfast table, only to go back historically to the Walter and Ise
Gropius breakfast table in their house in Lincoln, Massachussets
and we end up with an image of Alison at breakfast, on a snowy day
84 Peter Collins, Changing Ideals
in Modern Architecture 1750-1950, in their country house at Fonthill.’ 88
Faber and Faber, London, 1965;
1998 reprint, McGill-Queen’s
University Press, p. 42.
And further describing the way the Smithsons practised the
85 Also note the use of the con-
cept of the paradigm at this point, writing of history, and how they deployed the concept of three
only three years after Thomas
Kuhn’s seminal publication. generations, she found:
86 The reference to Loudon’s ‘[C]onceptual domesticity, as when the Smithsons organize
publication is key, of course,
since the book of 1833 was among the history of architecture as that of a family, a small family.
the first to address the new patro-
nage of the middle class; John
(...) The family tree tells the story of a search for the ideal house.
Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia The grandfathers Mies and Le Corbusier are evaluated in terms of this
of Cottage, Farm and Villa Archi-
tecture, 1833. search. As Peter put it: “Both Le Corbusier and Mies struggle with
87 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Cou-
plings’, pp. 32-33 in: Oase, nr. 51,
the same essential problems over the decades. With the reinvention
‘Re-arrangements. A Smithson of the house.” What the Smithsons inherited and the Eames inherited
Celebration’, June 1999, pp. 20-33.
88 Ibid., p. 27. is this quest.’ 89
89 Ibid., p. 27-28 and p. 32.
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The reduction of the modern architecture discourse including
the Smithson contribution to the singular site of the house
is most effective in reorganizing the narrative of modern
architecture, yet it remains remarkable, to say the least,
and is in need of some measurement, even though it seems
widely accepted. One deviating view on this matter comes
from Eric Mumford who defined the history of CIAM as
a ‘discourse on urbanism’, not architecture or housing.90
If indeed inhabitation, the house and housing were the main

focus of the Smithson effort, the city was always part of it.
Since, as they already put it in their ‘doorstep philosophy’,
the house looks both inward and outward:
‘The house, the shell which fits man’s back, looks inward to
family and outward to society and its organisation should reflect
this duality of orientation. The looseness of organisation and
ease of communication essential to the largest community
should be present in this, the smallest.’ 91
The Smithsons defined urban planning as an extension of

dwelling, stating that ‘it all hinges on the housing solution’,
and that ‘the house is the first definable city element’.92
Dwelling was the starting point to rethink the organisation of
the whole of the city. The examples in the Smithsons’ work are
countless. For instance, the opening lines to the posthumously
published ‘Urbanism’ volume of The Charged Void referred to the
various styles of living that came into being with the inventions
of the English domestic square and its mews, and the rows of
railway cottages with the footpaths along the lines. The first
concept explained was the one of ‘cluster’ which was referred to
as the result of the Smithsons’ ‘search for meaningful groupings
90 Eric Mumford, The CIAM Dis-
in housing’.93
course on Urbanism, 1928-1960,
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2000.
Another example of the central position of housing in the
Ordinariness and Light. Urban Smithson’s work concerns the Smithsons’ contribution to Denys
Theories 1952-1960 and their
Application in a Building Project Lasdun’s anthology Architecture in the Age of Scepticism, of 1984.
1963-1970, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 1970, p. 44. When the Smithsons were asked by their colleague to reflect on
92 Ibidem, p. 44 and p. 36. their view on architecture, the possibilities and duties involved,
The Charged Void: Urbanism, and how these were expressed through their work, the Smithsons
2005, p. 13 and 20. contributed twenty pages of ‘thirty years of thoughts on the house
‘Thirty Years of Thoughts on the and housing’.94 There was no explicit argument made why they
House and Housing’, in: Denys
Lasdun (ed.). Architecture in an
limited their contribution to the issue of housing, there was just
Age of Scepticism. A Practiti- a chronological list ranging from the smallest and most modest
oner’s Anthology, Heinemann,
London, 1984, pp. 172-191. kind of intervention – replacing the upper windows in the Koestler
dvdh10PRINT.indd 82 21-04-13 16:56

house in Austrian Alpbach – to the largest, most generic scheme
of ‘patio mat-housing’ for Kuwait City. Whereas their fellow Brits
used the opportunity to demonstrate their design versatility –
Norman Foster for instance, extensively documented his project
for the HSBC bank office tower in Hong Kong, while James Stirling
came up with one prestigious cultural commission after the other,
among others the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie and various American
university projects – the Smithsons limited themselves mainly
to rough sketches, diagrams and drawings of ideas for dwelling;
at the same time, the bigger and realized projects were left out.
The Economist was only mentioned by way of the Boodles Club
residential rooms (called ‘a classic “appliance cubicle” plan
arrangement’), Robin Hood Gardens was shown by way of two
collages of individual flats, and St Hilda’s was mentioned only for
its ‘tutor’s flat’ in one of the corners of the building.
The interconnections between house, housing design and town

planning as we find in the case of the Smithsons quite naturally
fit the modernist discourse – not just the strand as represented
by CIAM and its celebrated concepts of the Wohnung für das
Existenzminimum and the Functional City, but the much wider
discourse ranging from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities, Tony
Garnier’s Cité Industrielle, Berlage’s vast extension schemes for
Amsterdam and the public housing enclaves of Red Vienna. After
all, it was only through (re)conceptualizing such interconnections
between housing and city that building production, housing design
and the living environment of the working and lower middle classes
95 For a history of Team 10 see: could be drastically improved.
Alison Smithson (ed.), The Emer-
gence of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M.,
AAGS Theory and History Papers When Alison and Peter Smithson became active within CIAM
1.82, Architectural Association,
London, 1982; Alison Smithson circles they teamed up with kindred younger architects who
(ed.), Team 10 Meetings 1953-1984,
Rizzoli, New York, 1991, Max felt both critical to the CIAM procedures and loyal to what they
Risselada, Dirk van den Heuvel
(eds.) Team 10 – in search of a
viewed as the true cause of modern architecture.95 Together with
Utopia of the present 1953-1981, their MARS friends William (Bill) and Gill Howell they sought
NAi Publishers, Rotterdam,
2005; see also the special issue to replace the concept of the Functional City with their proposal
of Rassegna:‘The Last CIAMs’
as compiled by Jos Bosman and for an approach to town planning based on ‘human association’.
others, nr. 52, December 1992;
and Eric Mumford, The CIAM
According to them ‘life’ itself fell ‘through the net of the four
Discourse on Urbanism, 2000. Functions’, and a ‘more delicate, responsive, net’ was needed.96
96 Alison Smithson, Team 10
Meetings, 1991, p. 9. To this end they conceived the famous diagram of a ‘hierarchy of
97 As published in Alison association’ ranging from ‘voluntary’ to ‘involuntary association’
Smithson (ed.), The Emergence
of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M., 1982, and from ‘house’ via ‘street’ and ‘district’ to ‘city’.97 The different
pp. 8-9; much of this argument is
republished in various Smithson
levels of association were distinguished in a pre-Jane Jacobs
publications such as Upper Case, vein by such not so rational categories as ‘nodding acquaintance’,
Urban Structuring and in Ordinari-
ness and Light. ‘one confidant’, or ‘work associates’.
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The report that the Smithsons and Howells presented together
(‘Commission Six – Report of the English Group’) started with the
house and its requirements:
‘There should be a basic programme for the dwelling in terms of
the activities of the family, considering them separately and in
association with each other. (THE HOUSE).’ 98
Second, the immediate outside space of the house was considered:

‘We should then consider the first point of contact outside the
dwelling here children learn for the first time of the world outside
the home and here are carried on those adult activities which are
essential to everyday life, for instance, shopping, making minor
repairs, posting letters, cleaning the care, or exersising the dog.
(THE STREET).’ 99
In Ordinariness and Light this was slightly differently put by the

Smithsons:
‘The “street” is an extension of the house; in it children learn for the
first time of the world outside the family; it is a microcosmic world
in which the street games change with the seasons and the hours are
reflected in the cycle of street activity.’ 100
The relationship house-street was crucial to the Smithsons’

notion of ‘doorstep’, especially with regard to their idea of identity.
As they put it:
‘In the suburbs and slums the vital relationship between the
house and the street survives, children run about (the street is
comparatively quiet), people stop and talk, dismantled vehicles are
parked. In the back gardens are pigeons and so on, and the shops
are round the corner: you know the milkman, you are outside your
house in your street.’ 101
That the house was considered the ‘first definable element’ shines
through all Smithson statements made. Note for instance how
the ‘street’ as an extension of the house is put between quotation
marks by the Smithsons, whereas the house is not. When the
Smithsons talked about the street they kept emphasizing that it
98 Ibid. was the ‘idea’ of the street that was important to them,102 they
99 Ibid.
would not do so in the case of the house. Regarding the street,
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 45. or other more traditional public spaces, they stated that:
101 Ibid., p.43; emphasis original.
‘Re-identifying man with his environment cannot be achieved by
102 Ibid., p.52.
using historical forms of house-groupings: streets, squares, greens,
Urban Structuring, Studio Vista, etc., as the social reality they represent no longer exists.’ 103
London / Reinhold Publishing
Corporation, New York, 1967, p. 22.
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To define the two higher levels of association turned out to be even
more problematic. Hence, the two next steps of district and city
received much less attention than the house and the street, since
the Smithsons (together with the Howells) found it ‘extremely
difficult to define the higher levels of association – the street
implies a physical contact community; the district an acquaintance
community; and the city an intellectual contact community.’ 104
The difficulties encountered when trying to define these larger

scale entities were extensively discussed by the Smithsons.
It all boiled down to the observation that:
‘social groups are not created by location alone but by community
of interest and physical and psychological interdependence.
The family can still be tight-knit and possessive when its members
are thousands of miles apart; the “extended family” can be scattered
through many districts and classes of a town; and the “assessment
group” of the intellectual or artist may be international and non-
collingual, yet with more in common than with many neighbours.
The assumption that a community can be “created” by geographic
isolation is invalid.
Real social groups cut across geographical borders, and the
principal aid to social cohesion is looseness of grouping and ease
of communication rather than the isolation of arbitrary sections
of the total community with impossibly difficult communications,
which characterise both English neighbourhood planning and the
Unité concept of Le Corbusier.’ 105
The house and the street then were the two ‘elements’ of city
planning which received most attention, and between the two
of them, the house was clearly the Smithsons’ favourite as the
‘first definable element’. Debating the future of CIAM and modern
architecture, they came up with a typical Zeitgeist definition
identifying the home as the key assignment for architects, most
The Emergence of Team 10 out of notably with the middle class as main patronage, even when
C.I.A.M., 1982, p. 9; also in Alison
and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness indirect through institutional representation as happened in the
and Light, 1970, p. 48. case of the post-war welfare state. In itself this could be hardly
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, surprising, the tradition of modern architecture including the idea
pp. 42-43; most of this (including
the terms extended family and
of the house as paradigm was by then already firmly established;
assessment group) was borrowed what was different though, was how the Smithsons proposed not
from the essay ‘The Social Basis
of Town Planning’ by Rattray Tay- to look for universal solutions to the question of the house but
lor, published in Architects’ Year
Book, no. 4, 1952, pp. 27-32; I thank for a ‘type object’ of cultural specificity.
Volker Welter for pointing out the
crucial importance of this essay
to the Smithsons’ thinking on the During the debates on the issue of Habitat, which divided the
relations between architecture,
town planning and social studies. CIAM organisation from 1952 onward until its demise in 1959,
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the Smithsons wrote in one of the many versions of their Habitat
statements:
‘Every culture produces type objects, indeed it is through them that
a culture can be defined. From pre-history to contemporary peasant
society, each culture has thrown up a limited number of house
forms.’ 106
This formulation was still in a most Corbusian vein, and culture

and Zeitgeist seemed quite balanced here. Yet, while still insisting
on the search for an objet type for the house, the Smithsons then
proposed a first shift by explicitly introducing the notion of culture,
speaking of ‘unique’ forms and ‘each culture group’, thus rejecting
universalist CIAM ideals:
‘The culture expresses itself through these forms.
Today’s problem is to define that form unique to each culture group.
The search for a universal norm (Charte de l’Habitat) is meaningless,
for we patently have not got a universal culture.
The following is an attempt to produce a programme for the house
form of our own culture.
CULTURE GROUP United Kingdom

DATE 1954
SOCIETY (Contenu) Welfare State
a) Levelling down of middle and upper
classes – leads to demand for the
optimum dwelling. i.e. Easily worked and
satisfying our behaviour patterns.
b) Removal of economic limits to working
class aspirations leads to same demands
as above.
PROGRAMME FOR THE ARCHITYPAL (UR-typal) HOUSE

(Contenant) Three bedrooms
1 Living room
1 Kitchen-dining
1 Bath with W.C.
1 Separate W.C.’ 107
three page manuscript ‘Habitat
– Every culture produces type
objects, (...)’, dated 1954, publis- This ‘house form’ was to be ‘self evidently architypal’, and still
hed in: Alison Smithson (ed.),
The Emergence of Team 10 out according to the Smithsons, it ‘crystalised’ ‘our culture pattern
of C.I.A.M., 1982, pp. 14-16.
and be as pertinent a symbol as the croft and the Georgian town
107 Ibid.; note: ‘UR-typal’ is
wordplay on ‘ur’ and the Smith- house before it. Its basis will be organisation not style or space
sons’ Urban Re-identification
grid or UR-grid. standards.’ 108
108 Ibid.
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This idea of the house as an expression of culture was always
behind the Smithsons’ designs for individual homes, as well as
collective housing schemes, and it would reappear time after
time during their career in various guises, whether it concerned
the design for their own Brutalist home, the Soho House (1952-
1953), the brick Sugden House or the plastic House of the Future,
both from 1956, or any of the subsequent designs, such as the
Yellow House (1976) or the Put-Away Villa (1993-2000). Also the
Valley Section grid of 1955-1956 for the tenth CIAM conference
in Dubrovnik, which included five different design proposals for
five different situations was a demonstration of this search for
‘object types’. 109
The unbuilt New Model House (1965-1971), a design initially

developed as part of the urban redevelopment scheme for the
village of Street in Somerset, was also intended as a clear
response to this question of the house as a type object. 110
It is also known under the name of Burleigh Lane Houses,
and it comprises a set of detached, two-storey houses grouped
around a common lawn. 111 It was accompanied by a five page
typoscript re-stating the Smithsons’ convictions on the subject,
including a revision of their earlier judgment of the suburb,
its qualities and the specific demand for suburban housing:
109 These designs are all
documented in Van den Heuvel, ‘One has to face the fact eventually that it is mostly what it looks like,
Risselada, 2004.
110 Jeremy Gould gave an
not how it performs that makes the small detached or semi-detached
extensive presentation on Street housing estate unacceptable to architects. For we have to accept
and the various projects that the
Smithsons did as consultants that speaking in terms of performance the widening of motor-car
for the shoe factory Clark’s.
This relationship lasted over ownership has validated loose densities.
twenty years (1964-1986); parts
of this work are included in the
(...) The suburb is what most people want, and there are few valid
two volumes of The Charged reasons that can be advanced against it – although it is hard to admit
Void, Monacelli Press, New York.
Smithson study day, organized that the wheel has come round to the Garden City boys after all, not
by the Twentieth Century Society
at Bath University, 3 September because they were right all along, but because circumstances have
2011.
changed.’ 112
111 For a documentation plus
a brief explanation, see: Alison
and Peter Smithson, The Charged
Void: Architecture, 2001, pp. 336- Further discussing such typical middle class issues as pride of
337, and ‘Thirty Years of Though ownership, the cost of living, and privacy they defined ‘a “new
about Housing’, in Denys Lasdun
(ed.), Architecture in the Age of model” house in which it is possible without social disadvantage
Scepticism, Heinemann, London,
1984. to anyone else to eat out-of-doors, let-off fireworks, have
112 Alison and Peter Smithson, children’s parties or even kipper barbecues.’ Various earlier
‘New Model House’, unpublished
manuscript dated 24 February attempts are mentioned which the Smithsons regarded as almost
1965, pp. 1-2; the last line is a
clear indication of a shift away good, although not quite good enough. Mies van der Rohe’s low
from the 1950s CIAM debates in
which the Smithsons, together
rise housing for Detroit’s Lafayette Park was a key example
with others such as John Voelc- to them, just as two British examples of their contemporaries:
ker, proposed highrise solutions
to the housing problem. the Chick House designed by Powell & Moya and Span housing
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(‘a very powerful near-model’) by Eric Lyons and the Span
company. With an architecture characterised by ‘brick end walls,
brick party wall, two strips of windows, end to end gable over’ and
with ‘the spandrill between the window strips on the derivates
tile-hung on the outside’ these two latter designs exemplified a
‘present folk-style’ to the Smithsons.
The 1960s New Model House as envisaged by the Smithsons

for the village of Street is terribly modest and ordinary in its
appearance and it is hard to imagine any other project further
removed from their early attempts at continuing the heroic avant-
garde practices of the pre-war generations, such as the Golden
Lane scheme of 1952-1953 and the competition entry for Hauptstadt
Berlin of 1957-1958. As noted by Robin Middleton when reviewing
the Garden Building for St Hilda’s College, after the realization of
the Economist’s the Smithsons seem to have become much more
laconic regarding the image of their architecture, not looking for
any kind of iconic or ‘totem architecture’ any more.
Key to the design of the suburban house are its basic L-shape,
the way in which this shape organises the spaces around the
house, and how the house and its lot could be aggregated into a
larger grouping. The L-shape of the house consists of two wings
embracing a terrace space on the private back side of the house.
Living room and kitchen occupy the ends of the wings, the garage
and hallway occupy the centre, being closest to the street side.
On the top floor three bedrooms (one master bedroom, two
smaller ones) and ample closets for bathing, laundry, and dressing
are situated. The master bedroom and dressing closet occupy one
wing, the smaller bedrooms (apparently for the children) occupy
the other, thus granting the children and the parents each their
own territory and piece of privacy from family life. The oblique
positioning on the lot creates two spaces on the street side, one
slightly more formal giving access to the front door, the other
reserved for odd jobs, car cleaning and storage space, including
bins. Overall, the emphasis is on privacy. There are hardly any
windows overlooking the street, or vice versa giving by-passers
the opportunity to look in. There is only a kitchen window over
the sink giving a view on the street. All larger windows look out
onto the private terrace garden. The materialisation is described
as ‘used traditionally’ in the village of Street with the size of
the masonry being ‘in accord with the town’s best nineteenth
113 Alison and Peter Smithson, century buildings.’ The appearance of round shaped windows
The Charged Void: Architecture,
2001, p. 336. is also explained with a reference to the local vernacular.113
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The low mono-pitched roof is clad with metal sheeting, either
alumunium or zinc if we follow the New Model House typoscript.
A perspective shows a typical suburban idyll – about ten detached
houses are grouped around a green with some lush trees and
shrubs. Some autobiographical elements pop up too, a Citroën DS
is parked in front of the house, while a female figure resembling
Alison is working in the garden.
Domestic Violence
As a paradigm of twentieth century modern architecture

(Colomina) or even the larger modern era (Collins), the house
is also a site of contestation. Among others, this contestation
involved bourgeois represssion and biopolitical state control and
discipline. This is already evident in the history of the nineteenth
century reform movements and the first feminist suffragist fights
for social and cultural emancipation, as for instance mapped by
Dolores Hayden in her ground-breaking study The Grand Domestic
Revolution of 1981.114 Certainly, the spirit of contestation and
revolution and the idea that the house was a battle zone also
rang throughout the avant-gardist phase of modern architecture,
the ‘heroic period’ of the 1920s that Sigfried Giedion captured in
his manifesto-like portrait of the new movement and its title of
Befreites Wohnen.115 Throughout the post-war period this fight over
new notions of domesticity and the planning of the house was only
further intensified, through the new welfare policies of government
bodies, the new consumer-capitalist media strategies targeting the
housewife and family, as well as the continued artistic avant-garde
projects of among others the Independent Group exchanges.
Classically, the latter was epitomized by Richard Hamilton’s by

now iconic image collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes
so different, so appealing? of 1956, which was originally made
for the poster series of the T.I.T.-show at Whitechapel Gallery.
114 Dolores Hayden, The Grand
Domestic Revolution: A History The rather modest piece – a mere 26 × 25 cm – portrayed the
of Feminist Designs for American
Homes, Neighbourhoods, and new popular lifestyle as futurist as surrealist. An ordinary living
Cities, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 1981; another great example room is invaded by new consumer goods and mass media: food
that touches on this subject is products, vacuum cleaners, TV, tape recorders, hollywood movies,
Mark Wigley, White Walls, Desig-
ner Dresses. The Fashioning of trashy strip stories about ‘romance’. The inhabitants’ bodies have
Modern Architecture, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1995. attained an equally uncanny newness displaying the language
115 Sigried Giedion, Befreites of pin-ups and body-builders. An image of a new kind of space
Wohnen, Schaubücher, nr. 14,
Orell Füssli Verlag, Zürich, 1929. travel cosmology literally hovers over the domestic tableau vivant.
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The only reassuring, characteristically English element seems
to be the cup of tea on the table.
To the Independent Group, technology and its miniaturization

played a crucial role in understanding the consistent disruptive
transformations of the domestic. Banham mentioned it in his
foreword to his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, when
explaining the nature of the second machine age which according to
him came into being after Second World War. Banham perceptively
and ironically stated that the post-war ‘housewife alone, often
disposes of more horse-power today than an industrial worker did
at the beginning of the century’.116 Banham ultimately proposed
that the new micro-technology would render the conventional
house obsolete. The new ‘home’ would become an ‘un-house’ as
he suggested in his essay ‘A Home is not a House’, publised in
the journal Art in America in 1965, and republished in Architectural
Design in 1969.117 Largely building on the ideas and proposals of
Archigram and Buckminster Fuller, and illustrated with drawings
by François Dallegret, the house was now transformed into a
bubble of a ‘polythene bag’ with a core of the latest gadgetry,
mostly American inspired. The new ‘domestic revolution’ resulted
in a ‘standard-of-living package’ in the middle of nature including
‘woodland glade or creek-side rock’, which according to Banham
aspired to a superior kind of Playboy pad James-Bond-style with
an ambiance of ‘radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-
warming stereo, with well-aged protein turning in an infra-red glow
in the rotisserie, and the ice-maker discreetly coughing cubes into
glasses on the swing-out bar’.118 The all too clear overtones of a
sexist masculinity, almost like an over the top parody, were also
recognized by Banham himself when he preempted the criticism
stating that such a house was even suited for private family life
116 Reyner Banham, Theory and albeit that more sophisticated technology was needed to solve the
Design in the First Machine Age,
The Architectural Press, London, practicalities at stake, just as one would have to accept a new kind
1960, p. 10.
117 Reyner Banham, ‘A House of suburban lifestyle away from the city.119
is not a Home’, in: Architectural
Design, January 1969, pp. 45-48;
first published in April 1965 in Art Lawrence Alloway also touched on the issue of disruptive
in America.
118 Ibid., p. 46.
technology and media and how they would bring about new notions
119 The ironic thing was that Ban- of domesticity. In his essay ‘The Long Front of Culture’ he stated:
ham presented Philip Johnson’s
Glass House – a show case house ‘The media, whether dealing with war or the home, Mars, or the
of a gay bachelor – as a realized suburbs, are an inventory of pop technology. The missile and the
example of this ‘standard-of-
living package’, pp. 47-48. toaster, the push-button and the repeating revolver, military and
120 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Long
Front of Culture’, in: Modern
kitchen technologies, are the natural possession of the media
Dreams, pp. 30-33; originally – a treasury of orientation, a manual of one’s occupancy of the
published in Cambridge Opinion,
nr. 17, 1959. twentieth century.’ 120
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How the house embodied this ‘occupancy of the twentieth century’
remains a key question to contemporary research and criticism
of modern culture and design in general. Within current research,
especially as pursued within the field of gender studies and cultural
studies, one finds a ceaseless curiosity for the development of
the various concepts of domesticity. Here, the house once again
reappears as a site of contestation and intervention, since the
house is understood as an instrument to control both the discourse
and the planning of social relations and identities. This interest
goes beyond the strictly architectural discourse, and refocuses
on the notion of domesticity (and often public space too) and the
related formation of new subjectivities and sensibilities of the
users and inhabitants involved. Beatriz Colomina’s work from
the mid-1980s onward is examplary here; she made it a major
field for enquiry through her studies of the work of Adolf Loos
and Le Corbusier.121 Interestingly enough, this kind of research
developed a new look on the role of the interior, of decoration, the
objects, acts of public and private display, but also the rules of
social conduct and construction, and all this in reciprocity with
the architectural principles of ordering at work. In this kind of
research, the sites of the house and city are not regarded as neutral
territories subject to modernization processes and their political-
economic suprastructure, but as battle zones where individual and
collective agencies as well as identities are being reinvestigated,
renegotiated and ultimately, reconstructed.122
Still, the exclusive, paradigmatic position attributed to the

house and in particular the suburban family house must also be
questioned, especially after Michel Foucault’s ground-breaking
analyses of modern culture and its institutions.123 Places for work,
121 Beatriz Colomina, Publicity
and Privacy. Modern Architecture the office and factory, places of hygiene, hospitals and sanatoriums,
as Mass Media, MIT Press, Cam-
bridge MA, 1994. places for discipline and education, such as prisons, schools, but
122 The research field is too vast also museums and universities, are all moved to periphery of the
to properly summarize here, but
one could begin with the work of discourse when following the house paradigm and the reduction of
Beatriz Colomina, even though
it is under dispute within gender the modern era and modern architecture to a search for the ideal
studies, such as her book Privacy house. All those institutions of technology, discipline, production
and Publicity, 1994, and her essay
on Eileen Gray ‘Battle Lines and education belong as much to the core of the tradition of modern
E.1027’, in: Francesca Hughes
(ed.), The Architect Reconstruct- architecture as does the house. Just as there are model homes in
ing her Practice, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1996. More recent the history of modern architecture, there are model factories, model
research in relation to the domes- prisons and model schools, and so forth and so on. The Smithsons
tic can be found in the anthology
Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial too, of course, were involved in designing and building such
Production of Gender in Modern
Architecture, edited by Hilde Hey- institutional places (apart from prisons one might add). Moreover,
nen and Gülsüm Baydar, 2005.
the project that made their reputation was a school, the Hunstanton
123 Most notably his writings on
prisons, and psychiatric homes. Secondary Modern School.
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Therefore, to single out the home as paradigmatic is a willful
gesture to put order to the discourse and the course of historical
events, to which Peter Collins as we have seen more or less
admitted when he defined the house as paradigm. To assign
the house as paradigm does not concern a neutral observation,
it is also part of the larger dispositif at stake, how hegemonic
culture (including the academia and the world of critique) defines
itself, what it aspires to and how it changes. Hence, and perhaps
paradoxically so, there are also quite a few reasons to maintain the
home and its reciprocal relation with the city as the key site for the
development of the modern tradition in general, and for the work of
Alison and Peter Smithson in particular, and I will briefly mention
them here in addition to the already discussed above.
In the first place, there is (rightly or wrongly) the way the house
was presented and thus constructed as paradigm within the
discourse itself and how it was, and often still is, deployed as a
major vehicle for broadcasting the modern lifestyles as well as
modern architecture and its wider tradition. One cannot retro-
actively ‘correct’ the historical discourse nor displace the words
and concepts used. Colomina extensively demonstrated this in her
studies, especially in the essay ‘The Exhibitionist House’, in which
she combined the history of the house with its place and role in
modern architectural media, ranging from photography, film and
exhibitions to the sites of public display and propaganda, among
those magazines, gallery spaces, museums, fairs and department
stores.124 Colomina mentioned as seminal examples the 1925
‘Exposition des arts décoratifs’, where Le Corbusier presented
his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, the 1927 Weissenhof Siedlung as
part of the larger manifestation ‘Die Wohnung’, or the Berlin Bauen
exhibition of 1931, where visitors could enter full scale models of
houses designed by Lilly Reich, Mies van der Rohe, the Luckhardt
brothers, or Hugo Häring. The Ideal Home Show, at which occasion
the Smithsons House of the Future was on display also belongs to
this tradition.
A very early example of the way the house was proposed

as the key site for architectural discourse and invention we
find in the northern Italian region of Vicenza with Andrea
Palladio. Rudolf Wittkower pointed this out most accurately,
even though his actual aim was to revise this proposition.
In his 1949 Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism
Wittkower wrote the following with regard to Palladio’s false
124 Beatriz Colomina, ‘The Exhi-
bitionist House’, 1998. representation of the history of the house:
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‘Façades of ancient domestic buildings were unknown, but with
the application of the temple front to the house Palladio believed
that he had re-created them in form and spirit; (…).
His conclusion was founded on two fallacies, an erroneous theory
of the development of society, and an erroneous theory of the
genesis of architecture. He thought “that man formerly lived by
himself; but afterwards, seeing he required assistance of other men
to obtain those things that might make him happy (if any happiness
is to be found here below) naturally sought and loved the company
of other men; whereupon of several houses, villages were formed,
and then of many villages, cities and in these, public places and
edifices were built.” Therefore, he concludes, private houses were
the nuclei of public buildings; in other words, temples reflect
the appearance of the ancient house.’ 125
Clearly, Wittkower sought to reinstate the temple and church

as the key site for the demonstration of the cosmological
‘architectural principles’, something which he once again insisted
upon in the retrospective introduction to the 1971 re-edition
of his book. Nevertheless, and despite the justified remark on
historiographical error on Palladio’s behalf, the shift from temple
to house is among the most remarkable ones in the architecture
discourse, announcing the event of the larger modern era as
pointed out by Collins.126
Peter Smithson consciously continued to build on this, when he

125 Rudolf Wittkower, Archi- remarked in Changing the Art of Inhabitation that ‘the house of
tectural Principles in the Age of
Humanism, Academy Editions, Le Corbusier at Garches ... or his truly named Maison des Heures
London, 1988, fourth edition, p. 70;
original edition 1949. Claires at Poissy ... Mies’ staggeringly opulent Barcelona Pavilion
126 Historiographically speaking, ... or his Tugendhat House at Brno ... were the Villa Rotondas of
it is one of those moments that
history is overtaken by myth, and their time.’ 127
myth starts to redirect the course
of history.
127 Alison and Peter Smithson, Additionally, it could be argued that in the home itself as a site of
Artemis, London, 1994, p. 24; ta- contestation and appropriation all the abovementioned aspects of
ken from Without Rhetoric, 1973,
and annotated as being written modernization were operationalized and eventually internalized.
by Peter Smithson in 1968-1969. However, next to the aspects of discipline, control, normality,
128 Whether modernization
brought women liberation or new efficiency, and hygiene as highlighted by Foucault and others as
oppression is open for debate.
Le Corbusier’s contribution is a
being intrinsically part of Functionalism and modern planning,
case of its own, with some fierce- one should also make mention of the new concepts of comfort and
ly attacking him for sexism while
others defend him as a feminist, women’s emancipation being introduced here.128 The Smithsons
for opposing views see among
others: Peter Adam, Eileen Gray, were critical of modernization processes, but also recognized the
Architect Designer. A Biography,
Thames & Hudson, London, 1987;
idea of social and technological progress. This idea of progress,
and Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier: or at least the possibility of it, is one of the fine but clear-cut lines
Architect and Feminist, Academy
Press, London, 2004. between the modern architecture discourse and the postmodernist
dvdh10PRINT.indd 93 21-04-13 16:56

one. In particular the special space of the kitchen in the modern
house is of importance here, as has already been acknowledged
before by many other authors with regard to the examples of the
Frankfurter kitchen by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the kitchens in
the Weissenhoff Siedlung houses as designed by J.J.P. Oud, or the
kitchens in the Marseille Unité d’Habitation by Charlotte Perriand,
Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé. Being a major site for spatial and
architectural invention within the modern architecture discourse,
the kitchen and the individual home, would become a vast field
for cultural and aesthetic investigations also within Independent
Group circles, ranging from the food advertisements and the
new appliances that changed daily routines for good such as
refrigerators and TV-sets. Here, the new consumer lifestyles and
its impact on aesthetic values were probed, with the Smithsons’
House of the Future for the 1956 Ideal Home exhibition as perhaps
one of the foremost demonstrations of Independent Group
fascinations. The kitchen design was thoroughly elaborated by
Alison Smithson, who was responsible for the overall design
of the House of the Future. It functioned in the first place as a
backdrop for the strategies of product placement as immediately
becomes clear from all the photos with food products on display
for instance.129 Yet, it also included various, inventive conveniences
for the housewife, among those the ovens that were placed at eye-
level, a moveable trolley with heating devices to serve food in the
living room while keeping it warm, but also an extended worktop
for sowing and mending one’s own clothes – something which was
a saving necessity in many post-war households just as it entailed
another autobiographical element related to Smithson’s own
delight in desiging her and Peter’s outfits.
A Car of One’s Own
The Smithsons’ positive stance regarding post-war modernization

becomes most evident from their interest in car mobility as the
new foundation for a new, democratic and egalitarian way of life.
Their 1958 essay ‘Mobility. Road Systems’ communicated this
position most eloquently. City design, even when difficult to
grasp in terms of form and pattern, should involve the new ways
of life made possible by mass car ownership resulting in a new
129 In the Alison and Peter
Smithson Archive at the Harvard
‘aesthetic of change’ according to the Smithsons. The first page
Graduate School of Design there opens with two images, a diagram showing a network model, and
are lists of items to be included
in the design. an advertisement for Plymouth automobiles. Crucially, this advert
dvdh10PRINT.indd 94 21-04-13 16:56

targeted women, although not free from sexism, it still emphasized
the new freedom which a car of one’s own would bring to the
modern-day woman, it read among others:
‘Don’t be dependent on your husband’s free time or your neighbor’s
good nature. Go where you want, when you want in a beautiful
Plymouth that’s yours and nobody else’s.’ 130
The things this independent woman supposedly undertook

included: ‘Giving your kids the fun and advantages you want
for them. Taking them places and helping them do things’,
‘taking the part that’s expected of you in church and community
affairs’, and enjoying pottery classes ‘developing your talents as
you’ll be more interesting.’ 131 Despite the prescribed role model
for females that spoke from this, the Smithsons recognized a
new freedom here, stating that:
‘Mobility has become the characteristic of our period. Social and
physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one of
the things that keeps our society together, and the symbol of this
freedom is the individually owned motor-car.’ 132
Clearly, Alison and Peter Smithson did not regard family life and
women’s emancipation as mutually exclusive. On the contrary, to
properly organize family life was also a way to ensure a satisfying
lifestyle, to Alison in particular. With regard to the importance of
family life and the focus of the Smithsons on the accommodation
130 Alison and Peter Smithson, of the nuclear family, one might note that the Smithsons were
‘Mobility. Road Systems’, in:
Architectural Design, October very much family people themselves and Alison in particular a
1958, pp. 385-388; emphasis as ‘family-woman’ so to speak. This may be evident from the way she
in original advertisement.
131 Ibid., p. 385. characterized the Team 10 meetings as family meetings, but it also
132 Ibid. shines through in the few written pieces that touch on the role of
133 Alison Smithson, ‘Home-
Based Leisure: its facilitation Alison as a working woman.133 In a typoscript report ‘Home Based
by the form of the home and the Leisure’ she subscribed to the view that working mothers could
home’s relation to an immediate
environment’, typoscript, 1979, contribute to a more balanced family life.134 It also becomes clear
Smithson Family Archive; other
texts that deal with feminine from their life and the accounts of contemporaries that Alison and
identity: of course Alison Smith-
son’s novel of 1966, A Portrait of Peter Smithson highly valued a well-organised family life with
the Female Mind as a Young Girl, strict routines such as the trips to their weekend home in Upper
Chatto & Windus, London, 1966;
biographical portrayals in: Lynne Lawn, or Christmas celebrations. And again Alison in particular
Walker (ed.), Women Architects:
Their Work, catalogue RIBA, seemed to have taken pride in making it an art to combine the
London, 1984; Valerie Grove, The
Compleat Woman, Marriage, Mo- duties of work and family life.
therhood, Career: Can She Have
It All?, Chatto & Windus, London,
1987; Liz McQuiston, Women in Family life in relation to the organization of the house and
Design: A Contemporary View, Tre-
foil Publications, London, 1988. of society was a persistent and recurrent consideration in
134 Alison Smithson, ‘Home- the Smithsons’ work – most famously so in their Urban Re-
Based Leisure’, typoscript, 1979,
p. 40. identification grid for the 1953 CIAM conference in Aix, with
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the photographs of playing children by Nigel Henderson. In all
their schemes for housing groups due attention was paid to
the place of children in and around the house. The immediate
environment of the house and the street were conceived as to
serve the well-being of children, almost in a pedagogical way,
since it was in these everyday surroundings the child learns how
to behave, to feel secure, trust its skills and develop the nerve to
move around in the world. Take the scheme for the Portico Row
houses, a rough sketch design as part of the appliance house
series that investigated the lay-out of the house in relation to
the new consumer lifestyle of the late 1950s in the same vein as
the House of the Future did. The Portico Row houses scheme
was also based on these family life ideas and its urban lay-out
revolved around a set of outdoor spaces suited to the various age
groups, with outdoor spaces for the zero to four years olds directly
overlooked by the parents, a safe, collective back garden for the
two to six years old, just outside the house, and a less controlled
piece of land but still nearby the home for the six to fourteen years
old to play unhindered by parental gazes.
Family life and the planning of the nuclear family lifestyle were
central constituents of welfare state politics of the post-war
period.135 While the Smithsons’ work does not escape from this
larger politico-cultural framework, they even aimed to come up
with the ultimate house type for the welfare state ‘culture’ as we
saw, it would also be an exaggeration to regard their body of work
as a seamless translation of such biopolitical rationalization to the
field of architecture. Still, one might ask the question, where does
the Smithsons’ work align with welfare state discipline and where
does it formulate new freedoms indeed? The following ambiguities
can be observed.
‘The basic group is obviously the family’, the Smithsons stated in

their Urban Re-identification texts as published in Ordinariness
and Light.136 And as we saw in the case of the ‘architypal (UR typal)
house’ for the middle class welfare state society, just as in the
design for the New Model House, the three bedroom family house,
well-suited for a couple with two children was clearly regarded
135 Many authors have touched as the proper paradigm. And although there was a consideration
on this subject, for an introduc- with house jobs and the dirt from gardening and car washing,
tion to the British context see
David Jeremiah, Architecture the ‘organisation’ of the three bedroom house did not provide the
and Design for the Family in
Britain, 1900-70, Manchester Uni- option for a separate working space, but implicitly still built on
versity Press, Manchester, 2000.
the separation of functions of the Functional City including the
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 43. ones of work and living. At the same time the Smithsons would
dvdh10PRINT.indd 96 21-04-13 16:56

also state that the design for a house should also ‘take account
not only of the family but also those additional responsibilities that
vary in all countries and with all families – this additional activity
gives identity to the dwelling and its inhabitants.’ 137
Generally speaking one can distinguish between two kinds of

‘programmes’ that direct the various proposed solutions within
the Smithson housing designs. There are the houses and housing
schemes designed as an answer to the larger context of the
welfare state and the mid-twentieth century, middle class way of
life, and there are the houses designed for private clients, usually
friends or acquaintances, who – just like the Smithsons themselves
– belong to the professional classes, for whom work and living are
much more integrated than for any common blue- or white collar
worker, who usually has to commute to work.
The former type of programme usually follows the mono-functional

programme of living. Yet, the lay-out of the plan is conceived in
such a way that to some extent individual appropriation is enabled,
also for the walks and ways of life other than the happy, nuclear
family. The 1952 competition entry for Golden Lane remains the
most lucid demonstration. The typological invention as introduced
by the Smithsons is the space of the so-called yard-garden: an
outdoor space between the wide gallery space of the collective
‘deck’, and the individual flat, which negotiates the relation
between the collective space and the private domain of the
house, and which can be used for various, unforeseen uses by
the inhabitants, in particular because there are two front doors
provided.
The basic lay-out of the deck and the yard-gardens once again,
follow the rules of family life:
‘These yard-gardens, which can be seen from the deck, bring the
out-of-doors life of a normal house – gardening, bicycle cleaning,
joinery, pigeons, children’s play, etc., on to the deck, identifying
the families with their “house” on their deck. The arrangements
at deck level are “detached”. “semi-detached” or “terraced”
(each deck differs). The piece of the dwelling at deck level is small
and unintimidating to the playing child, and the passing stranger’s
view is enriched by glimpses, through the open yard-gardens, of
The Emergence of Team 10 out of the city and river.’ 138
C.I.A.M., 1982, p. 8; and Alison
and Peter Smithson, Urban Struc-
turing, 1967, p. 22.
This standard is the basis for variation ‘to suit local needs.’
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 56. The Smithsons explained:
dvdh10PRINT.indd 97 21-04-13 16:56

‘The use of the houses as house-shops and house-workshops
will not interfere with the normal working of the plan, as there is
always the possibility of two “front doors”. The yard-garden can
be used as an alternative means of access, or for a market-stall.’ 139
In their early years the Smithsons already acknowledged the

redundancy of the separation of work and living, criticising
the ‘diagrammatic development’ of the functional city:
‘Living and working are not so incompatible: they should not be
separated so laboriously in the future except in extreme circum
stances. The attitude of segregation is a relic; not a little a relic of
reaction to the overcrowded sewerless and smokey days when few
people in London can ever have felt entirely well.’ 140
Whereas the welfare state programme for collective housing

and suburban development did not allow for such overcoming
of the separation between living and working, the commissions
for private houses seemed to have offered opportunity for
the integration of family life and work, or other ways of living
together.141 The houses the Smithsons designed for themselves
are certainly examples of this. But also the modest houses for
Independent Group friends, such as the Eduardo Paolozzi house
and the Cordell Studio House. The rough sketch for the latter
of 1957 shows the house is basically two houses, one for Magda
Cordell and one for Frank, and between them the entrance to the
large, communal kitchen and dining space.142
Typologically speaking, the main difference between the private

houses for professionals and the ones for families in collective and
suburban housing consists of the addition of an extra, large space,
the possibility of two, independent accesses to the house, and the
139 Ibidem, p. 57. absence of, or at least lesser functional hierarchy between living
140 Ibidem, p. 24.
141 The Smithsons themselves
spaces and bedroom spaces. Again, the yard garden inserted in
were aware of this distinction, the Golden Lane scheme is an example of an added extra space,
see their ‘Criteria for Mass
Housing’, which opens with the a functionally undefined buffer which lends more versatility to
acknowledgment: ‘The term Mass
Housing applies to all dwellings family life in collective housing. At Robin Hood Gardens, built
not built to the special order of an
individual, etc.’, first published in
under a strict welfare state regime, the yard-garden could only
1957, revised in 1959; republished be realized for some of the largest dwellings at the estate. Still,
in Architectural Design, Septem-
ber 1960 and in the 1964 edition of the overall housing typology offered a variety of flats for different
the Team 10 Primer.
households, from ‘old people’ flats on the ground floor to flats
142 The Cordells had what one
calls a ‘complicated’ household for 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 person households. Just over half of the
situation; for a couple of years
there was a ménage-à-trois 268 flats were reserved for the nuclear family of 3 to 5 persons
lifestyle with John McHale.
(140), a quarter to the smaller households (64) and a quarter to
Ordinariness and Light, 1970. the bigger families (64).143
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Socio-plastics
Looking at the historical design production and the parallel

discourse, the search for the ideal house and how the house
would be the ‘direct result of a way of life’ remains elusive within
the whole modernist discourse in terms of form language. Partly
because of the elusiveness of everyday life itself and how it resists
being fixed into formalized patterns, partly because of the ever
shifting balance between the ‘forces’ that shape everyday life:
among others technology and consumerism and how they interact
with the cycles of family life, its modern-day variants and the
organisation of work, not to mention the cultural values that shift
under the impact of fashion and ideology. The exact relationship
between architectural invention and patterns of common use
remains an open one also within the Smithsons’ search for an
architecture of the simple life well done, in particular with regard
to the issue of form and form-language. No formal guidelines
or pattern book solutions were proposed as to how to translate
the everyday and the ordinary into architecture, and probably
necessarily so, since any new orthodoxy would also imply a new
academicism incapable of regeneration. To attend to the everyday
was not to discover universal rule but rather specificity, which
would inevitably change over time and under pressure of the
condition of an unrelenting modernization.
To graft architecture on the ‘patterns’ of a ‘whole way of life’

suggests that the fields of anthropology and sociology were to be
of a special, if not decisive importance to the Smithsons. Yet, their
appreciation of these two fields was ambiguous, to say the least.
In the 1950s, Peter Smithson coined the term ‘socio-plastics’ to
bridge the gap between the social sciences and the form-giving
disciplines of architecture and urban design. Among the many
exchanges between the younger CIAM members of Team 10
Smithson stated the following:
‘We have to satisfy our need for a sense of “a place of our own”,
not in a “universalist” way, but in a free way that allows for change
and for everyone to be himself.
The architects’ job is to make this individualism into a thing which
can be read, can be understood for what it is – an ordered complex
of active relationships between men and things.
Architecture does not simply “provide a background” to existing
relationship, it can create them. It is an active force in life itself.
It is no longer enough to simply “make buildings”, we must make
them in such a way that they give meaning to the space around
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them in the context of the whole community.
This is what Bakema call “urbanism through architecture”
and what I call “socio-plastics”.’ 144
The idea of a ‘socio-plastics’ recurred one more time in the

Smithsons’ writings and was then abandoned.145 Its proposition
was probably the most positive remark one could find among
the Smithsons’ writings regarding the merits of sociology
and its usefulness for architects. More often one comes
across ambiguous, distrustful and at times outright negative
characterizations. This ambiguity toward sociology and
anthropology may be surprising since by now it is a widely shared
observation how these disciplines rose to new prominence
within architecture and urban planning circles in the post-
war decades, in particular with regard to the post-war CIAM
debates on habitat. Some authors have argued that the shift
toward anthropology and sociology encompassed a paradigm
shift, set in motion by the younger CIAM members, in particular
by Team 10.146 Leaving aside whether it is justified to speak of
such a tremendously grand phenomenon as a paradigm shift
(and if so, what kind of paradigm shift exactly), it should be
noted that the issue is far more complicated as suggested
by such a reductive phrase as the one of ‘paradigm shift’. To
144 ‘CIAM-RE-ORGANISA- start to understand the complexities at stake, one might note
TION’, typoscript dated 28-29
August 1957, in: Alison Smithson that Alison and Peter Smithson were actually fierce critics
(ed.), The Emergence of Team 10
out of C.I.A.M., AAGS Theory and of anthropology or sociology as a solution to the questions
History Papers 1.82, Architectural
Association, London, 1982, pp. 82- that architects were facing. They pejoratively described their
83; I thank Karin Theunissen for contemporaries Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, who studied
bringing the term of ‘socio-
plastics’ to my attention. She the area of Bethnal Green for their book Family and Kinship in
herself made the term a central
one of her own research into the East London of 1957, and which is conventionally and erroneously
work of Denise Scott-Brown and
Robert Venturi, for instance in her credited as a source for the Smithsons’ interest in working class
paper ‘Socio-plastics Revisited’, lifestyles, as ‘johnny-come-lately’s’.147 One might argue, that
which she presented at the 2007
conference ‘Density Inside Out’ the Smithsons already challenged the assumed paradigm shift,
at the University of Edinburgh.
145 In ‘Letter to America’ origi-
rather than set it in motion.
nally published in 1958.
146 Both Tom Avermaete and
Annie Pedret make this claim in Another obvious example comes from the debates going on
their dissertations: Tom Aver-
maete, Acculturating the Modern:
between the Dutch and British members of Team 10 in 1954:
Candilis-Josic-Woods and the the famous Doorn Manifesto, which is considered one of the
Epistemological Shift in Post-war
Architecture and Urbanism, founding texts of the Team 10 agenda for modern architecture.
KU Leuven, February 2004; Annie
Pedret, CIAM and the Emergence In their version the Smithsons distanced themselves from
of Team 10 Thinking, 1945-1959,
MIT, 2001.
too much reliance on sociology, they stated as the eighth and
147 In their review of Banham’s concluding point:
book The New Brutalism of 1966.
‘The appropriateness of any solution may lie in the field of
148 As published in the
Team 10 Primer, p. 75. architectural invention rather than social anthropology.’ 148
dvdh10PRINT.indd 100 21-04-13 16:56

And from their ‘Draft Framework’, version 4, which was made in
preparation for the Dubrovnik conference of 1956 we read:
‘Particular stress is laid on the word project which implies
architectural solutions, for the heart of the problem is FORM (…)
This is what we want to see at the Congress, not diagrams or
explanations of social structure or surveys. (…)
Accepting the responsibiliy for the creation of order through
form, form not as a passive result of forces but a force in itself.
A force for which the architect is uniquely responsible.’ 149
In a published conversation with planners William Holford and

Arthur Ling, dedicated to the future of CIAM after the 1956
Dubrovnik congress, Peter Smithson demonstrated his aversion
to anthropology most unequivocally:
‘(...) architects have become, quite understandably, suspicious
of sociologists, particularly because the techniques of social
anthropology with regard to society in change, as far as I can see,
are practically negligible. Anthropology has, in the past, been able
to study a society in a state of stasis and establish what its culture
pattern is, what motivates the pattern of that society; why they
have certain taboos and so on; why people get married at thirteen;
why they move from one village to another; why their huts are
round; but it has always dealt with societies that are primitive, and
relatively, if not actually, underdeveloped, where there was no major
technological change, no clash of cultures. But in our society we
have a major clash of culture.
(...) in such a society, in flux and change, (...) the value of social
antropology study seems to me to be pretty low as far as being able
to use it creatively. Social anthropology will never be able to tell
you what to do. It will be able to say the pattern in the past was such
and such because they had certain drives, but what the pattern is
to be now seems to be more a matter of social magic rather than
social anthropology.’ 150

son, ‘Draft Framework 4, 1956’ The ambiguity at stake becomes evident when the sociologists
typoscript, in: Team 10 archive,
part of Bakema archive, NAi and anthropologists are called in for support. Despite the fact
Rotterdam, published in: Max
Risselada, Dirk van den Heuvel
that Young and Wilmott were ‘johnny-come-lately’s’, they were
(eds.) Team 10 – in search of a also quoted approvingly in the Smithsons’ Upper Case and
Utopia of the present 1953-1981,
2005, pp. 48-49. Urban Structuring with regard to their ideas about street life. 151
150 William Holford, Arthur Ling We see the same with Patrick Geddes as a referent. Geddes’
and Peter Smithson, ‘Planning
Today’, in: Architectural Design, Valley Section is famously appropriated by the Smithsons to
June 1957, pp. 185-189.
become a most prominent part of the 1954 Doorn manifesto
Upper Case, nr. 3, 1960, unpagina- and programme for the 1956 CIAM conference in Dubrovnik.
ted and Urban Structuring, 1967,
p. 22, caption to the top diagram. Yet, the Smithsons also stated in their ‘Urban Re-identification’
dvdh10PRINT.indd 101 21-04-13 16:56

manuscript, published as the first part of Ordinariness and Light:
‘Survey! preached Geddes.
Alas! the master never explained what happened next,
or what you did with the survey once you had it.’ 152
Still, the Smithsons had departed on a lifelong journey trying

to understand the cultural patterns at work, and how to work
with them as architects. They might have rejected sociology
as medicin or recipe, at the same time they were acutely aware
of it, most notably through Judith Stephen, Nigel Henderson’s
first wife who had studied anthropology and economics,
among others in the United States under Ruth Benedict and
Margaret Mead.153 Back in England she worked for the research
programme ‘Discover Your Neighbour’ organized by the
sociologist J.L. Peterson, a programme similar to the one of
Mass Observation of the same period. Among other things, it
meant she had to live next door to the family she was studying
and was writing reports about each day.154 Hence, she and
Nigel Henderson moved to Chisenhale Road, Bethnal Green,
hence Nigel’s more or less parallel project of documenting the
working class district, from playing children, street life to shop
window displays, and hence the walks he and the Smithsons
undertook there through the bombed streets of East London
and the ruins of everyday life.
The confusion around the exact role of sociology and anthropology

vis-à-vis architecture was probably inevitable, since the former
two concern a basically deductive research practice, while the
latter is inductive (or what some now call ‘projective’). At any
rate, Smithson contemporaries and Team 10 fellows, in particular
the offices of Candilis Woods and Josic, of Van den Broek and
Bakema, as well as Aldo van Eyck, would each operationalize the
rather blurred relationship in very different ways. The Smithsons’
ambiguous, at times antagonistic attittude towards sociology
152 Alison and Peter Smithson, was already expressed by them in their various statements on
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 22.
the New Brutalism. When invited by Theo Crosby to deliver a
153 The earlier quote of Peter
Smithson (note 136) is only statement of clarification as an editorial to the January 1955 issue
one demonstration of this, cer-
tainly when he spoke of ‘culture of Architectural Design, Alison and Peter Smithson presented a
pattern’; Benedict’s 1934 book
Patterns of Culture was already riddle-like manifesto. Four of its eight points referred to Japanese
mentioned. architecture; two spelled out the issue of ‘form’ in capitals;
154 Victoria Walsh, Nigel Hen-
derson. Parallel of Life and Art, the importance of materials and the handling of materials was
Thames & Hudson, London, 2001,
p. 17; the family in question didn’t
mentioned; their Hunstanton school was referred too, just as
know this, despite the friendly Le Corbusier, Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright, Garnier and Behrens; and
relationship that was to grow
between the two households. finally some sort of anthropology crept in when ‘peasant dwelling
dvdh10PRINT.indd 102 21-04-13 16:56

forms’ were mentioned as ‘closest affinities’ to the New Brutalism
as a movement; these peasant dwelling forms had ‘nothing to do
with craft’ according to the Smithsons, but with how they saw
‘architecture as the direct result of a way of life’.155
This idea of architecture as ‘the direct result of a way of life’ was

the closest the Smithsons got when it came to a definition of the
relation between architecture and sociology; yet again, it should
be noted not as some universalist truth but as cultural and local
specificity. To translate cultural pattern into architectural form
was then part of the poetics of the architect, the issue at stake to
‘drag a rough poetry out of the forces at work’ as the Smithsons
further explained less than two years later.156 The 1955 statement
on the New Brutalism ended therefore as characteristically as
provokingly in the way it avoided exact definition, while playfully
alluding to the forces that shaped the modern way of life and
their sites of operation as recognized by the Smithsons, from
advertizing to car design to the repainting of a house:
‘1954 has been a key year. It has seen American advertising equal
Dada in its impact of overlaid imagery; that automotive masterpiece,
the Cadillac convertible, parallel-with-the-ground (four elevations)
classic box on wheels; the start of a new way of thinking by CIAM;
the revaluation of the work of Gropius; the repainting of the
Villa at Garches?’ 157
155 ‘The New Brutalism’, in: Ar-

chitectural Design, January 1955;
again, authors are not mentioned
as such.
156 This is a summary of the
Smithsons’ second statement on
New Brutalism published as com-
ments on ‘Thoughts in Progress.
The New Brutalism’ in: Architec-
tural Design, April 1957, p. 113; the
full quote reads ‘Brutalism tries
to face up to a mass-production
society, and drag a rough poetry
out of the confused and powerful
forces which are at work.’
157 Editorial statement, Architec-
tural Design, January 1955.
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dvdh10PRINT.indd 104 21-04-13 16:56

3 COMPETING TRADITIONS
Englishness and the Post-war Debate on Modern Architecture in Britain
A Chain of Re-inventions
In the late 1980s, early 1990s renewed interest in the work of the
members of the Independent Group led to several exhibitions and
publications, among others This is Tomorrow Today at the New
York Clocktower Gallery, and the retrospective exhibition The
Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty
which opened at the ICA in London in 1990, after which it traveled
to Valencia and the USA.1 It was in the context of the former
exhibition that Kenneth Frampton republished his comments on
the Smithsons’ House of the Future. To him it marked a shift in
the couple’s attitude moving away from the ‘Brutalist spirit of
resistance’ toward an ‘incipient consumerism’ under the ‘rising
star of the Pax Americana’. In particular the Smithsons’ embracing
of the new consumer lifestyle based on mass car ownership was to
Frampton evidence of the Smithsons’ surrender to Americanism.
Referring to the iconic collage of Richard Hamilton – ‘Just what
is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’, which
Hamilton had initially produced for the poster series of the 1956
‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery, Frampton
claimed that the sleek, curved interior spaces of the House of the
Future on display at the Daily Mail Ideal Home show of the same
year, were ‘evidently intended as the ideal home for Hamilton’s
muscle-bound, “punch-bag” natural man and his curvaceous
1 See Modern Dreams: The Rise companion’.2
and Fall and Rise of Pop, MIT
David Robbins (ed.), The Inde-
pendent Group. Postwar Britain Frampton’s comments printed in the This is Tomorrow Today
and the Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT anthology of essays and interviews prompted the Smithsons
Press, Cambridge MA, 1990.
2 Kenneth Frampton, ‘The New to write a response in the catalogue that accompanied the
Brutalism and the Welfare State:
1949-59’, in: Modern Dreams, 1988,
Independent Group retrospective of 1990. The organizers had
pp. 46-51; the essay is an edited requested some of the former participants to look back on their
version of the earlier published
‘New Brutalism and the Archi- experiences with the Independent Group meetings. Alison and
tecture of the Welfare State:
England: 1949-1959’, chapter to Peter Smithson produced two short statements. One is the
Frampton’s seminal Modern
Architecture. A Critical History,
better known ‘The “As Found” and the “Found”’ – the only text
Thames & Hudson, London, 1980, in which they attempted to retrospectively theorize their idea
revised and extended edition
1985. of the As Found, whereas the other is an untitled statement,
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even shorther than the already quite succinct As Found text.
The untitled statement opened with an explicit refutation
of Frampton’s account of the Smithsons’ position toward
consumerism and American culture:
‘We always considered ourselves very English and – contrary to what
Frampton infers – we have always been oriented towards Europe and
never deviated, reacting to aspirations beamed out from America that
we saw would be irresistible, but also, recognising these as part of a
wider threat to Europe’s cultural identity.’ 3
The Smithsons continued their text by defining the Independent

Group as they saw it, touching on the not so obvious connections
between Englishness and English avant-garde. To them, this
concerned ‘convivial evenings with friends’, some sort of private
get-togethers of like-minded, young people marking their own
territory, very much aware of earlier groups but equally self-
conscious taking a position of their own, setting themselves apart
from those predecessors. The Smithsons mentioned the Camden
Road Group, Bloomsbury Group, Vorticists and the Omega
Workshops, only of which the Bloomsbury Group probably holds
a reputation beyond the immediate English context. A second
mentioning of Englishness once again emphasized the two aspects
of continuation and the creation a space of one’s own:
‘… It was vital to us personally as an energising “togethering,” to
feel we were not alone in needing to think quite differently, not out in
the creative wilderness; that our sense of difference was supportably
real by there being other, equally strong senses of difference to the
previous generation’s Englishness-as-appendage-to-Europe …’ 4
Much of the Independent Group history is a matter of retro-active

definition, if not all, but to describe the Independent Group and
its activities in terms of Englishness is most remarkable, to say
the least. Most accounts follow the connection between American
and British Pop Art as forged by various of the other group
members, such as Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham and John
McHale. It is probably against this background that Frampton
makes his assertion using the facile opposition between Brutalist
3 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘resistance’ and American consumer culture, as if there is no
untitled statement, in: David
Robbins (ed.), The Independent playful irony or double message implicated in both Hamilton’s
Group. Postwar Britain and collage and the Smithsons’ House of the Future, nor any kind of
the Aesthetics of Plenty, 1990,
pp. 194-195; the text is signed by critical engagement. At any rate, Frampton’s reading of the events
the couple, but probably mainly
by Alison, in the latter part the snugly fitted the first historiographical revival of the Independent
text falls back to the singular
(‘my own instincts’). Group as staged by This is Tomorrow Today, which largely focused
4 Ibid. on cross-Atlantic exchanges between the US and Britain rather
dvdh10PRINT.indd 106 21-04-13 16:56

than between Britain and the Continent, or internal British
developments.
So how to view the Smithson claim then, the assumed

Englishness of the Independent Group? Although not commonly
supported or reproduced in the existing literature of the group,
there seems to be a case for this claim if one were to set the
group’s fascinations against the larger context of international art
and (neo-)avant-gardist practices. One could point for instance
to the specific notions of landscape and the domestic that seem
to be present in most of the group’s work, be it the 1953 Parallel
of Life and Art installation or McHale’s collages, to name just
two instances. Yet, at the same time it should be remembered
too, that many of the group’s participants fiercely contested
any notion of so-called Englishness during the 1950s as part
of their ongoing provocations of the institutional and cultural
establishment. Reyner Banham in particular was adamant about
this, and would continue questioning any sort of association
between British nationalist sentiment and the efforts to pursue
and revitalize the project of modern architecture and design well
into the 1970s. The Smithsons, too, would step in occasionally,
for instance, when they felt it was necessary to dismiss the 1951
Festival of Britain. Referring to the Black Eye and Lemonade show
by Barbara Jones in the Whitechapel Gallery, which was part of
the whole range of Festival exhibitions and which was dedicated
to contemporary popular British culture, Alison Smithson spoke
of the ‘horrors of the Festival’.5 Smithson’s remarks were made
in the context of her appreciation of the work of Charles and
Ray Eames, their chairs, collections, films and photography, and
how the Eameses represented the kind of American culture she
was interested in, in order to escape the sort of Englishness
she associated with the ‘peculiar front-parlour-collection chill’
of the Jones exhibition. Calling the Eames chair a ‘message of
hope from another planet’ in those days, she also mentioned that
‘our generation were as children reborn from post-war Britain to
love objects of a particular international flavour’.6
5 Alison Smithson, ‘And now So if we were to follow the Smithson claim, that they always
Dhamas Are Dying out in Japan’,
in: Architectural Design, Septem- considered themselves ‘very English’, very different notions of
ber 1966, pp. 447-448; reprinted Englishness are at work here and being played off against each
in: Alison and Peter Smithson,
Changing the Art of Inhabitation, other. And not just between the fringe scene of the Independent
Artemis, London, 1994, pp. 77-78;
in the reprint the Barbara Jones’s Group and the architecture establishment, but also among the
show is erroneously dated of the
1940s, it was 1951. Group members themselves. The latter aspect is important to note
6 Ibid. and keep in the back of one’s mind, since one finds that the various
dvdh10PRINT.indd 107 21-04-13 16:56

historical accounts, by Banham for instance, but also Alloway’s,
7 Nikolaus Pevsner, The English- are an attempt to homogenize the discussions within the Group
ness of English Art, The Architec-
tural Press, London, 1956. while ignoring dissenting voices.
8 Banham’s biography by Nigel
Whiteley is a case in this respect,
Reyner Banham. Historian of the There are two quite clear moments in this history when
Immediate Future, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 2002; Anthony the protagonists in this debate feel forced to make a stand and
Vidler gives a much more construct an anti-Englishness position: the already mentioned 1951
measured account of Banham’s
writings although his is limited Festival of Britain and the BBC Reith lectures by Nikolaus Pevsner
to a strictly personal reading
of Banham’s writings rather of 1955, published in 1956 as The Englishness of English Art.7
than a comprehensive one, for
instance Banham’s ongoing
The account by Reyner Banham is the most familiar one and is
criticism of the Festival of usually uncritically reproduced in most current historiographies.8
Britain and the policies of the
Architectural Review are missing Although Banham’s reports of the ICA events are quite broad
from Vidler’s account, just as his
various attempts to reframe the and apparently comprehensive (and certainly not a schematic
Independent Group events as
belonging to either Brutalism or representation of positions as one sometimes finds with his
Pop: Anthony Vidler, Histories of famous and most influential student Charles Jencks), there are
the Immediate Present. Inventing
Architectural Modernism, MIT some generalisations as well as omissions of his portrayal of the
Press, Cambridge MA, 2008.
9 Reyner Banham, ‘Machine
group and its internal dynamics that should caution any reader of
Aesthetes’, in: Reyner Banham, his work, not to mention Banham’s clever and effective rhetoric,
A Critic Writes. Essays by Reyner
Banham, University of California which was based on simultaneous acts of definition and dismissal.
Press, Berkeley, 1996, p. 26; origi-
nally published in New Stateman,
no. 55, 16 August 1958, pp. 192-193.
Take for instance, one of Banham’s shorter pieces which he wrote
10 As is well-known ‘angry young
men’ is an epithet given to a new for the New Statesman, ‘Machine Aesthetes’ of 1958.9 At that
generation of authors (novels and
plays) writing about lower class, particular moment the Independent Group was not a brand name
everyday life, so-called kitchen used by Banham or any other historian, or any other group member
sink drama, foremost among
those being Alan Sillitoe and for that matter. Banham preferred to talk about New Brutalists,
John Osborne, whose 1956 play
‘Look back in Anger’ generated also in this text, while painting the Brutalists’ efforts to recover
the term.
the pre-war avant-garde project as a generation conflict, which is
11 Reyner Banham, ‘Machine
Aesthetes’, 1958. As said, actually one of the most consistently recurring figures to explain
despite Banham’s appreciation,
the reference to these English the events of the early 1950s, both by the protagonists themselves
‘Angry Young literaries’ returns
in all major studies on Brutalism
and historians. Calling them a ‘junior avant-garde’, Banham linked
and Team 10; even Banham’s bio- them to Team 10 and the so-called Angry Young Men, the group
grapher Nigel Whiteley displayed
no hesitation in applying the of younger writers who had just made their fame in Britain.10
term, while paradoxically acknow-
ledging Banham’s own criticism From thereon one finds in almost every account of the New
on the use of the term (Chapter 2,
footnote 119). Stephen Kite most
Brutalism history, the Independent Group or Team 10, this analogy
recently revived the reference with the literary group, including the undertones of generation
in his account of Colin St John
Wilson’s contributions to the conflict and class struggle, despite the fact that this comparison
British debates of the 1950s,
see: ‘Softs and Hards: Colin St falls short on many aspects. The remarkable thing remains that
John Wilson and the Contested
Visions of 1950s London’, in:
Banham himself introduced the analogy while at the same time
Mark Crinson, Claire Zimmer- dismissing it. This is what he wrote:
man (eds.), Neo-avant-garde and
Postmodern. Postwar Architecture ‘You don’t have to be very clever to find a link between the
in Britain and Beyond, Studies in
British Art, nr. 21, The Yale Center New Brutalists and the Angry Young literaries, but you don’t do
for British Art and The Paul Mel-
lon Centre of Studies in British
yourself much good in the process. Unlike Angries Unanimous,
Art, New Haven, 2010, pp. 55-77. who are as English and as dated as last week’s pool coupons,
Lawrence Alloway too, resisted
the angry young men analogy: the Brutalists are not parochial.’ 11
dvdh10PRINT.indd 108 21-04-13 16:56

Such condensed writing, both engaging and polemical is most
characteristic of Banham and partly explains its attractiveness.
The double movement or simultaneous act of definition and
dismissal can be found in much of Banham’s writing, in particular
in those cases where he presents himself as a witness and
participant, for instance the classic 1966 book on New Brutalism,
or the 1976 book on megastructures. Also, in the case of the
debates on Englishness one finds definition as well as dismissal.
When in 1976, Banham’s wife Mary together with Bevis Hillier
published the book commemorating the 1951 Festival of Britain,
A Tonic to the Nation, Banham produced the most critical essay
‘The Style: “Flimsy … Effeminate”?’, in which he once again
ridiculed the so-called Festival style and the British appropriation
of modernist, Continental invention.12
At the same time and despite his criticism of complacent,

inappropriate nationalism, one cannot deny that in Banham’s
writings too, a certain national consciousness was present
and at times directed his argument. For instance in his 1966
book on the New Brutalism he erroneously defined Team 10 as
‘predominantly British’, which according to him demonstrated
that ‘British architects had a special contribution to make’, after
which Banham immediately continued, much more on the spot,
‘The pleasurable filling of a
role in urban life (instead of that ‘to write a predominantly British account of New Brutalism
protesting or looking for more
favourable circumstances) is not necessarily to be parochial or chauvinistic. The origins
separated London artists from
the working-class bias of Richard of Brutalism “as a movement” were British (…) It was, in short,
Hoggart and from the angry the first consequential British contribution to the living body of
young men.’, from: Lawrence Allo-
way, ‘The Development of British architecture since the collapse of the “English Free Building” of
Pop’, in: Lucy Lippard, Pop Art,
Thames & Hudson, London, 1966. Voysey and Lethaby around 1910’, and so forth and so on.13
Still, the analogy is tenacious and
wide-spread, it recurs in the best
of scholarly work, for instance The whole English discourse on modern architecture is thoroughly
in Francis Strauven’s seminal
biography of Aldo van Eyck who imbued with the issues of national identity and cultural heritage.
also labels the Team 10 architects
as ‘angry young men’. They cannot be uncoupled, and paradoxically perhaps, this
12 Reyner Banham, ‘The Style: predicament is one of the ultimate characteristics of English
“Flimsy … Effeminate”?’, in:
Mary Banham, Bevis Hillier (eds.), architecture of the twentieth century.14
A Tonic to the Nation. The Festival
of Britain 1951, Thames & Hudson,
London, 1976, pp. 190-198.
Americanism then, to briefly go back to the introduction and
13 Reyner Banham, The New
Brutalism, 1966, p. 134. the exchanges between Frampton and the Smithsons, is but
14 A fantastic demonstration one of the sites of contestation here, and surely a very sensitive
of this problematic is of course
delivered by the Prince of Wales one with regard to the specific post-war situation with the
and his various interventions
regarding some major London impoverished British colonial empire breaking up and the USA
projects such as the extension of
the National Gallery and of more
now the leading economic and military world power, together
recent date, the development of with the USSR. The Independent Group meetings of the early
Chelsea Barracks by Richard
Rogers. 1950s hold a very specific and unique position here as a post-
dvdh10PRINT.indd 109 21-04-13 16:56

war or neo-avantgarde group of individuals, since America
was until then hardly considered a credible source for avant-
garde experimentation, except perhaps for jazz music and grain
elevators.15 To view American consumer culture and leisure
as sources for new image systems as the Independent Group
members did, marked a new moment in the avant-garde discourse
of the twentieth century, a moment which was substantially earlier
than the more academic, and largely anti-American investigations
into this realm of fabricated popular culture and its industry as
undertaken by cultural theorists in particular. Roland Barthes
Mythologies comes close being published in 1957. The first bulletin
of the Internationale Situationniste appeared in June 1958, while
Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle is published only in 1967.
Within British cultural studies Americanism remained a delicate
issue, as well; William Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy of 1957
famously attacked ‘mass culture’, including the Hollywood film
industry, for destroying authentic popular working class culture.16
The one exemption came from North America itself and formed
actual input to Independent Group meetings: namely the Canadian
Marshall McLuhan and his writings, in particular The Mechanical
Bride. Folkore of Industrial Man of 1951, of which Banham had
mentioned that it reached a ‘semi-legendary’ status when Group
members discovered it, but according to him this happened not
before 1956.17
The inclusion of American mass culture by Independent Group

members was perhaps only natural since many of the earlier
pre-war avant-garde had moved to the United States continuing
their work and teaching there, among those the former Bauhäusler
László Moholy Nagy and Herbert Bayer, whose work was to be
phenomenally influential in Independent Group circles. When
Alison and Peter Smithson wrote about the new leading role of the
‘ad-man’ regarding the production of new cultural values in their
seminal statement ‘But Today We Collect Ads’, they were referring
to among others Bayer’s work in advertising and information
design, and to Alexander Dorner’s The Way Beyond Art of 1947,
15 See also Whiteley, the sub-
which was completely devoted to Bayer’s achievements and which
chapter ‘The Fear of Americani- tried to open up new ways for art and design after the pre-war
zation’, p. 98-101.
16 Many other examples of experiments, including commercial mass culture, a profoundly
Marxist-based, cultural critique different position from Clement Greenberg’s of course, who in
could be mentioned, most pro-
minently the German Frankfurter his famous essay of 1939 ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ coupled the
Schule which would consistently
criticize American mass consu- mechanisms of fabricated popular taste and mass culture with
mer culture.
kitsch, and ultimately with the rise of German and Italian fascism
17 Whiteley, Reyner Banham,
2002, p. 324. and Stalinist state communism.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 110 21-04-13 16:56

Englishness then, as well as Americanism are not so much
essentialist categories, but rather the trope that accommodates
the discursive battle, for drawing lines of definition and selection,
for downplaying while highlighting, for including a select chosen
ones while excluding others. Raymond Williams eloquently
demonstrated the workings of such rhetorical constructions
throughout his body of writing. In his introduction to one of
his major studies into English culture, literature and capitalist
development, The Country and the City of 1973, Williams explained
the relation between the early beginnings of the Industrial
Revolution of the eighteenth century and the specific English
experience and identity:
‘... the English experience is especially significant, in that one of
the decisive transformations, in the relations between country and
city, occurred there very early and with a thoroughness which is
still in some ways unapproached. The Industrial Revolution not
only transformed both city and country; it was based on a highly
developed agrarian capitalism, with a very early disappearance of
the traditional peasantry.’
And: ‘The English experience remains exceptionally important: not

only symptomatic but in some ways diagnostic; in its intensity still
memorable, whatever may succeed. For it is a critical fact that in
and through these transforming experiences English attitudes to
the country, and to ideas of rural life, persisted with extraordinary
power, so that even after the society was predominantly urban its
literature, for a generation, was still, predominantly rural; and even
in the twentieth century, in an urban and industrial land, forms of the
older ideas and experiences still remarkably persists. All this gives
the English experience and interpretation of the country and the city
a permanent though not exclusive importance.’ 18
As Williams’ book title already indicated, the reciprocal relation

18 Raymond Williams, The Coun- between country and city was one of the main keys by which
try and the City, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1973, p. 2. the consequences of the Industrial Revolution was read by him.
19 Ibid., pp. 9-12; Williams’ ac- Part of the historical dialectics between city and country is the
count of the pastoral is different
from the way Heynen uses the consistent re-invention of the pastoral tradition in British culture,
term in her Modern Architecture.
A Critique. For Williams it is a
in the arts and literature, but also in politics. The Picturesque is
historical category that changes part and parcel of this re-invention, or rather chain of re-inventions
over time and is relative to the
context in which the term is used, as Williams explained in his chapter ‘A Problem of Perspective’.19
at the same time it represents
a cultural and literary tradition. Through the ages the pastoral and Picturesque appear and re-
Heynen uses it as a parameter
of ideological intention to distin-
appear in various forms and fashions. There is the nostalgic
guish between various practices deploring of the loss of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, agricultural
of modern architecture in the
twentieth century. England, despite the obvious political shortcomings of the old
dvdh10PRINT.indd 111 21-04-13 16:56

feudal system. At times it was, and even still is, used to cover
up the real, social structure behind early agricultural capitalism.
This ideological tendency is parallelled by a formal and academic
one in aesthetics, that lost touch with the original meanings
of agricultural life, or the society described in ancient Virgilian
poetry – the common reference in British pastoral literature.
And finally, there is the utopian tendency that used the pastoral
and Picturesque to evoke prospects of a better life and society.
Williams did not include architecture in his broad discussions

of country and city, not even once he mentioned the Garden City
movement for instance, although William Morris and his News
from Nowhere are.20 Although a discourse parallel to architecture
perhaps, Williams’ description of the Picturesque tradition as a
chain of re-inventions perfectly fits the debates within architecture
circles and the way Englishness was connected with the
Picturesque, with technological industrial development and other
forces of modernization. In the Smithsons’ writing and thinking
too, one finds an endless variety of such re-inventions, already
so in the case of their Hunstanton school building. In response
to Philip Johnson’s comments on the building in the pages of the
Architectural Review, who compared it to Mies’ American work, the
proper project description starts first and foremost by connecting
the project to so-called ‘English precedent’, namely the widely
divergent examples of Hardwick Hall by Robert Smythson and
All Saints’, Margaret Street by William Butterfield.21 As we will
see the coupling of Hunstanton with such seemingly disparate
‘precedents’ as Hardwick Hall and All Saints’ is part of the
Brutalist game. At this point, it serves primarily as an example of
how the issue of Englishness is indeed always present in Alison
and Peter Smithson’s work. Englishness and English identity would
remain a topic for reflection throughout their career, almost as
a meta-historical category, as demonstrated by a passage from
Alison Smithson’s essay ‘In Pursuit of Lyrical Appropriateness’
written mid-1970s at a time very different from the Independent
Group years. ‘In Pursuit of Lyrical Appropriateness’ was published
20 Ibid. pp. 272-274.
21 ‘School at Hunstanton’, in: in AA Quarterly, the AA-School periodical, as well as in Giancarlo
The Architectural Review, Sep-
tember 1954, pp. 148-162, comment
De Carlo’s magazine Spazio e Società and it is one of the many
on p. 152; the piece is anonymous, appearances of the Picturesque in the Smithsons’ thinking; it
Tony Vidler ascribes it to Reyner
Banham in his Histories of the is also an example of their view of the web of relations between
Immediate Present, but it is most
likely a collective effort, since Englishness, literature, landscape and urbanism:
so much of the information con-
tained is most specific, esp. tech-
‘England bears many marks on its landscape, nearly everywhere
nical detail. Max Risselada even is an overlaid tracery of patterns of work and movement, from
suggests that the Smithsons
themselves were the author. 1900 BC – supposed start of Stonehenge – to the present time.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 112 21-04-13 16:56

Therefore, we can be fairly confident that the trick of giving
form to patterns supportive of life can be performed here again.
The spark can be in many ways unexpected; those paintings by Claude
or Poussin brought back by the English from the Grand Tour somehow
made it visible to all, their national sensibility to the landscape;
the paintings becoming enabling images in the development of the
English Landscape Garden, a genre virile enough to be re-exported.
That this sensibility became universal within Britain, and extended
from the garden into all aspects of life, is the especial nature of
English urbanism – vide Newcastle, Edinburgh – finally buildings as
landscape: a whole sensibility neatly and palatably communicated
in the writings of Jane Austen... for, apart from the land, the other
internal communication of conviction is for the English through
literature: the English being fairly unmoved by form; but if something
can be walked on, or read, it can be accepted as worthwhile.’ 22
The key term to understand the Smithsons’ love for the

Picturesque and the specific tradition of the Landscape Garden
is perhaps the one of ‘enabling images’, which brings them
close to the utopian tendencies which appropriate the 18th
century sensibilities to evoke the prospects of a better life and
society. An early example of this is the seminal ‘Cluster City’
essay of 1957, published in The Architectural Review, the journal
which famously campaigned for a revival of the Picturesque
as ‘Townscape’ from 1949 onward, while redefining the English
landscape tradition as proto-modernist. ‘Cluster City’ opened
and closed with two key images: both fragments of a painting
by Poussin, ‘Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion’ (1648).
The Smithsons had this to say about it:
‘Poussin’s vision of the classical city is an image of a consistent
22 Alison Smithson, ‘In pursuit of hierarchy of building forms, that runs from the high temple of the hill
lyrical appropriateness’, manus-
cript 1975-1976; published in Spa- to the local temple and the profane buildings around it. Can modern
zio e Società, and AA Quarterly.
architects create an equally convincing image of the city, without
‘Cluster City’, in: The Architec- being caught in some similar closed hierarchy?’ 23
tural Review, November 1957,
pp. 333-336; it should be noted
that London and the Courtauld In the case of the two reprints of the essay, one in the Smithsons’
institute were a centre of Poussin
studies mid-twentieth cen- Ordinariness and Light anthology and the other in Banham’s
tury, with Anthony Blunt as the
most distinguished expert, and 1966 book on the New Brutalism, the Poussin images are gone.
Rudolph Wittkower also involved.
I thank Neil Bingham for pointing Yet, on another occasion Banham would remind his readers
this out to me. of the use of this particular image as evidence of the crypto-
24 Reyner Banham in his ‘Re-
venge of the Picturesque’, p. 270; Picturesque sentiments of the Smithsons.24 Still, as also noted by
‘Cluster City’ was reprinted in:
Alison and Peter Smithson, Or-
Banham, the kind of Englishness as proposed by the Smithsons
dinariness and Light, pp. 128-134, was not the ‘parochial’ kind as one would find for instance with
and in: Reyner Banham, The New
Brutalism, 1966, pp. 72-73. James Richards’ eulogy of the English suburb, his Castles on the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 113 21-04-13 16:56

Ground, or the illustrations by John Piper that one found in this
particular book as well as in the pages of the Review.25 Almost
invariably, the Smithsons’ notion of Englishness would involve
some sort of contestation of established definition, just as it would
involve personal history and experience. The most outspoken and
combative example of this can be found in their 1968 pamphlet
against the demolition of the entrance building to Euston Station,
the Euston Arch. To the Smithsons, being themselves from the
north, the bold, Paestum-inspired architecture by Philip Hardwick
with its overseized Doric columns represented the new era of
steel technology and steam powered machines. The Arch was
demolished as part of the reconstruction of Euston Station by
developers with the approval of London authorities, something
that was taken as a deliberate insult to the culture of the north of
England by the Smithsons. They claimed:
‘The Arch was a monument to the Railway Age, to an age when
for the first time for centuries the power which the court and the
south control suddenly came to depend on the industrial energy of
the north. It was a monument to the Stephensons, to the new man.
The Arch was a nag, a reminder, that what was the Empire was based
on men working in the dirt up north.’
Demolition of the Arch was nothing but ‘an act of revenge by

the south against the north.’ 26
Nikolaus Pevsner wrote the foreword to the Smithsons hommage

to Victorian entrepeneurship, while the 1962 Architectural Review
essay by Richards decrying the ‘Euston Murder’ was completely
included as well. The Euston Arch then forms another example
of cross-generational collaboration between Brutalists and
Townscape advocates contrary to the endlessly repeated Banham
myth of fierce opposition.
In The Euston Arch one finds many more of those aspects of

English culture and identity as both contested and redefined
by the Smithsons and which were part of a much wider ongoing
debate. British cultural studies of the latter half of the twentieth
century may be mentioned as a reference once again here,
25 J.M. Richards, The Castles
on the Ground. The Anatomy and Williams’ culturalism in particular, with as key aspect the
of Suburbia, The Architectural Industrial Revolution, its developing technology and economy,
Press, London, 1946.
26 Alison and Peter Smithson, and the long term effects on cultural formations such as the class
The Euston Arch. and the Growth
of the London, Midland & Scottish
system, mass culture and mass media, democracy and a mobile
Railway, Thames and Hudson, society, which were establishing the new, modern English identity.
London, 1968, no paging (by own
counting pp. 21-23).
dvdh10PRINT.indd 114 21-04-13 16:56

The Battle for Modern Architecture in Britain
That Raymond Williams not once discussed architecture in

The Country and the City may be only natural for a literary
critic, but it can also be viewed as symptomatic for the value
attached to the architecture discipline in Britain in general.
The much lamented lack of avant-garde experimentation in
British architecture stands in stark contrast with developments
in British literature, which made it such a fantastic register for
Williams’ cultural investigations into the condition of modernity.
Alison Smithson’s account of the Picturesque sensibilities
as quoted above also points to this when she foregrounded
landscape and literature as the two most important modes of
English culture, while regretting the English disinterest in the
issue of architectural form. To complain about the difficult situation
for architects in Britain, not to mention the prejudice modern
architects had to face, was (and again perhaps still is) common
practice among architects.27 To be both modern and English was
considered a predicament which presented an awkward yet distinct
characteristic of British architecture of the twentieth century.
When Reyner Banham was invited to give a lecture at the RIBA
in January 1957, entitled ‘Futurism and Modern Architecture’, in
which he demonstrated the profound, yet until then neglected
impact of Futurist concepts and rhetoric on the development
of modern architecture, Peter Smithson commented on the
presupposedly still marginal status of modern architecture in
27 Quite regularly publications Britain:
come out lamenting the state of
the art in British architecture. ‘I feel it is slightly like a dream to hear Mr. Banham lecturing at the
It’s a tradition of its own right,
not just the Prince of Wales who
R.I.B.A., and myself speaking at the R.I.B.A. – rather like finding Jelly
likes to express discontent; for Roll Morton in the Library of Congress. If it is not a dream, if it is
instance the 1980 book by Nathan
Silver, Jos Boys (eds.), Why Is real, perhaps it indicates the new situation. If modern architecture
British Architecture So Lousy?.
can be discussed at the R.I.B.A., then architecture in England might
28 Peter Smithson as quoted at
the end of: Reyner Banham, ‘Futu- at least get off the ground.’ 28
rism and Modern Architecture’,
in: RIBA Journal, February 1957,
pp. 129-135, p. 137. The lecture,
and the discussion afterward, And with a tone of desperation James Stirling noted in his journal:
are funny and telling at the same ‘Frequently I awake in the morning and wonder how is it that I can
time. For instance, Banham de-
monstrated how Futurist rhetoric be an architect and an Englishman at the same time, particularly a
could even be retraced in Pevs-
ner’s glorifying description of the modern architect. Since the crystallisation of the modern movement
architecture of Gropius. The more
cautious, and conservative atti- around about 1920, Britain has not produced one single masterpiece
tude toward modern architecture and it must be practically the only European country which has not
and futurism was represented by
Ian Leslie, editor of The Builder. produced a “great man” or a single building.’ 29
29 In his so-called ‘Black Note-
book’, published in: Mark Crinson
(ed.), James Stirling. Early Unpu- The exasperation about the state of modern architecture on the
blished Writings on Architecture,
Routledge, London, 2010, p. 34. island is always combined with references to the Continent.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 115 21-04-13 16:56

Despite a handful of belated, yet respectable modern projects
in Britain as built in the 1930s by Lubetkin, his office Tecton,
and others such as Wells Coates and Connel, Ward and Lucas,
the island had been mostly out of touch with the revolutionary
events in Europe during the interbellum years.30 Perhaps
because of the shared feeling of missing out and remaining in
the margins, the British post-war discourse meant fierce debate
on the limits and future scope of modern architecture, more than
anywhere else in Europe one might say. The tone of the debates
was full of reference to the war, up to the point that the cause
of the war was linked to the cause of modern architecture. For
sure, Reyner Banham represented the most polemical voice. He
boldly talked about betrayal and abandonment while construing
a generation conflict between the advocates of modern
architecture in Britain. In his belligerent essay ‘Revenge of the
Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945-1965’, which
was his contribution to the 1968 Liber Amicorum presented to
Nikolaus Pevsner on the occasion of his 65th birthday, Banham
spilled his beans and spared nobody. It famously opened with
the following statement:
30 The history of modern archi-
tecture and modernism in Great
‘Those of my generation who interrupted their architectural
Britain has regained quite some training in order to fight a war to make the world safe for the
new interest, see among others:
John R. Gold, The Experience of Modern Movement, tended to resume their studies after
Modernism. Modern Architects
and the Future City 1928-1953, demobilization with sentiments of betrayal and abandonment.
E & FN Spon, London, 1997; and
its sequel: John R. Gold, The
Two of the leading oracles of Modern Architecture appeared
Practice of Modernism, Modern to have thrown principle to the wind and espoused the most
Architects and Urban Transfor-
mation, 1954-1972, Routledge, debased English habits of compromise and sentimentality.
London, 2007; Nicholas Bullock,
Building the Post-war World. J.M. Richards, author of the highly persuasive Introduction to
Modern Architecture and Recon-
struction in Britain, Routledge,
Modern Architecture at the beginning of the war, celebrated its
London, 2002; Alan Powers, end with The Castles on the Ground, an apotheosis of English
Modern. The Modern Movement
in Britain, Merrell Publishers, suburbia for which some have never forgiven him. Similarly,
London and New York, 2005; Alan
Powers, Britain. Modern Architec- Nikolaus Pevsner, whose Pioneers of the Modern Movement
tures in History, Reaktion Books,
London, 2007; Elizabeth Darling,
had given modern architecture a comfortingly secure historical
Re-forming Britain. Narratives of ancestry, was now publishing (either as author, or as editor of the
Modernity before Reconstruction,
Routledge, London, 2007; Andrew Architectural Review) articles giving equally secure historical
Higgott, Mediating Modernism.
Architectural Cultures in Britain, justifications for a revival of the Picturesque.’ 31
Routledge, London, 2007. The
Twentieth Century Society and
its journal too, have significantly According to Banham then, ‘combat was joined between a barely
contributed to the research of
modern architecture in Britain. middle-aged architectural “Establishment” armed with a major
31 Reyner Banham, ‘Revenge of magazine [Architectural Review], and a generation of battle-
the Picturesque: English Archi-
tectural Polemics, 1945-1965’, in: hardened and unusually mature students.’ 32
John Summerson (ed.), Essays on
Architectural Writers and Writing,
Allen Lane the Penguin Press,
London, 1968, pp. 265-273. However, after having first dismissed the older editors of the
32 Ibid. Architectural Review, Banham then aimed his arrows at his
dvdh10PRINT.indd 116 21-04-13 16:56

contemporaries, ‘those of my generation’, with whom he had
organised the ICA events of the Independent Group in order to
come up with some sort of alternative agenda to the policies
of the Review. Banham’s partners-in-crime were well aware
of his disappointment; apparently, Alison Smithson had once
remarked that ‘poor Peter [Banham]’ was ‘forever condemned
to be disappointed’.33 And of course, despite the firm lines
drawn by Banham, it should not be forgotten that he himself
held a most ambiguous position here as well, having held
himself the position of so-called ‘assistant literary editor’ on
the Architectural Review board while working on his dissertation
under the supervision of Pevsner during those same years. Any
oppositional account of the events should thus be measured
most carefully.
The by now established myth of the Independent Group and

the New Brutalism is grounded on such oppositions, despite
several attempts to more critically contextualize the historical
events.34 It should be briefly recaptured here, since it must
be contested. The classic myth runs as follows: there was a
younger generation, eager to catch up with both Continental
avant-garde and American consumer culture; they gathered
at the ICA, were anti-establishment and polemicized against
the policies of the Architectural Review of the time; to this end
they devised the New Brutalism against what they called the
33 As quoted by Whiteley in his
Banham biography, 2002, p. 133. ‘New Sentimentality’, a pun on the Review editors propaganda
34 By far the most critical is of a New Empiricism and New Humanism as derived from the
Anne Massey and Penny Sparke,
‘The Myth of the Independent example of the Swedish welfare state; Architectural Design
Group’, in: Block, nr. 10, 1985,
pp. 48-56. The article was a fierce (with the younger Theo Crosby as ‘technical editor’) would
attack on a piece by Dick Heb-
dige, ‘In Poor Taste’, published
act as the Review’s counterpart and be the new generation’s
in: Block, nr. 8 of the same year mouthpiece. An exciting story then unfolds involving
which according to Massey and
Sparke uncritically reproduced iconoclastic ‘bloody-mindedness’ against the cultured tastes
the myth of the Independent
Group as constructed over the of a figure like Herbert Read, the ‘Pope of modern art’; it’s about
years. However, Hebdige’s article
was reproduced in the catalogue
‘hards’ against ‘softs’, and ‘angry young men’ who sought
of the first Independent Group honest architectural expression, not the kind of ‘compromise’
retrospective, the MIT Press pu-
blication Modern Dreams of 1988. as suggested by Pevsner in his Reith lectures for BBC radio
Massey and Sparke’s critique
went largely unnoticed. It should on the Englishness of English art.
be noted here, that Penny Sparke
was involved in the production of
the BBC documentary ‘Fathers Other ingredients of the crucible included competing student
of Pop’ just as she edited Reyner
Banham’s anthology Design by factions at the Architectural Association and the LCC as a
Choice, Academy Editions,
London, 1981. Anne Massey place of confrontation between the socialist minded architects
published her dissertation of
1985 in 1995 as The Independent
who preached ‘people’s detailing’ and the young architects with
Group. Modernism and Mass Cul- a predilection for Corbusian béton brut; a battle fought at the
ture in Britain, 1945-59, Manches-
ter University Press, Manchester. Alton estate of Roehampton, where eventually the young team
dvdh10PRINT.indd 117 21-04-13 16:56

of Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis built five ‘Marseille cubs’
based on the earlier experiment of StJohn Wilson, Colquhoun
and Peter Carter at the Bentham Road estate. The 1951 Festival
of Britain, the so-called ‘contemporary’ style that was invented
for the occasion, Townscape, the neo-Picturesque and New
Town planning are all then casually interwoven in the story.
In the more recent historiography from the 1990s onward the
Independent Group is eventually added and cherished as the
ultimate place of resistance and neo-avantgarde experiment with
the 1956 exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery
as something of a cumulation of the events. Ultimately, the
moment unravelled in the early 1960s when the Smithsons built
the Economist in London and Stirling the Engineering Building
at Leicester University. A disappointed Banham declared it was
all over: in his 1966 book on the New Brutalism he concluded that
ultimately, the younger generation of architects had not been
capable of developing a coherent alternative, had fallen out with
each other, while Brutalist ethic had given way to Picturesque
revival after all, and most glaringly so in the case of the ‘bell-
wethers of the young throughout the middle fifties’, Alison and
Peter Smithson.
But when one looks just a bit closer at the web of exchanges,
nothing of this account actually holds up. At the same time,
it is not completely untrue either, all of the abovementioned
was part of the ‘English crucible’ as Kenneth Frampton so
aptly defined the situation.35 The polemics that were part
and parcel of the crucible and accompanied the events
often prevent a clear understanding of the issues at stake.
Lethaby already complained about the eagerness for dissent
between his fellow countrymen. Talking about a ‘culture war’
35 Paper delivered by Kenneth (in 1917) Lethaby observed how ‘it has become a delightful
Frampton at the occasion of a
TU Delft seminar on CIAM,
amusement to us to differ in words’ and that one was ’so eager
Team 10 and the English Context, for word arguments that if our very own opinions are uttered
5 November 2001; the account is
personal and impressionistic, by some one else we are tempted to contradict them, or we
a slightly different version from
someone just a few years younger raise confusing other questions in philosophy or politics’.36
than the Smithsons and their
contemporaries, even though one
Jencks too, noted in his Modern Movements in Architecture
could count Frampton also as a how the ‘scene’ of British architecture could be captured by the
contemporary, he and Alison dif-
fer only two years in age. ‘single metaphor’ of the ‘battlefield’, a ‘“scarred battlefield”
36 W.R. Lethaby, Form in Civiliza- at that, for it is saturated with the shellholes of polemic’, and
tion. Collected papers on Art and
Labour, Oxford University Press, ‘each label (or insult according to the enemy) marks the place
London, 1957, p. 87.
37 Charles Jencks, Modern
and time where a battle was fought or where a flag was stuck
Movements in Architecture, marking out new territory’.37
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
1973, p. 239.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 118 21-04-13 16:56

The Construction of Opposition or Closing the Circle?
Between the 1955 New Brutalism essay and Banham’s 1976

critique of the Festival of Britain and the ‘Festival style’ the
various accounts of the events in the 1950s as produced by the
‘historian of the immediate future’ keep slightly shifting over the
years. The construction of opposition remains the most important
element, however, with class struggle and the generation
gap among the basic ingredients. The second element, which
became a recurring element ever since Banham’s 1966 book on
the New Brutalism came out, is how the opposition between
the parties was ultimately reversed and overcome. Looking back,
Banham spoke of a ‘closing of the circle in about one decade’
dating this as follows:
‘Symbolically, the gap between the Brutalists and the Picturesque
Townscape movement may be said to close in 1962, when the
Smithsons employed Gordon Cullen, greatest of the Archtectural
Review’s “Townscape” draughtsmen to prepare the perspectives
of their Economist building.’ 38
But if one could truly speak of such a big opposition as suggested

by Banham, then arguably, this ‘closing of the circle’ had happened
as early as 1952 when the Independent Group was installed and he
himself joined the Architectural Review board. The very moment the
protagonists of the new generation asked for a space of their own,
this request was granted. This happened also in the case of CIAM
and MARS, just as it happened at the ICA and in the pages of the
Architectural Review. Unlike the early, pre-war avant-gardes, the
Brutalists never had a magazine of their own comparable to say G,
De Stijl, or Esprit Nouveau. It always concerned a critical practice
from within the more or less established media and institutes.
As noted, the various historiographies that reproduce the

Banham myth of straightforward opposition are mostly a matter
of highlighting and suppressing, particularly so in the case of
the generation conflict. There is hardly a voice contesting this,
even though there is plenty of evidence of mutual interest and
interaction bridging the generation gap, just as there is evidence
of fierce rivalry between the contemporaries – as in the case of
the Smithsons and Stirling for instance, or Banham and Rowe.
Additionally, one might also point to lesser known contemporary

younger architects who worked parallel to the Independent Group
38 Reyner Banham, The New
Brutalism, 1966, p. 75. members and who were equally, or even more successful in
dvdh10PRINT.indd 119 21-04-13 16:56

winning competitions and setting up their own businesses: Philip
Powell and Hidalgo Moya in the first place perhaps, who won the
competition for Churchill Gardens as early as 1946, as well as the
1949 competition for the so-called vertical feature at the Festival
of Britain, built 1951, and which the Smithsons lost; Peter (or Joe)
Chamberlin, Geoffry Powell and Christoph Bon built the Golden
Lane estate after Powell won the competition, and again lost by
the Smithsons. Not much later the threesome were to be involved
in the development of the monumental Barbican estate just south
of Golden Lane. As for ‘elders’ following, at times surpassing the
young turks in terms of ‘bloody-minded’ radicalism in architecture
one could point to Denys Lasdun, his Cluster Block in the East End
of London and the University of East Anglia dormitory buildings
in particular, or Ernö Goldfinger and his building projects for
Elephant & Castle, the Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower, all set in
London and of a most eloquent concrete architecture.
A rare, dissent yet perceptive observation regarding the

construction of a generation conflict comes from Percy Johnson-
Marshall, British modern architect and planner, about ten years
older than Stirling and Smithson. Talking about the debates of the
1950s, he said:
‘The Festival of Britain absorbed modern architecture into the show.
It was a very British way to behave, but it did not suit everyone. There
were already others, of whom the Smithsons are the best known, who
wanted to regain a harder edge. I stress the word regain. They were
not mere iconoclasts. They believed in the importance of history and
were passionately keen to rekindle that spark that the masters like
Corb and Mies had ignited. To a real extent, they were reaching back
to move forwards. Certainly they were young, but there were older
people who agreed with them and also younger people who didn’t.’ 39
To complicate matters, Banham himself too, would retrospectively

note examples of intergenerational collaboration, stating that
the ‘committed young as Colin Rowe, James Stirling and the
Smithsons’ ‘found it difficult to maintain consistent hostility to
the Review’, instead they started working with the Architectural
Review editors soon enough, publishing major articles by their
hand in the magazine.40 James Stirling would publish his reviews
of the Ronchamp chapel and the Maisons Jaoul by Le Corbusier,
39 Interview in: John R. Gold, The while Colin Rowe published his seminal essay ‘The Mathematics
Experience of Modernism, 1997,
pp. 220-221. of the Ideal Villa’ as early as 1947. The ‘Cluster City’ essay by the
40 Reyner Banham, ‘The Revenge Smithsons was already mentioned, just as the generous coverage
of the Picturesque’, 1968, pp. 266-
267. of the Smithsons’ Hunstanton school by the Review with comments
dvdh10PRINT.indd 120 21-04-13 16:56

from such an authorative critic as Philip Johnson, even though at
the same time the Smithsons were introduced as ‘two of the most
controversial young designers in England’.41
Banham, wisely but regrettably, did not include himself in the retro
spective assessment of the exchanges. As is well-known of course
(sometimes it feels one is only repeating what has been said a long
time ago) his ground-breaking New Brutalism essay was published
in the Review, not in Architectural Design, the alleged mouthpiece of
the younger generation; interestingly enough, it was published in the
December issue of 1955, so it must have been written simultaneously
to Pevsner’s radio talks on the Englishness of English art. Perhaps
then, it is not by accident that the two defining concepts of Banham’s
explanation of the New Brutalism, the ones of so-called ‘Image’ and
‘topology’, seem to be so tuned as to substitute the key Picturesque
41 The Architectural Review, notions with the Image for the painterly and topology for the
September 1954, contents page.
42 Such confusion seems to organization of movement; a most clever rhetorical construct by
be the case in the book by John
Macarthur, The Picturesque. Banham that may also lead to confuse the Brutalist project with
Architecture, Disgust and Other yet another example of Picturesque revival, even though the New
Irregularities, Routledge, London,
2007, pp. 103-109, where the author Brutalism essay itself clearly attempts to steer away from the rules
either erroneously concludes, or
perhaps attempts to ironically as set out by the elder editors of the Review.42
provoke, when he states that
‘Banham was correct to think
that Brutalism was picturesque’. The relationship between Banham and Pevsner must have
Banham never proposed such a
thing. been quite a special one and remains hard to fathom.43
43 For more on this see
Whiteley’s biography of 2002;
Banham’s profound respect for Pevsner is well documented, yet
Susie Harries in her biography of simultaneously he would seek confrontation, for instance in the
Pevsner (Nikolaus Pevsner, The
Life, Chatto & Windus, London, case of his dissertation, which was also a partial criticism of
2011), largely follows Whiteley on
this aspect. Pevsner’s own work who acted as the supervisor to the doctoral
44 Reyner Banham, Theory and work: Banham’s classic study Theory and Design in the First
Design in the First Machine Age,
The Architectural Press, London, Machine Age, on which he worked between the years 1952 and
1960; Robin Middleton notes that
‘the vital, final chapter of Theory 1958, and which was eventually published in 1960.44 But as said,
& Design was not part of the following Banham’s own early career one cannot but conclude that
original dissertation, Buckmin-
ster Fuller was introduced at the integration between the two ‘combat’ parties was firmly secured
suggestion of John McHale’, cor-
respondence with the author. as early as 1952 when he himself started to work as a literary editor
45 From Robbins, 1990, chrono- for the Architectural Review, just as he would start to convene the
logy by Graham Whitham; the
date of 1952 as Banham’s start gatherings of the ‘Young Group’ at the ICA that same year. His
at the Architectural Review is not
a 100% clear though, in his dis- official capacity was that of ‘secretary of the Independent Group’;
sertation on the editorial policies
of The Architectural Review,
Banham’s appointment to the ICA Management Committee
Erdem Erten lists March 1953 followed a year later in the summer of 1953.45
as the first inclusion of Banham
in the journal’s colophon as
assistant literary editor: Erdem
Erten, ‘Shaping “The Second In a sense, the figure of Banham and the relation Banham-Pevsner,
Half Century”: The Architectural
Review 1947-1971’, MIT, February
the protégé respecting while contesting his own mentor, seem to
2004; Whiteley mentions 1952, represent much of the interactions within the various platforms
p. 9 of his biography, just as Rob-
bins, p. 18. for modern architecture and art, not only with respect to the ICA
dvdh10PRINT.indd 121 21-04-13 16:56

and the Independent Group, but also the MARS group, CIAM
and Team 10. It would certainly explain much of the anger some
of the elders felt for the actions of the junior members (though
Pevsner was never angered by Banham’s actions it must be noted).
A frustrated Jane Drew, second generation British modern
architect, complained for instance about the dissolution of the
MARS group in 1957, and CIAM in 1959:
‘My chief objection to them, and not just them, was the way that
they jumped on to the CIAM bandwagon, having done nothing
and setting up what was called [Team] Ten ... I thought that it
was colossal cheek.’ 46
The so-called ‘combat’ between the two generations then turns

out to be a much more complicated affair, but how can one be
surprised? When we are looking at the exchanges between the
two camps as outlined by Banham, the Review editors versus the
younger architects and writers, it is more like looking at a web of
interactions between highly ambitious individuals, overlapping
loyalties and shifting coalitions, surely not a clearcut dividing
frontline between generational parties. Nor did it concern a rivalry
between two magazines one might add at this point, namely
between the Review versus Architectural Design. The special
position of the ‘trade rag’ The Architects’ Journal for instance,
has remained underexposed in existing historiographies.47
Published by the Architectural Press and De Cronin Hastings
(just as the more prestigious Review) the rhetorics frequently
spilled over to the pages of the Journal as well. The Smithsons
contributed regularly, also under pseudonym, the construction
46 Interviewed by John Gold, photographs of Hunstanton were lavishly published first by
quoted in: John R. Gold, The
Practice of Modernism. Modern the Journal in September 1953, just as their critical review of
Architects and Urban Transfor-
mation, 1954-1972, Routledge, ‘Banham’s bumper book’ on the New Brutalism was published
London, 2007, p. 236. there. Other media with very different readerships that also
47 To construct a controversy
between the Review and Archi- covered the ICA related events (albeit on an incidental basis)
tectural Design as the ‘axis’ of the
architectural debate in Britain
were the Observer, the New Statesman, Listener, Encounter,
is continued in contemporary and ARK, the Journal of the Royal College of Art.
research by Christine Boyer in
her ‘An Encounter with History:
the Post-war Debate between the
English Journals of Architectural The discursive web we are looking at holds competing views
Review and Architectural Design
(1945-1960)’, in: Dirk van den Heu-
on the future of modern architecture and planning, yet they very
vel, Gijs de Waal (eds.), Team 10 much operate within the same modernist paradigm. There are
between Modernity and the Eve-
ryday, conference proceedings, differences, there is contradiction, disagreement, even opposition
Delft University of Technology,
2003; but also by Steve Parnell, of course, there is exaggeration and definition by opposition, but
Architectural Design 1954-1972:
The Contribution of the Architec-
the positions are not mutually exclusive, there are overlappings,
tural Magazine to the Writing of shared interests and shared ambitions, probably much more than
Architectural History, PhD The-
sis, University of Sheffield, 2012. the parties would have liked to admit.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 122 21-04-13 16:56

Next to the generation conflict the issue of class also serves
as too easy an explanation for assumed oppositions, in order
to clarify the history of the post-war years and the Independent
Group events. Despite denouncing the ‘angry young men’ analogy,
Reyner Banham did try to cast the Independent Group events,
including both the Brutalist and Pop tendencies within the group,
as belonging to or at least feeling sympathetic toward working
class attitudes. In the 1970s BBC documentary on the Independent
Group ‘Fathers of Pop’ Banham – himself of working class origins –
tried to portray the whole group as such, but almost every other
participant interviewed resisted such general characterization.
Design historians Anne Massey and Penny Sparke provided an
early refutation of this classic Independent Group myth with their
piece ‘The Myth of the Independent Group’, published already in
1985 in the journal Block, in which they carefully dismantled any
definition of the group by such schematic opposition.48
Yet, the myth is tenacious. Beatriz Colomina tried to have the claim
of class opposition confirmed in her interview with Peter Smithson
in October, but Smithson mentioned that among others Alison,
but also Nigel Henderson and Colin St John Wilson were all from
very middle class to upper middle class backgrounds.49 In a recent
piece Colomina, following Banham, rephrased the connection with
working class, anti-academic sentiment by referring to the so-
called red brick universities, the nineteenth century counterparts
of old elite universities, the implication being that the architects of
the Independent Group went to these red brick universities instead
of following an elite sort of education.50 Again, although not untrue,
the generalizing tone results in myth making. A few of the young
Turks were from Liverpool, the classic red brick university, like
Stirling, Bob Maxwell and Brian Richards for instance, just as the
Smithsons went to Newcastle University (then Durham). However,
many of the protagonists received their training at the classic
architecture schools, most notably the AA-School, where Voelcker
48 Massey, Sparke, 1985.
49 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Friends of went for instance, or Cambridge, Sandy Wilson went there, or
the Future: A Conversation with even the Royal Academy Schools, which Peter Smithson himself
Peter Smithson’, in: October,
nr. 94, Fall 2000, pp. 16-17; Alan enrolled after having finished his architectural training at Durham
Colquhoun called the whole class
issue a ‘red-herring’ stating that University in Newcastle.
it should be about the positions
and the principles of ordering,
in conversation with the author, The one underlying topic, which is actually a most interesting
23 June 2007.
50 Beatriz Colomia, ‘Foreword’ one, yet hardly looked into until now, although Colomina touches
to Mark Crinson and Claire Zim-
merman (eds.), Neo-avant-garde
on this, is the one of education in relation to social mobility, a
and Postmodern, 2010, p. 2; see key characteristic of the post-war era and the freshly established
also Banham, The New Brutalism,
1966, p 13-14. welfare state policies. Especially so, because many of the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 123 21-04-13 16:56

returning soldiers, including Independent Group members such as
Nigel Henderson were provided with scholarships to re-integrate
into society. Denise Scott-Brown, at the time (the early 1950s) a
student at the AA School, mentioned how the school was a melting
pot of lower class students with scholarships and students from
the upper middle classes with public school backgrounds.51 She
also talked about how some of those of upper middle class descent
would ‘rebel’ in the ‘angry young men’ kind of way. But aspirations
also worked the other way in the English crucible of the post-war
years, and this is overlooked too often. Working and lower middle
class students adopted upper class attitudes, the Whiggish Colin
51 Lecture at the AA School,
Rowe perhaps most notably.52 Peter Smithson and John McHale
2009: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk// too, would talk about how English ‘snobbishness’ was something of
VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=85.
52 Being from working-class a cultivated attitude in and outside of Independent Group circles.53
Yorkshire and a fellow student of
Stirling and Maxwell at Liverpool
university, Rowe is said to have Next to Liverpool, the AA School, or the Bartlett School of
adopted the upper-class accent
to better himself; Braden R. Engel Architecture, the other key London institutes that should be
paints a fantastic portrait of Co-
lin Rowe and his fellow students mentioned here are the Central School of Arts and Crafts and
from Liverpool in his essay ‘The the Slade School of Art. The latter was the place where Richard
Badger of Muck and Brass’, in:
AA-files, nr. 62, 2011, pp. 95-103; Hamilton, William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi met when
for instance, he describes how
Rowe and Stirling received the students. The former was also important, since it was founded
necessary domestic etiquette
from their friend Sam Stevens’ by Lethaby, and thus an immediate connection with early anti-
mother, ‘like leaving the bath in classicist and pre-modernist notions from the Arts and Crafts.
a good condition after use’.
53 Among others in Hans Ulrich Theo Crosby for instance went to the Central School to take
Obrist, Smithson Time. Peter
Smithson & Hans Ulrich Obrist.
classes in sculpture, while many others would teach there,
A Dialogue, Verlag der Buchhand- including Paolozzi, Henderson, Peter Smithson, Victor Pasmore,
lung Walther König, Cologne,
2004, p. 25; Colomina, ‘Friends Turnbull, Edward Wright and Hamilton.54 The Central School
of the Future’, 2000, p. 5; David
Robbins, The Independent Group, thus served as the first meeting place during the years 1948-1951,
1990, p. 29.
before the ICA would open its doors in Dover Street in December
54 See the chronology of Inde-
pendent Group events by Whit- 1950, and before the actual Independent Group gatherings would
ham in Robbins, 1990; to unravel
the history of the schools falls start in 1952. In fact, if it ever was a real phenomenon, the whole
unfortunately beyond the scope generation opposition and the drive behind the so-called New
of this research, still it should be
mentioned; for an attempt to such Brutalist ‘bloody-mindedness’ might be referred to those pre-ICA
a history of the Central School
see: Sylvia Backemeyer (ed.), years when one considers that the New Empiricism as proposed
Making their Mark. Art, Craft and
Design at the Central School 1896- by the Review editors and against which the Brutalists would rail,
1966, A & C Black, 2000. belonged to the 1940s. From December 1949 onward Townscape
55 ‘Townscape’, in: The Archi-
tectural Review, December 1949, was launched and would supersede the New Empiricism as the
pp. 355-362; see for more on
this Erten’s dissertation (2004);
major and most influential campaign of the Review.55 The Festival
Mathew Aitchinson has written year 1951, also the first year of the new premises of the ICA,
on the topic, and edited the post-
humous publication of Nikolaus marked both the opposition and the integration of the younger
Pevsner, Visual Planning and the
Picturesque, Getty Research artists and architects by the establishment, after which the
Institute, Los Angeles, 2012;
Aitchinson also organized the
whole Independent Group affair took place within the confines
symposium on Townscape, 22-23 of the ICA.
July 2011, University College
London.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 124 21-04-13 16:56

Early integration can also be observed in the pages of the
Architectural Review. Even before the Independent Group meetings
and the event of the New Brutalism, the Architectural Review had
already published Nigel Henderson photographs in the February
issue of 1952. Next to a text called ‘Italian Scrapbook’, a report
on post-war developments at the peninsula, we find a so-called
‘stressed photograph’ by him of Eduardo Paolozzi visiting his family
village.56 And when the Growth and Form exhibition by Richard
Hamilton was on show in 1951, the cover of the Review featured
an image taken from the exhibition, while inside two pages with
Henderson photographs showed an impression of the installation.57
At the 1951 Festival of Britain too, Paolozzi’s work was part of the
official exhibitions, just as Pasmore and Turnbull’s, both future
Independent Group members; and to mention it once again,
Richard Hamilton put together the Growth and Form installation
for the ICA, even though the exact status with regard to the Festival
programme became a subject of dispute.58 Interestingly enough,
after the Festival had closed in October 1951 the Review also
56 The Architectural Review, published commentaries critical of key parts of its programme.
February 1952, p. 82; the text itself
is authored by Alan Ballantyne. In the December issue two highly critical pieces appeared, the
57 The Architectural Review, Oc-
tober 1951, plus photos by Nigel
main article that discussed the design products as selected
Henderson on p. 216 and 273. by the Council of Industrial Design (CoID), and a review of the
58 Anne Massey discusses the
difficulties around the ‘Growth achievements of the Lansbury estate by Richards who didn’t hide
and Form’ exhibition and how his profound disappointment with the ‘live architecture exhibition’
it eventually fell outside of the
official Festival agenda, Massey, of the Festival.59 And later, in 1953, Richards would attack the first
1995, p. 42-45.
59 J.M. Richards, ‘Lansbury’, in:
results of the New Town policies in his essay ‘The Failure of the New
The Architectural Review, Decem- Towns’, two years before the Smithsons would publish their critique
ber 1951, pp. 361-367; two pieces
without author discussed design in Architectural Design with their 1955 essay ‘The Built World: Urban
at the Festival: ‘COID: Progress
Report’, pp. 349-352, and ‘COID: Re-identification’ and the 1956 essay ‘Alternative to the Garden
Progress Report’, pp. 353-359.
City Idea.’ 60 And famously, the Review produced the ‘Outrage’ issue,
‘The Built World: Urban Re- June 1955, edited by the activist-journalist Ian Nairn, once more
identification’ in: Architectural
Design, June 1955, pp. 185-188; attacking the assumed mediocrity of British planning policies,
Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘An
Alternative to the Garden City
which produced a new cityscape that Nairn had coined ‘Subtopia’.61
Idea’, in: Architectural Design, The Smithsons would seize upon this latest campaign of the Review
July 1956, pp. 229-231 (first typo-
script is dated 1954). when they compiled their demonstration grid for CIAM 1956 in
61 The Architectural Review, June Dubrovnik. For one of the five examples of settlement development
1955, also published as a book
by the Architectural Press in the based on the Geddes Valley Section they used the very phrase
same year.
62 From the Smithson archive,
of ‘OUTRAGE’, pasting it on one of the boards of the grid, plus
published in Dirk van den Heuvel, a photograph taken from the Review’s ‘Outrage’ issue depicting
Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and
Peter Smithson – from the House a generic suburban development, although its origins and the
of the Future to a House of Today,
010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004, connection to the Review campaign were initially made invisible.62
p. 70; and Max Risselada, Dirk
van den Heuvel (eds.), Team 10.
In Search of a Utopia of the Pre- As a final observation regarding the dynamics of the exchanges
sent 1953-1981, NAi Publishers,
Rotterdam, 2005, p. 51. between middle-aged establishment and younger opposition
dvdh10PRINT.indd 125 21-04-13 16:56

one could point to the two issues of the Review devoted to
developments in the United States, and in which quite naturally
the reciprocal issues of (anti-)Americanism and Englishness
were consistently played off against each other, the 1950 issue
‘Man Made America’ and the 1957 issue of ‘Machine Made
America’ with a collage of John McHale on the cover. In addition
to the suggestion by Banham that the younger generation had
moved in the direction of the establishment giving up resistance
and reproducing Picturesque sensibilities, we also see the
establishment absorbing the interest in America as an at least
partially positive force.63
The other platform of exchange that is usually left out of the

historiography of the 1940s and 50s, sometimes simply overlooked,
or at best assigned with a minor role only, is the one of the
MARS Group, the British section of CIAM established in 1933.64
MARS is conspicuously absent from Banham’s account of the
debates of the 1950s for instance. Perhaps because he himself
63 ‘Man Made America’, The was not a member, perhaps because MARS in its last years
Architectural Review, December
1950, and ‘Machine Made Ame- played no real part in the debates on the New Brutalism. Yet, at
rica’, The Architectural Review,
May 1957; this observation was
the same time the MARS network had multiple overlappings with
already made by Charles Jencks the ICA and the two major British magazines, the Architectural
in his Modern Movements in
Architecture of 1973, p. 280. Review and Architectural Design. MARS members controlled the
64 Unfortunately, there is no exchanges, the issues at stake and who was allowed to speak and
separate history of the British
CIAM group written until now, who not, starting with James Richards, editor of the Review of
but in recent publications one
finds a handful of references, in course, who would also serve as chair of the British CIAM group.
particular the work of John Gold,
The Experience of Modernism, But Monica Pidgeon, chief editor of Architectural Design, was a
1997, and The Practice of Mo- member of the MARS Group as well, just as her younger technical
dernism, 2007; Nicholas Bullock,
2002; Alan Powers 2005 and editor Theo Crosby. MARS then brought together many of the
2007; Darling, 2007; in Mumford’s
history on CIAM (2000) there competitors in the English crucible, and the Group had secured
are also a couple of references
to MARS, esp. in relation to the key positions in the architecture media. MARS members, younger
1947 and 1951 conferences. and older, also controlled the architecture of the Festival of Britain;
65 Paul Elek published the hard-
cover book series called Archi- Hugh Casson, Leslie Martin, Ralph Tubbs, James Cadbury Brown,
tects’ Year Book between 1945 and
1974 with various editors: nr. 1
Powell and Moya, all were involved in building on the South Bank,
as published in 1945, edited by all were MARS members.
Jane Drew, completely devoted
to practical issues related to the
immediate reconstruction; nr. 2
published in 1947, edited by Jane And although not officially part of the group’s activities, the
Drew; nrs. 3-4, 1949 and 1952,
jointly edited by Drew and Trevor
Architects’ Year Book series, a prestigious hardcover published by
Dannatt; nrs. 5-10, between 1953 Paul Elek, was fully controlled by prominent MARS members with
and 1962, edited by Trevor Dannat;
nrs. 11-13 edited by David Lewis Jane Drew and Trevor Dannatt as editors. The Architects’ Year Book
as thematic issues: nr. 11, ‘The
Pedestrian in the City’, 1965; nr. series ran fourteen editions, starting in 1945 after which it came
12, ‘Urban Structure’, 1968; nr.
13, ‘The Growth of Cities’, 1971;
out irregularly until 1974.65 Especially from 1953 onward it would
nr. 14 and last volume, ‘The Inner bring major pieces by leading international voices, among those
City’, 1974, edited by Declan and
Margaret Kennedy. Ernst May, Le Corbusier, Ernesto Rogers, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 126 21-04-13 16:56

Giulio Argan, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., and Julius Posener. But also
many of the younger generation were represented: the Smithsons,
John Voelcker, James Stirling, Peter Moro and Theo Crosby.
Other contributing MARS members were Maxwell Fry, Jane
Drew, Ove Arup, Denys Lasdun and Ernö Goldfinger. From abroad
too, younger voices were given a platform, most notably from
CIAM circles: Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck, Giancarlo De Carlo,
but also Tomás Maldonado, Max Bill, and Edvard Ravnikar.
Even the distinguished Herbert Read, one of the founders of
the ICA and favourite target of Independent Group members,
sat on the editorial board from the series’ inception and would
contribute regularly.
When MARS was abandoned, a special volume came out giving

an overview of the events and developments from 1933 until 1957,
most notably by Maxwell Fry.66 Paul Elek continued the series with
Dannatt, who edited his last issue in 1962, after which another four
volumes would be published by intervals of three years. It meant
a continuation of a post-MARS and post-CIAM discourse well into
the 1970s combining familiar and new positions that overlapped
with or ran parallel to the Team 10 discourse. Authors included in
this second part of the series were among many others:
from Team 10 and its wider circles: Daniel van Ginkel and Blanche
Lemco, Van Eyck, Candilis Josic Woods, Herman Haan, Doxiadis,
Christopher Alexander, Yona Friedman; early post-modernist
voices: Denise Scott-Brown, and Charles Moore; from Archigram:
Peter Cook, David Greene and Michael Webb; also Gunter
Nitschke, Peter Carter and Brian Richards; and younger critics
such as Tony Vidler and Kenneth Frampton; and of the by then
66 Maxwell Fry, ‘English ‘older’ more mature ICA guard: Theo Crosby, Eduardo Paolozzi,
Architecture from the ’Thir-
ties’, in:Trevor Dannatt (ed.), Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Anthony Hill, Victor Pasmore, and
Architects’ Year Book, nr. 8, Elek
Books, London, 1957, pp. 53-56; William Turnbull. The Smithsons would also contribute up until
(immediately followed by an over-
view of events between 1953-1957
issue nr. 12 of 1968, with Peter’s essay ‘Density, Interval and
by Denys Lasdun, Voelcker wrote Measure’ as a final one.67
a report on the Dubrovbik CIAM
conference and Team 10).
67 Peter Smithson, ‘Density, Regarding the English situation, MARS and the Architects’ Year
Measure and Interval’, Architects’
Year Book, nr. 12, Elek Books, Book series thus represented a network bringing together the ICA
London, 1968; first published in
Landscape, Spring 1967, also in establishment, Independent Group members and the magazines
Architectural Design, September
1967. of the Architectural Review and Architectural Design. It was also
68 In 1953 it was decided to through MARS that the young members, William Howell, Alison
open up MARS membership
for a limited number of young and Peter Smithson and John Voelcker in particular, could meet
members to form ‘junior groups’,
in particular the ones mentioned
with key players in the field.68 MARS membership offered them
here, see Denys Lasdun, ‘MARS the opportunity to become active as official representatives within
GROUP 1953-1957’ in Architects’
Year Book, nr. 8, 1957, p. 57. CIAM circles, eventually leading to the organization of Team 10.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 127 21-04-13 16:56

The complaints of Smithson and Stirling that there was no such
thing as modern architecture in Britain before them should thus
be held critically against this context. By 1957, when MARS was
to be disbanded and Smithson expressed his surprise that modern
architecture was being discussed at an RIBA function, modern
architecture had indeed established itself as the new paradigm,
also in Britain. In 1957 Alvar Aalto was awarded with the RIBA
Gold Medal, after Gropius had received the honours the year
before, and Le Corbusier in 1953. It seemed MARS had operated
quite succesfully in the so-called battle for modern architecture,
preparing the ground for the younger generation, even though
some of whom felt such urge to distance themselves from
their elders.
Designing Histories
In analogy with the figure of the young members and the former
military back from the war being integrated into society and its
institutions along the lines of custody and contestation – with the
ICA actually surviving the process and MARS and CIAM going
under – we see a similar figure with regard to the devising of the
larger theoretical and historiographical frameworks during the
period. Mid-twentieth century was the period when knowledge
and its disciplinary development were conceived as structured
through the by now established concepts of epistemology
(Foucault and Bachelard) and paradigm (Kuhn), just as it saw the
emergence of a vast patchwork of counter-constructs that tried
to mobilize the so-called human, the socio-cultural, the irrational
or analogical, the artistic-psychological, even cosmological such
as poesis (again Bachelard, but also Heidegger and Huizinga),
69 A handful of relatively recent
studies have been published but also phenomenology, existentialism, all sorts of ‘practices’
about the subject of the historio-
graphy of modern architecture
including bricolage and hybridisation, the very broad category
and its specific epistemological of hermeneutics, and so forth and so on. In architecture too, we
structure. The most extensive
study until now is by Panayotis see in the second quarter of the twentieth century the devising of
Tournikiotis, The Historiography
of Modern Architecture, MIT historiographical frameworks, which aimed to explain, systematize
other studies include: Anthony
as well as legitimize the ‘new architecture’ as represented by the
Vidler, Histories of the Immediate modern movement, and which defined new relationships between
Present. Inventing Architec-
tural Modernism, MIT Press, knowledge, technology, society and architecture. This early period
Cambridge MA, 2008; Gevark
Hartoonian, The Mental Life of the was quickly followed by a critical, yet equally operative evaluation
Architectural Historian: Re-ope-
ning the Early Historiography of
of those first ‘paradigms’ during the 1950s and 60s.69 It was in
Modern Architecture, Cambridge this first period of evaluation and reconceptualization of modern
Scholars Publishing, Newcastle
upon Tyne, 2011. architecture and its achievements that Alison and Peter Smithson
dvdh10PRINT.indd 128 21-04-13 16:56

and their contemporaries of the Independent Group and Team 10
intellectuallly grew up and matured so to speak. As already
mentioned in the introductory chapter, they defined themselves as
‘simple inheritors’ with the achievements of the ‘first generation’
of modern architects as the ‘rock’ on which they planned to
ground their ‘own idea of order.’ 70 Notions of continuity, difference
and regeneration are at work here. And rather than a simplistic
rejection of competitor’s positions, one sees a strategy of
absorption, critique and appropriation. All sorts of aspects of
the contested campaigns by the Review, the ICA founders, or the
CIAM establishment, most notably Le Corbusier of course, but
also Ernesto Rogers, can be retraced in the debates between
the younger members in general, and in the work and thinking of
Alison and Peter Smithson in particular. Classicist principle is but
one yet very clear example. Peter Smithson explained why he went
to the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1948 as follows:
‘(…) because the professor [Sir Albert Richardson] was good in
the study of classicism. I thought if one was an enemy of eclecticism,
then one had to know more about it than they did. In a sense this was
a wartime idea – the general of one side had a picture of the general
on the other side in his caravan; he wanted to know as much as
possible of the history of the opponent.’ 71
In line with the wartime rhetoric one might argue that in the
battle for modern architecture in Britain as in other modernist
contexts around the globe, the writing and rewriting of the
history of architecture was a key weapon, not just in Britain.
The design of larger, historiographical frameworks ran parallel
70 ‘Simple Inheritors’ is the
first chapter of the Smithsons’ to avant-garde and modernist invention, although admittedly word
retrospective monograph The
Charged Void: Architecture; the followed action here. Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich of
other quote comes from their Ar-
chitectural Design issue devoted 1928 came out almost forty years after the realization of the 1889
to ‘The Heroic Period of Modern Eiffel tower, his 1929 manifesto Befreites Wohnen, two years after
Architecture’, 1965.
71 Catherine Spellman, Karl the Stuttgarter Weissenhof Siedlung opened, was already much
Conversations with Students.
closer to the date of executed key works of the modern movement.
A Space for our Generation, When Giedion published his Space, Time and Architecture. The
New York, 2005, p. 17; a similar Growth of a New Tradition in 1941, various competing histories of
quote appears in the monograph
of Sir Albert Richardson: Alan the modern movement were already circulating, establishing some
Powers, ‘Albert Richardson: A
Critical Survey’, in: Simon Houfe,
sort of general paradigm for the new architecture: most notably,
Alan Powers, John Wilton-Ely, The International Style by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip
Sir Albert Richardson 1880-1964,
Heinz Gallery, London, 1999, p. 65; Johnson of 1932, which followed Hitchcock’s slightly earlier yet
that the relationships between
the combatant ‘generals’ was of a lesser impact, Modern Architecture of 1929; Emil Kaufmann’s
most courtly was testified by
Richardson giving a set of silver
Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier came out in 1933, an early example of
tea spoons to Peter and Alison a historian forging the connection between the architecture of the
Smithson when they married the
same year. French enlightenment, the idea of autonomy and the ideas of the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 129 21-04-13 16:56

early twentieth century avant-garde; and finally, Nikolaus Pevsner
who published his Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936, in
which he emphasized the tradition of Functionalist design as quite
another genealogical line as captured by its subtitle From William
Morris to Walter Gropius.
Space, Time and Architecture had a very different objective from

Giedion’s earlier publications, or the others mentioned. It had the
ambition to establish modern architecture as what Giedion called
‘the new tradition’.72 Rather than proposing a break with the past
in true avant-garde spirit, Giedion now designed a comprehensive
historical-theoretical framework for the new, growing tradition
of modern architecture, which according to him revolved around
the development of the concept of space and which reached back
as far as the Renaissance.73 Giedion explained the need for such
large time-frames as ‘the demand for continuity’ referring to the
chaos of his time without explicitly mentioning the outbreak of
World War II.74 The ‘total war’ as proclaimed by the Nazis had
only just started when Giedion published his book, neither the
72 See also: Werner Oechslin et
ending of war, nor victory over Nazi Germany were evident at
al., Sigfried Giedion 1888-1968. Der the time. Giedion understood the devising of a larger, universal
Entwurf einer modernen Tradition,
Ammann, Zürich, 1989. framework as in function of the overcoming of the then disastrous
73 Giedion would ultimately state of affairs; he stated that the ‘destructive confusion of
expand his historiographical
construct with his last book Ar- events in the world at large today is so great that the movement
chitektur und das Phänomen des
Wandels. Die Drei Raumkonzep- toward universality is clearly visible in the field of science
tionene in der Architektur (Verlag
Ernst Wasmuth, Tübingen, 1969), and scholarship’. And quite in contrast with his iconoclastic
in which he distinguishes three Befreites Wohnen, which in an exalted, Nietzschean way had
concepts of space (prehistoric
architecture as sculpture (ancient called for the replacement of the older ‘race’ with a new one,75
Greece as example), architec-
ture as interior (ancient Rome now according to Giedion, ‘a connection with the past is a
as example) and architecture as
both sculpture and interior (mo- prerequisite for the appearance of a new and self-confident
dern architecture of the twentieth tradition’.76
century)).
74 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time
and Architecture. The Growth of a
New Tradition, Harvard University
The two national contexts in which such construction of
Press, Cambridge Mass., 1982, historico-theoretical frameworks were most critically and
p. 7, first edition 1941.
75 Giedion opened his Befreites productively reviewed were Britain and Italy. The first three post-
Wohnen with a quote from the war CIAM congresses would also take place here, Bridgwater in
Belgian Jobard, journalist and di-
rector of the Industrial Museum: 1947, Bergamo in 1949, and Hoddesdon in 1951. In both countries
‘Wie bei Pflanzen und Tieren, so
erscheint auch in der Architektur a magazine would play a dominant role, Casabella Continuità in
eine neue Rasse erst nach dem
Verschwinden der alten. Die Milan, with Ernesto Rogers as chief editor, and the Architectural
Rasse der Hohenpriester der Review in London, with James Richards and Nikolaus Pevsner
Steinarchitectktur wird, wie die
vorsündflutlichen Tiere, versch- as foremost editors as well as Hubert de Croning Hastings active
winden müssen, um einem neuen
konstruktiven Geslecht Platz zu behind the scenes as owner, publisher, editor and anonymous
machen.’, on p. 3.
author. Both magazines would reconsider the cause of modern
76 Ibid., respectively p. 8 and
p. 30. architecture and city planning vis-à-vis history, avant-garde
dvdh10PRINT.indd 130 21-04-13 16:56

experiment, the popular arts and the existing city albeit with very
different outcomes. Rogers’ revisionary approach is generally
considered to prepare for the moment of Tendenza in the
1970s with Rogers’ protégé Aldo Rossi as its most prominent
representative. Yet it should be noted too, that this is only possible
by suppressing the contributions of Giancarlo De Carlo, first of
the protégés of Rogers, co-editor to the magazine, companion to
the CIAM congresses and future member of Team 10 throughout
the 1960s and 70s. The Architectural Review was behind various,
most influential campaigns, the New Empiricism and Townscape
as already mentioned, but – even though conventional wisdom
likes it otherwise – it also served as the launch platform for
the New Brutalism by way of Reyner Banham’s essay, and the
extensive, authoritative publication of the Hunstanton school
with Philip Johnson’s critique. Considering the strong and self-
conscious publishing policies of the leading journal this was
only possible due to the tolerance of the elder editors toward
the young agents provocateurs, the recognition of their specific
role and how it would somehow contribute to shared ambitions.
The Architectural Review had made the cause of modern

architecture part of its central policies from the 1930s onward
as a result of the activist stance of its co-owner and chief editor
Hubert de Cronin Hastings (1902-1986) who took on editorship
from 1927 onward. De Cronin Hastings was a son of one of the
founders of the Architectural Press, the company that published
the distinguished, intellectual Review, just as the professional
Architects’ Journal, which was also led by him from the same
year on. He remained on the board of the Review until 1973 and
thus firmly put his mark on the debates on modern architecture
in Britain, even though he rather worked from behind the scenes
appointing influential editors as James Maude Richards (on the
77 See for a history of the post- board from 1937 until 1971 with a break during the war years)
war decades of The Architectural
Review the PhD Thesis by Erdem and Nikolaus Pevsner (editor from 1942 until 1971), and himself
Erten, ‘Shaping “The Second
Half Century”: The Architectural publishing under the pen name of Ivor de Wolfe.77
Review 1947-1971’, MIT, February
2004; for a biographical overview
of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, When the Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1947,
see: Susan Lasdun, ‘H. de C. re-
viewed’, in: The Architectural Re- the editors compiled a special section looking back as well as
view, September 1996, available
online: http://findarticles.com/p/ forward. Documenting the first half of the twentieth century and
articles/mi_m3575/is_n1195_v200/ what they called the ‘revolution’ that culminated in the modern
ai_19007181/
78 J.M. Richards, Nikolaus Pevs- movement, they concluded that now a new post-revolutionary
ner, Osbert Lancaster, H. de C.
Hastings, ‘The Second Half Cen-
phase had begun, now was the time for consolidation ‘to build up
tury’, and ‘The First Half Century’, a tradition.’ 78 Unsurprisingly, the argument of the Architectural
in: Architectural Review, January
1947, pp. 21-36. Review largely followed that of its co-editor Pevsner and his
dvdh10PRINT.indd 131 21-04-13 16:56

Pioneers of the Modern Movement. In contrast to Giedion’s
universalism, or Kaufmann’s interest in French rationalism,
Pevsner had constructed a functionalist tradition with special
roles for the English Arts and Crafts movement, its aligned
socialist thinkers and ultimately the Picturesque tradition too,
as forerunners of the aesthetic revolution after the First World
War. The Picturesque tradition was not a constitutive element of
Pevsner’s Pioneers, only after 1936 when he had migrated to the
UK and had become an editor for the Review he would make it a
most prominent part of his idea of a modern tradition.79 Ultimately,
Pevsner’s anglophilia culminated in the 1955 Reith lecture series
for the BBC radio on the ‘Englishness of English Art’, which also
included some memorable statements on the then current state of
British modern architecture, the functionalist tradition and town
planning. The book still reads as a sincere and sometimes moving
hommage of a migrant to his newly adopted country, but it also
holds some awkward references to national qualities.80 Pevsner
himself already knew he was treading dangerous grounds here,
with his attempt for a geography of art instead of a history and
he admitted in his conclusion that:
‘National character is not a procrustean bed. There is nothing
stagnant in national qualities, they are in a perpetual flux.
New possibilities may at any moment be thrown up and force us
to revise our categories.’ 81
Yet, as sensible a statement this might read, it also seemed to act

79 In his ‘Revenge of the Pic-
turesque’ Reyner Banham listed as an apology for his own bias for the stereotyped Englishman,
the following articles by Pevsner
in the Review to delineate his who presumedly favoured rational judgement, common sense,
involvement: ‘Heritage of Com-
promise’, February 1942; ‘Genesis
moderation, fairplay and compromise over revolution and
of the Picturesque’, November uncultured brutality. Pevsner also thought of the English as
1944; ‘Humphrey Repton – a
Florilegium’, February 1948; with disliking violence – one wonders what the former colonies would
S. Lang ‘Sir William Temple and
Sharawaggi’, December 1949; think of such a qualification – and the ‘boisterous’ behaviour of
surprisingly enough Banham did
not include ‘Twentieth Cen-
the ‘so-called’ lower classes as ‘“continental” to this day’ as if
tury Picturesque, An Answer to hooliganism were a French import.
Basil Taylor’s Broadcast’, in: The
Architectural Review, April 1954,
pp. 227-229, which marked the
beginnings of the ‘Englishness of More importantly though, with regard to the debates of the 1940s
English Art’ controversies.
and early 1950s, the inclusion of British sources in the history
80 The lectures were broadcast in
October and November 1955, and of modern architecture remains one of the most conspicuous
published in 1956 by The Archi-
tectural Press, London; for much elements of Pevsner’s argument and the editorial position of
more on Pevsner’s biography see the Architectural Review. Here, we once again touch upon the
the most insightful biography by
Susie Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner, sensitive issue of Englishness and national identity. To cast
The Life, Chatto & Windus,
London 2011. modern architecture as at least partially originating on the island,
81 Nikolaus Pevsner, Englishness after which British invention was appropriated by the Germans
of English Art, The Architectural
Press, London, 1956, p. 182. in particular, cannot be uncoupled from the larger geopolitical
dvdh10PRINT.indd 132 21-04-13 16:56

situation and implied ideological associations. This was not
unlike the propagation of the example of Sweden as a democratic
version of modern architecture. That the social democracy of
Sweden was able to continue planning and building during the war
years was also a most convenient circumstance, which made the
Scandinavian kingdom an almost natural example to the British
while planning for the future post-war reconstruction.82 It should
be kept in mind that the interest in the Swedish example was also
in service of depoliticizing the hardcore socialist experiments in
Weimar Germany, or Stalinist Russia during the collectivization
of agriculture and before the great purges there. With new
opportunities for modern architecture after the victory over
Germany and the beginnings of the Cold War, this depoliticization
remained a crucial ingredient to the Review campaigns, especially
when one considered that the British post-war welfare state
82 Just as Brazil would be an was tuned as an alternative mediating between Communist
example for the United States
one might add, and why MoMA dictate as a very real threat to post-war Europe and capitalist
put up the ground-breaking exhi-
bitions Brazil Builds and Sweden
laissez-faire exploitation of the pre-war period, while raising
Builds, with Kidder-Smith as living standards for lower and middle classes. Radical, socialist
chronicler.
83 There is a special role for mi- modern architecture from the Continent had to be domesticated
grants from the Continent,which
one sees re-appearing in the
so to speak, if it were to be accommodated by British institution.83
various recent historiographies This was part of the project of the Review editors, who were all
of British modern architecture;
Pevsner himself, but also Lubet- Labour supporters.
kin, Goldfinger, Gropius, Breuer
and Mendelsohn – had helped
sowing the seeds of the new tra-
dition in Great Britain. Elizabeth
The joining of the international discourse on modern architecture
Darling has argued that there is after the end of the Second World War, was perhaps most clearly
also a case for a British grown
modernism, pointing to the work signalled by the two gatherings of CIAM in the UK. MARS, headed
of Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry and
Connell and Ward; see Elizabeth by Richards, was responsible for organizing two of the six post-war
Darling, Re-forming Britain.
Narratives of Modernity before Re-
CIAM conferences. The first post-war, so-called reunion congress
construction, Routledge, London, of CIAM was held in Bridgwater in September 1947. In July 1951,
2007.
84 As quoted by Eric Mumford CIAM 8 took place in Hoddesdon, again organized by MARS,
in The CIAM Discourse on Urba- which was according to the then president of CIAM José Luis
nism, 2000, p. 201, from a letter
by Sert to Giedion, 21 December Sert and Giedion ‘the best and most active group in the Congress
1949, in the CIAM archive, gta-
ETH Zürich 42-SG-34-52, and today’.84 Its general theme was that of the ‘Heart of the City’ as
in Special Collections, Harvard
Graduate School of Design, Jo- proposed by MARS and supported by Sert. Within CIAM circles,
sep Lluis Sert Archive, folder C6. the heart of the city, or the idea of ‘core’, was regarded as the fifth
85 Richards already wrote about
the ‘common man’ in 1940. For a function in addition to the quartet of work, housing, circulation
summary of these debates and
the contributions by Richards
and recreation of the Functional City as defined by the Athens
and the MARS group see Eric Charter. The theme was a convergence of Giedion and Sert’s
Mumford, The CIAM Discourse
on Urbanism, 2002, the sub- interest in the possibilities of a new monumentality – as expressed
chapters ‘The New Monumen-
tality’, pp. 150-152, ‘The New by them in the ‘Nine Points on Monumentality’ they had written
Empiricism’, pp. 163-168, ‘CIAM
6, Bridgwater, England, 1947’,
in 1943 together with Fernand Léger – and Richards’ agenda to
pp. 168-179, and ‘CIAM 8, Hod- conceive of a modern architecture that would also appeal to the
desdon, England, 1951: The Heart
of the City’, pp. 201-215. larger audience, the ‘man in the street’ or the ‘common man’.85
dvdh10PRINT.indd 133 21-04-13 16:56

The theme also happily coincided with Geddesian theory as taught
and propounded by Jaqueline Tyrrwhit, in particular Geddes’
concept of a city acropolis as the spiritual centre of a society,
an idea which had seemingly materialized in the South Bank
exhibition of the Festival of Britain and its centrepiece, the Royal
Festival Hall.86 Together with the first results of New Town planning
in Stevenage and Harlow, both destinations of CIAM delegates,
Britain had apparently finally succeeded in catching up with the
international avant-garde, while synthesizing core British values
with modernist planning and architecture.87
However, on closer inspection Richards’ proposition of a

‘next step’ to arrive at a modern tradition as disseminated in
86 The Geddesian concept of the the pages of the Review fundamentally differed from the CIAM
city acropolis quite literally re- leadership.88 Speaking in general terms, CIAM still subscribed
turned in the theme of the CIAM
conference: namely the heart to an international and universal outlook of modern architecture
of the city, including its civic
function. Various publications whilst naturally integrating the various ‘regional’ groups and their
have been devoted to the Festi-
val: Mary Banham, Bevis Hillier achievements as derivatives of this universal outlook. Richards on
(eds.), A Tonic to the Nation. The the other hand was looking for a ‘functionalism of the particular’,
Festival of Britain 1951, Thames
and Hudson, London, 1976, among and not ‘of the general.’ Using wordings that still echoed the
others including an essay by Rey-
ner Banham, ‘The Style: “Flimsy rhetorics of the war, Richards explained, that ‘particular’ was
... Effeminate”?’; Elain Harwood,
Alan Powers (eds.) ‘Festival here to be understood as both the popular and the patriotic:
of Britain’, Twentieth Century ‘... the problem is to retain, in a highly industrialized,
Architecture nr. 5, The Journal of
the Twentieth Century Society, scientifically conceived, architecture a content that will make
London, 2001. It should be noted
that there were numerous other it intelligible to everyone, and will therefore allow architecture
Festival events next to the South
Bank exhibition, which is always to take its place naturally as one of the popular arts and one of
privileged in accounts of modern the vehicles of patriotic sentiment. There can be no quarrel with
architecture history, there were
among others the Battersea Park such an objective.’ 89
Pleasure Gardens, the Exhibition
of Science in South Kensing-
ton, exhibitions in Glasgow and
Belfast as well as two travelling
This ‘patriotic sentiment’ was already predominant in Richards’
exhibitions. For a history of the eulogy of suburbia and the specific British way of life, the already
South Bank redevelopment, see:
Christoph Grafe, People’s Pala- mentioned Castles on the Ground, written during his wartime exile
ces. Architecture, Culture and De-
mocracy in Two Cultural Centres in Cairo, and which Banham later stigmatized as an act of betrayal
in Post-war Europe, PhD Thesis
TU Delft, March 2010. of the revolutionary cause of modern architecture. This testimony
87 Throughout 1951 The Archi- of patriotism rather than international solidarity points to the
tectural Review reported on the
Festival and its architectural dominant nationalist tendencies within post-war Britain, also
achievements, reviews were
largely laudatory as in the case
among some of the protagonists of modernism and which were
of the South Bank exhibition and regarded as stifling and most regressive by many of the young
its picturesque planning (special
issue of August) and the Royal architects who felt attracted to ICA and MARS circles.
Festival Hall (special issue of
June), but also in critical terms
with regard to Lansbury and the
COID (December issue).
Various authors have described the predominantly conservative,
88 J.M. Richards, ‘The Next nationalist character of both the Festival and the general
Step?’, in: The Architectural Re-
view, March 1950, pp. 165-181. atmosphere of austerity of the period in Britain, which stood in
89 Ibid. stark contrast with the visual dominance of the cheerful colour
dvdh10PRINT.indd 134 21-04-13 16:56

applications and light-hearted patterning that would become
the hallmark of the so-called Festival style. Anne Massey in her
1995 study of the Independent Group has pointed out how the
expressionist, prize winning painting ‘Autumn Landscape’ by
William Gear although by now largely forgotten, then triggered
strong responses from the popular press and the public, and how
more traditional and established painters voiced their concern
by forming a committee that complained that the Arts Council
who had sponsored the contemporary arts competition was
‘leaning too far to the left.’ The incident eventually led to questions
in the House of Commons. According to Massey it was the
‘international, modern nature of the work which so many found
objectionable’.90 Adrian Forty in his essay ‘Festival Politics’
of 1976 extensively discussed the Festival as the outcome of
culture politics of the time. He called the nationalist character
of the Festival ‘its most embarrassing aspect’, not because he
denied the ‘need to recover national morale in the late 1940s,’
but because of the ‘studious censorship of everything foreign’
that accompanied the Festival. An example highlighted by Forty
was the ‘decision to ban foreign foodstuffs from the South Bank
restaurants and cafetarias’.91 Also according to Forty, the Festival
covered up the real shortcomings of the time. Its image of a
Britain of full employment and a welfare state was ‘illusory and
partly false’. Notwithstanding popular success – eight and a half
million people visited the South Bank exhibition – the Festival
was first and foremost part of the ‘chimera’ as sustained by the
British government, a political fantasy misleading the people that
a ‘world of plenty’ was within reach, and even worse, a fantasy
that ‘persuaded people not only that if times were rough they would
soon be better, but also that happiness could be found through
material possessions and plenty of shiny paint’.92
Robin Middleton had called the Festival a ‘world of make-believe’

against which the later New Brutalism was a reaction.93 Indeed,
the Smithsons opened the first of their series of statements on the
90 Massey, 1995, pp. 12-17.
New Brutalism, in the Review of all places, that it was ‘necessary
91 Adrian Forty, ‘Festival Poli- to create an architecture of reality’.94 But, if such an ‘architecture
tics’, in: Banham, Hillier (eds.),
A Tonic to the Nation, pp. 26-38. of reality’ was not to be found through a modern architecture
92 Ibid., p. 38. based on Picturesque planning or Townscape ‘make-believe’ as
93 Robin Middleton, Architectural supported by the Review and its editors Pevsner and Richards,
Design, January 1967, p. 7.
94 Alison and Peter Smithson, what did the young turks propose instead?
comments printed as part of an
anonymous (Reyner Banham?)
editorial piece on ‘The New
Brutalism’, in: The Architectural
Review April 1954, p. 274-275.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 135 21-04-13 16:56

The Other Moderns
When in 1954 the New Brutalism started to be debated in the

correspondence columns of the Architectural Review, in particular
by Independent Group friends Richard Llewelyn Davies and
John Weeks who contested the laudatory appreciation for the
Smithsons as expressed in the April issue, there was also a letter
from Alan Colquhoun, criticizing an essay by Pevsner, ‘Twentieth
Century Picturesque’.95 In his turn, Pevsner’s essay was a response
to criticism of the editorial policies of the Review as vented by the
art historian Basil Taylor in three radio broadcasts, which he did
for the BBC Third Programme. Taylor did not think much of English
modernism, certainly not in comparison to the Continent, a familiar
diatribe for many. Taylor specificly blamed the Picturesque, highly
regarded by Pevsner. Taylor also named the Review as a source for
the poor quality of British art production. Pevsner felt compelled
to defend and focused on how the English Picturesque provided
nothing less but an ‘aesthetic theory’ that fitted ‘the demands
of modern architecture and planning’.96 Gropius’ Bauhaus and
Le Corbusier’s Stuttgart houses and his Moscow Centrosoyuz,
he claimed, could share the same theoretical premisses as
expressed by Uvedale Price and Payne Knight when they worked
on their lay-outs for the English landscape gardens. This was
clearly too much to bear for the then 33 years old Alan Colquhoun,
who also attended Independent Group meetings but never
considered himself a member, he wrote:
‘Dr. Pevsner is surely overstating his case when he says that
“the modern revolution of the twentieth century and the
Picturesque movement of a hundred years before had all their
essentials in common.”’ 97
Colquhoun questioned how the ‘historicism’ inherent to the

Picturesque, could be aligned with the search for a ‘Style’ as
pursued by the heroes of the modern movement; a ‘Style’ that
would supersede the relativism of the 18th and 19th century
debates and establish a set of principles equally strong and
95 Alan Colquhoun, letter to universal as those of the Classicist kind. Colquhoun concluded
the editors, in: The Architectural
Review, July 1954, p. 2; Pevsner’s that ‘so much of Post War British architecture is effete and super-
essay ‘C20 Picturesque. An Ans- ficial’ because there was no ‘visual “theory” basing itself on the
wer to Basil Taylor’s Broadcast’
appeared in the April issue of universal validity of forms independent of structure and function’.98
1954 pp. 227-229.
96 Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘C20 Pic-
turesque’, in: The Architectural In his ‘letter to the editor’ Colquhoun also referred to a friend
Review, April 1954, p. 229.
97 Colquhoun, 1954. of his, Colin Rowe and his extensive book review in the
98 Ibid. Art Bulletin June 1953 of Forms and Functions of Twentieth
dvdh10PRINT.indd 136 21-04-13 16:56

Century Architecture,99 in which Rowe had explained that ‘the
explicit aim of the modern movement was to find sources of a style
proper to the twentieth century’.100 Rowe also quoted Le Corbusier
who had defined style as ‘a unity of principles animating the works
of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special
character.’ 101
This search for a ‘unity of principles’ was a very different project

from Pevsner’s idea of an ‘aesthetic theory’ derived from the
Picturesque. From the architectural point of view as defined by
Colquhoun and Rowe, the Picturesque could never deliver such
a unity, the historical Picturesque is anecdotal and narrative
in terms of organization and principles of ordering. With the
introduction of the Picturesque, style became something relative,
for the first time the (neo-)Classicist could be mixed with the
(neo-)Gothic and the exoticism of orientalism or chinoiseries
as if equally valid. The Picturesque was born from the pastime
of the leisured classes and did certainly not entail the kind of
rigour any new unity of principles required. Pevsner’s admiration
for ‘compromise’, ‘leisurely mellowness’ and the acceptance
of the ‘fancy dress ball’ of Victorian architecture as something
benignly English as he would express during his BBC radio talks
the next year could only elicit more furious responses from the
younger voices.102
The project of the Independent Group comprised exactly such

a search for ‘sources of a style proper to the twentieth century’
in the sense of a new ‘unity of principles’ as defined by Colquhoun
and Rowe. The Smithsons also talked in these terms about their
Independent Group years: the Parallel of Life and Art installation
99 Colin Rowe, review of ‘Forms
and Functions of Twentieth of 1953 was initally even called ‘Sources’.103 The talks of the
Century Architecture’ by Talbot Independent Group, their meetings and presentations, the debates
Hamlin, originally published in:
The Art Bulletin, 1953, reprinted and exhibitions, the inclusion of the most disparate of disciplines
in: Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying,
vol. 1, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, and cultural phenomena, were all in function of this. Any subject
1996, pp. 107-121.
matter seemed to have been of interest to the group as long as
100 Colquhoun, 1954.
101 Rowe, 1953, reprinted in: it was in function of coming to terms with the ‘mass produced
Rowe, As I Was Saying, vol. 1,
1996, p. 116.
society’ and its ‘confused’ yet ‘powerful forces’ as the Smithsons
102 The BBC Reith Lecture would state, just as Lawrence Alloway would talk about the
Series broadcast in October and
November 1955 and published as ‘long front of culture’ and the ‘popular art-high art continuum’,
The Englishness of English Art, and so forth.
The Architectural Press, London,
1956; the publication was dedica-
ted to Hubert de Cronin Hastings.
Colquhoun’s letter to the editors and the early writings of Rowe
‘Texts Documenting the Develop- can be regarded as part of the beginnings of an intense discourse
ment of Parallel of Life and Art’,
in: Robbins, 1990, p. 129. opening up new directions regarding the definition of any ‘unity of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 137 21-04-13 16:56

principles’ that might guide modern architecture into the post-war
era of the second half of the twentieth century. The Smithsons had
joined this debate soon enough – again by way of a letter to the
editors, their famous letter defending the Rudolf Wittkower book
of 1949, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, and which
was published in the RIBA Journal of February 1952.104 The focus on
‘principles’ explains why the Smithsons would defend a historical
investigation into the architecture of Andrea Palladio; it was not so
much the Classicist tendency that the Smithsons were defending
but the exact definition of a coherent set of principles that
structured Palladio’s work.
As is well-known, many of the young ICA members felt compelled

to contribute to the correspondence columns of the Review,
in: ‘Correspondence’, in: RIBA but also to the pages of Architectural Design and other journals,
Journal, February 1952, pp. 140-141;
Voelcker, still a student at the AA Reyner Banham most profusely of course, the already mentioned
School, also had his letter to
the editor published next to the
Llewellyn-Davies and Weeks, but also John Voelcker, Colin St John
one of the Smithsons, and also Wilson and James Stirling. Theo Crosby should be mentioned
in response to the Wittkower
book review. Both pointed out here too, not an acknowledged Independent Group member though,
the importance of Le Corbusier’s
Modulor publication with regard but most crucial as mediator, for instance as co-organizer of the
to Wittkower’s study.
‘This is Tomorrow’ show of 1956 and editor of Architectural Design
105 Reyner Banham, ‘1960 -
Stocktaking’, in: A Critic Writes. from 1953 onward, the Upper Case series as well as the Studio
Essays by Reyner Banham, Univer-
sity of California Press, Berkeley, Vista paperback series of the 1960s.
1996, pp. 49-63, originally publis-
hed in The Architectural Review,
February 1960, pp. 93-100. With regard to the contribution of the Independent Group members
106 Since Banham was from the
Courtauld Institute and gener-
to the post-war debates on the future of modern architecture
ally considered to be part of the (and the arts) the following two aspects of methodology
iconographic school in art history
as developed by Erwin Panofsky might be noted as well. One concerns the idea of history as
among others, there is an imme-
diate relation with Aby Warburg’s something all-inclusive, a ‘total recall’ as Banham declared in his
mnemosyne atlas project, a
strand that runs right through to
‘Stocktaking’ essay of 1960 while referring to Malraux’s idea of a
such Independent Group installa- musée imaginaire.105 Banham’s statement was a criticism of the
tions as ‘Parallel of Life and Art’
and the various personal image historians of modern architecture who had produced histories
collections as built up by Nigel
Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and that had proven to be too narrow and selective.106 This had been
Alison Smithson; to my know-
ledge this has not been properly
part of Banham’s own doctoral work to critically revise Pevsner’s
investigated yet, in terms of his- Pioneers of the Modern Movement among others and to do
torical and theoretical implica-
tion. Recent work by Alex Kitnick justice to the Italian Futurists, Dutch and German Expressionism
and Claire Zimmerman starts to
look into this; Claire Zimmerman, and De Stijl, who were overlooked by Pevsner. This inclusion of
‘From Legible Form to Memorable
Image: Architectural Knowledge
hitherto overlooked, forgotten or suppressed positions brings us
from Rudolf Wittkower to Reyner to the second aspect of historiographical method: the interest in
Banham’, in: Candide, nr. 5, 2012,
pp. 93-107, and Kitnick edited the peripheral positions to question, amend and ultimately shift the
special issue of October, nr. 136,
Spring 2011, on the New Bruta- direction of established history. With regard to the revising of the
lism, his Princeton dissertation
Paolozzi and Others 1947-1958
historiography of modern architecture the key phrases here are
focused on Paolozzi and his ‘the other moderns’, or the ‘silent architects’.
position within the Independent
Group exchanges.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 138 21-04-13 16:56

107 According to various ac-
Eventually, it was Colin St John Wilson who coined the
counts (among others Kenneth collection of these peripheral positions as the ‘other tradition’.107
Frampton and Max Risselada) the
phrase the ‘Other Moderns’, or The interest in this so-called other tradition is another
the ‘Other Tradition’ has circula-
ted for decades within the British characteristic of the British post-war discourse, not just with
discourse. Eventually, as late as
1995, it was Colin St John Wilson,
respect to those who belonged to a younger generation, but
who published The Other Tradi- also to the Review editors for instance who would deploy this
tion of Modern Architecture. The
Uncompleted Project, Academy discursive figure, too. The whole interest in Swedish modernism
Editions, London; re-published
under the same title by Black Dog and its selective appropriation can be mentioned here, just as
Publishing, London, in 2007. Ano-
ther example of the history of this
the much disputed coupling of the Picturesque with Continental
‘other’ tradition was written by avant-gardism.108 Yet, while the Review editors aimed for a
a critic of a younger generation,
Peter Blundell Jones, Modern Ar- domesticated, British modernism, the younger writers deployed
chitecture through Case Studies,
Architectural Press, Oxford, 2002. the ‘other moderns’ as a way to challenge the then dominant
Although the origins of the two
terms are intraceable, usually
historiography of modern architecture and construct a whole
St John Wilson is credited. Next set of counter-histories so to speak.109 This interest in the more
to Le Corbusier and Mies van
der Rohe, the key figures of this peripheral positions was always present in the Smithsons’ writings
other tradition according to
Wilson and Blundell Jones are and design work, too. Alvar Aalto, Hugo Häring, Jan Duiker,
Hans Scharoun and Alvar Aalto,
others mentioned include Gun-
Gerrit Rietveld and Eileen Gray, key figures of the ‘other tradition’
nar Asplund, Eileen Gray, Hugo and who remained largely absent from the early canonical histories
Häring and Jan Duiker.
108 Another example is the of modern architecture, were all included in The Heroic Period of
book published by Pevsner and 1965. The impact of it becomes most evident in the later projects
Richards: The Anti-Rationalists,
Architectural Press, London, though, in which the achievements of such different designers
1973, mostly looking into Art
Nouveau. as Sigurd Lewerentz, Max Bill, but also Dimitris Pikionis among
109 There is a whole cohort of others were integrated and elaborated.110
British architects who picked up
their pens to rewrite the history
of modern architecture; next to
the already mentioned Colquhoun The notion of ‘otherness’ was also already present in Banham’s
and Rowe, one should think of
Robert Maxwell, Robin Middleton
Brutalist call for une architecture autre in his 1955 essay, a
(from South Africa but trained at reference to Michel Tapié’s Un Art Autre of 1952, which was
Cambridge), Joseph Rykwert and
Kenneth Frampton, who interes- an early attempt to identify new trends in post-war modern
tingly enough would all migrate
to the United States. art including works by Dubuffet and Pollock, but also one by
110 Usually the references are Paolozzi.111 Tapié, Dubuffet and Pollock are mentioned by
quite cursory, just a small note,
esp. in the later writings in The Banham as sources for the new anti-academic ‘cult of ugliness’
Charged Void, as well as in the
texts for the ILA&UD sum- that belonged to the Brutalist programme for an ’architecture of
mer schools; for more explicit
examples see: Alison and
reality’. Some authors have suggested that the notion of otherness
Peter Smithson, ‘The Silent forms a linkage between the English proposition of une architecture
Architects’, in: Sigurd Lewerentz,
1885-1975. The Dilemma of Clas- autre and the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology,
sicism, Architectural Associa-
tion, London, 1988; and Alison yet this remains most implicit in the debates between the
and Peter Smithson, ‘Dimitri
Pikionis’, in: Dimitri Pikionis,
British protagonists.112
Architect 1887-1968. A Sentimental
Topography, Architectural As-
sociation, London, 1989. To go back to the specific issue of revising the historiography
111 Michel Tapié, Un art autre, où of modern architecture: it seems plausible to conclude that the
il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du
réel, Gabriel-Giraud et fils, Paris, coupling of the notion of the ‘other’ with the dominant paradigm
1952.
112 Cees Boekraad has sug-
was in service of the creation of a double perspective, which
gested that the terminology of the ultimately was aimed at the production of a third element.
Smithsons is completeley analo-
gous to Merleau-Ponty’s, Sarah The notion of the ‘other’ was not a mere vindication of lost voices
dvdh10PRINT.indd 139 21-04-13 16:56

and overlooked positions. It was also part of a regenerative
project, a radical attempt at developing another perspective on
and understanding of the concept of the modern movement itself,
rescueing it from academicism, bringing it up-to-date so to speak
while establishing the younger Brutalists’ ‘own idea of order’. This
vitalist principle of regeneration we find everywhere in the writings
of the Smithsons and their contemporaries, the whole discourse
is simply drenched with it. Literally one speaks of the necessity
of ‘continuity and regeneration’, while such classic concepts
from the Team 10 discourse like ‘cluster’, ‘mat-building’ and ‘the
space between’ are all at the service of producing a new, third
element. Colomina and Max Risselada among others have pointed
Goldhagen tried to forge a con- out the importance of this aspect of ‘coupling’ in the work of the
nection between the Smithsons’
notion of authenticity and Jean Smithsons; Colomina in relation to the aspect of collaboration
Paul Sartre’s ideas (which Peter and the construction of historiography, Risselada in relation to
Smithson angrily refuted accor-
ding to Robin Middleton), Ignasi the concept of ‘the space between’ as a discursive tactic as well
de Sola-Morales suggested that
Team 10 and Van Eyck were as design strategy of productive recombination.113 The competitive
‘existentialist’ and Tony Vidler
confusingly referred to an exten- model that the English crucible presents to us can be said to
sive essay by Nigel Whiteley on have been highly productive, indeed, in terms of rethinking
Banham’s ‘Otherness’ as proof of
existentialist tendencies at work modernist concepts. When looking at the web of exchanges of
here, but this essay is nothing
of the kind. In the writings of the the post-war British discourse, we find a whole set of competing
Smithsons one find references
to the following French authors: views, which in hindsight carry many of the seeds of the later
Georges Simenon and Albert tendencies now known as the New Brutalism, Pop Art, High-
Camus.
113 Max Risselada, ‘The Space Tech and even postmodernism. As said, we are not following the
Between’, in: Oase, nr. 51,
‘Re-arrangements. A Smithsons
‘generation conflict’ model here, but rather Frampton’s suggestion
Celebration’, 1999, pp. 46-53; one of a ‘crucible’ of individuals, institutions and overlapping,
might relate this once again to
the issue of poetic ‘vagueness’ dynamic coalitions.114
as proposed by Van Eyck and
discussed in the first chapter that
is the actualisation of the ‘unde-
fined and latent multi-meaning’.
Whiteley, in his biography of Banham, already remarked how
114 Frampton, ‘The English one could distinguish between certain groupings within the
Crucible’, in: D’Laine Camp, Dirk
van den Heuvel, Gijs de Waal Independent Group, or ‘tendencies’ as he put it:
(eds.), CIAM Team 10. The English ‘There were some discernible tendencies in the Group, based
Context, conference proceedings,
Delft University of Technology, around individuals. The Smithsons, Henderson, and Paolozzi were
2002, pp. 113-129. Alan Colquhoun
made a similar observation, sta- especially sympathetic to any art brut and “outsider” tendencies;
ting that within the Independent
Group there were no ‘factions’, and McHale, del Renzio, Hamilton, and Alloway, augmented by the
only individuals, in conversation Cordells, favored communication studies. However, the movement
with the author, 23 June 2007. In
Colomina’s interview with Peter between groupings was fluid, and another grouping around popular
Smithson we see this once again
confirmed, when it is stated that culture and advertisements included Peter Smithson, Alloway,
both in Team 10 and the Indepen-
dent group one was part of the Hamilton, McHale, del Renzio, and Banham. A further grouping
group but never spoke for the was those interested in cultural theory – Alloway, Banham, McHale,
group, nor represented the group
as a whole, in: Beatriz Colomina, and Hamilton – whom Alison Smithson termed the “grey men,”
‘Friends of the Future: A Con-
versation with Peter Smithson’, implying the groupings were not without an element of suspicion
in: October, nr. 94, Fall 2000,
pp. 28-30. and even friction.’ 115
115 Whiteley, 2002, p. 89.
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The latter remark is an understatement, competition was fierce
and ruthless in the English crucible. Next to the abovementioned
groupings quite a few others can be distinguished within the wider
ICA circle. Famous places to get together were the Banham home
in Primrose Hill and the French Pub in Soho, which are most often
referred to in the historiography. Robin Middleton also remembers
an all ‘girls’ club’ that was convened by Mary Banham when she
returned from the States, which included Alison Smithson and
Sandra Lousada among others, just as ‘evenings with slides’ at
the Smithson home in Chelsea, at Bob Maxwell’s and at Brian
Richard and Sandra Lousada’s.116 Bruno’s diner in Soho was also
a favourite for the Smithsons, to combine weekly shopping for
groceries at the market with entertaining visitors from abroad.
Regarding the quest for a new unity of principles one can

distinguish quite another set of groupings, albeit of an equally
fluid composition as the ones distinguished by Whiteley: there
are the ‘classicizing party’ as Banham put it in his retrospective
‘Revenge of the Picturesque’, the New Brutalists, Pop and
Pop Art, Cybernetics, media theory and communication, and neo-
Constructivism as a fringe party perhaps, but still influential.
The ‘classicizing party’ was a rephrasing of the ‘neo-Palladians’

as identified by Reyner Banham in his ‘New Brutalism’ essay of
1955. In 1968, in his essay ‘Revenge of the Picturesque’, Banham
now mentioned the ‘classicizing party’ as the one moment of
clear opposition against the Picturesque revival of Pevsner and
the Architectural Review. ‘Classicizing’ and ‘neo-Palladians’ were
of course references to the tremendous influence as exercised
by Rudolf Wittkower’s study into Andrea Palladio’s work, in
which he most eloquently explained the set of cosmological
principles of ordering behind the designs. Palladio’s work thus
represented a fantastic example of an architecture based on
an ‘unity of principles’. Colin Rowe’s essay on the organizing
principles behind the villa’s of Le Corbusier and how Palladian
schemas could be retraced as ordering devices in the plans
of the Purist, so-called ‘white villas’ added to the conviction
that Classicist, Palladian principle represented the strongest
example of the possibility of a body of autonomous principles
proper to the architecture discipline. Rowe’s analysis gave
legitimacy to a powerful mix of Corbusianism and Palladianism
which had quite an impact on British modern architecture of the
post-war decades. ‘Members’ of this ‘classicizing party’ were
116 In conversation with the
author. then Rowe, Colquhoun, Sandy Wilson, Sam Stevens, Big Jim
dvdh10PRINT.indd 141 21-04-13 16:56

Stirling, Joseph Rykwert; according to the surviving stories the
French pub was their main meeting place. But this ‘classicizing’
influence can be also found in the wider Independent Group
circle, most notably in the case of the Smithsons and their early
designs for Hunstanton and the Coventry Cathedral competition,
the latter of which was designated as the most important example
according to Banham.
The ‘classicizing party’ can be regarded as the precursor of

some of the later postmodernist tendencies, such as autonomy,
historicism and Modernist mannerism, although also invariably
accompanied by the most rigorous kind of critique from Colquhoun
and Rowe.117 Also with regard to these proto-postmodernist
aspects, it is hard to completely disconnect the Smithsons from
the ‘classicizing party’. For instance, on the aspect of architectural
autonomy there is certainly a case to include the Smithsons,
especially in the case of Hunstanton of course, of which they
would state that there is a ‘secret life’ of architecture parallel to
the everyday business of school life.118 Regarding the history of
the ICA events it is important to note that this ‘classicizing party’
was mostly an architectural affair.
The New Brutalism then can be accorded the second clearest

moment with the collaborations between the foursome of
Alison and Peter Smithson, Henderson and Paolozzi forming
the core group; Banham was part of if as well of course, but
also John Voelcker, William and Gill Howell, creating a strong
proto-Team 10 input here. Sandy Wilson and Stirling’s work too,
were ranked under the banner of New Brutalism by Banham, and
they too, would visit Team 10 meetings. The Ove Arup engineer
Ronald Jenkins must be mentioned as well, since he was involved
in Parallel of Life and Art,119 his office interior was a Brutalist
117 Peter Eisenman and Tony installation with Paolozzi wallpaper on the ceiling, and he was
Vidler were instilled with this
tendency when they were at involved in the Smithsons’ designs for Hunstanton and the
Cambridge as students. Coventry Cathedral competition. Richard Hamilton also tried to
The Charged Void: Architecture, appropriate the New Brutalism, among others by his installation
p. 42.
for a ‘House for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art’ at the
119 His status is not quite clear, Ideal Home show, 1958,120 and John McHale was also involved
incidentally he is mentioned as
co-curator next to the foursome among others through a mural for a John Voelcker house for
of Henderson, Paolozzi and the the jazz trumpetist Humphrey Lyttleton. Frank Cordell produced
Smithsons, in an interview with
Graham Whitham the Smithsons the music of the New Brutalism, jazz and musique concrète,
mention he (co-)sponsored the
event. in particular for the movie made of the Smithson design for the
120 Ben Highmore made a point Hauptstadt Berlin competition.
of this in his lecture at TU Delft,
28 February 2008.
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The ‘as found’ and ‘finding processes’ were among the key artistic
concepts deployed to mine the achievements of the earlier avant-
gardes ranging from an interest in Surrealism, Dada and
Schwitters, Van Doesburg and I.K. Bonset, but also Laszlo Moholy
Nagy, Herbert Bayer’s advertising, Paul Klee’s drawings and
Bertolt Brecht’s theatre revolution. Despite the crucial involvement
of artists and art theory, the cause of Brutalism seemed to be
121 Robin Middleton suggests aimed more at the architecture discourse than at the one of the
another interesting background
to the New Brutalism. In his vistual arts.121
review of Banham’s book he as-
serts that the New Brutalism is a
concoction of northerners. Next Pop and Pop Art were the third clearest moment emerging within
to Alison and Peter Smithson he
mentions Gordon Ryder, David the Independent Group discourse, albeit perhaps in its afterlife
Witham, Ronald Simpson, Jack
Lynn and Ivor Smith. See ‘The so to speak. Again, demarcation lines remain fluid. The core of
New Brutalism, or a Clean, Well-
lighted Place’, in: Architectural
this tendency was formed by Hamilton and McHale who would
Design, January, 1967, pp. 7-8. fight over the origins of the term, just as Banham and Alloway.122
122 There is a general acceptance
that the term was coined around Voelcker was also involved through his alliance with Hamilton and
1954 between McHale and Hamil-
ton, but still part of a word game,
McHale for their ground breaking installation at the T.I.T.-show.
which was also a characteristic Fashion and advertisement were key issues, brought in by
of the New Brutalist discourse.
Still, the term is limited to private Toni del Renzio for instance, but also eagerly discussed by the
exchanges, it is not quite a public
affair as yet. Only when a new ge- Smithsons and integrated in their work and writings. As is well-
neration of young artists seems
to appropriate the term pop – in
known, in the fight over words the Smithsons would later distance
the film ‘Pop Goes the Easel’ by themselves from any alliance with Pop.123 At the same time,
Ken Russell, BBC broadcast 25
March 1962, on the work of Peter Banham’s idea of ‘Image’ as a key concept of Brutalism seems an
Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline
Boty and Peter Phillips – the anticipation of the Pop Art interest in signs and communication.
writers of the Independent Group,
Banham and Alloway, reclaimed
For sure, the interest in advertising and commercial graphic design
the term for themselves, as sug- was a common denominator here across the various tendencies
gested by Massey and Sparke,
1985, p. 49; Reyner Banham in within the Independent Group. Pop was also partly building on
‘Who is this Pop?’, in: Motif, Win-
ter 1962, and Lawrence Alloway Dada and Surrealism here, just like the New Brutalism, in the
in ‘“Pop Art” since 1949’, in: The
Listener, December, 1962.
sense of the coupling of the incompatible, and the high and low;
123 For more on this history see another overlap with Brutalist sensibilities concerned an interest
my essay ‘Picking up, Turning
over and Putting with ...’, in: Dirk in the ephemeral aspect of the trouvé, in the case of Pop the
van den Heuvel, Max Risselada idea of the ‘expendable’ as expressed for instance by McHale
(eds.), Alison and Peter Smithson
– from the House of the Future to in his essays ‘The Plastic Parthenon’ and ‘The Expendable
a house of today, 2004, pp. 13-28;
extensively discussed in my Icon’.124 There was a strong relationship between Britain and the
paper ‘Caught between Pop and
Glut. The Case of Alison and Pe- USA here, especially with Alloway and Banham moving to the
ter Smithson’ for the 60th Annual States in their later careers.
Meeting of the SAH, Pittsburgh
2007.
124 John McHale, ‘The Expen-
dable Ikon 1’ in: Architectural
Two final key ‘tendencies’ within the Group but which never
Design, February 1959, pp. 82-83, lead to a very clear-cut label as Pop Art or New Brutalism
and ‘The Expendable Ikon 2’,
in: Architectural Design, March concerned cybernetics, media theory and communication, and
1959, pp. 116-117; ‘The Plastic
Parthenon’ in: Macatre, Winter neo-Constructivism. The latter is the least known, or certainly the
1966, republished at different
places among others in: Dotzero
least recognized tendency. Yet, with the event of the T.I.T.-show we
Magazine, Spring 1967, and: Gillo see a strong presence of neo-Constructivism as represented by
Dorfles, Kitsch: The World of Bad
Taste, Bell, New York, 1969. Mary and Kenneth Martin (group 9), and Ernö Goldfinger (group 7).
dvdh10PRINT.indd 143 21-04-13 16:56

Russian Constructivism was a strong influence in the early work
of Stirling and remained a strand within the Smithsons’ thinking
throughout their career as well. Patrick Hodgkinson, famous for
his Brunswick Centre in London, may be mentioned here as well.
And finally, the formerly mentioned fields of cybernetics and
information theory that were just burgeoning but nevertheless
represented a major area of investigation for some Independent
Group members. There was a large overlapping with the Pop
tendency of course, especially when it came to sci-fi and space
technology, typical Independent Group fascinations. But looking
for instance at the T.I.T.-installation by Holroyd, Del Renzio and
Alloway (group 12), one finds an interest in communication theory
and systems thinking, all very different from the semantics of Pop.
The members’ interest in McLuhan and Eames’s communication
primer and films fit in here; the positions of Weeks and Llewellyn
Davies could be situated here, too, because of their interest in
the modular and the scientific-rationalist in building production
and organisation. Banham and Alloway, just as McHale and
Del Renzio made several contributions, mining the new domain of
interactive loops and nascent computer technology. The Smithsons
for their part hooked up with a proposal for an ‘extensions of
man’ exhibition. McLuhan’s phrase was taken by Banham as a
title for a show that – as late as 1962 – was ‘intended to eliminate
the bad taste the Festival of Britain exhibition had left’ and
which was (among others) discussed at the house of Roland
Penrose, co-founder of the ICA of course, and one more example
of intergenerational encounter and consistent acts of ‘closing
the circle’.125 Perhaps superfluous to note, but here we also find
overlappings with the later Archigram group, students of the
Smithsons who would praise their work, the House of the Future
as well as their design for Coventry Cathedral, and who would
combine the Pop and cybernetics to further develop the language
of High-Tech architecture along with Cedric Price.126
As becomes clear from the above listing actors moved between

the groupings, just as ideas one might add. For example the
The Charged Void: Architecture, Smithson Hunstanton school design, it could be classified with
p. 326; this must have been Farm- the neo-Palladian, the Brutalist, but also the proto-High-Tech.
ley Farm in East Sussex, acquired
by Penrose in 1949. It might be kept in mind therefore that the groupings of people and
126 Perhaps British High-Tech ideas in the English crucible were fluid, and any attempt at clearcut
is one of the moments where one
should rather talk about overlap- definition (for instance by opposition) is a matter of retro-active
pings then origins with regard to
the English crucible, especially
interpretation inevitably implying reduction and exclusion, whereas
when one thinks of the impact we saw that within the Independent Group discourse there is also
of such a monumental figure as
Buckminster Fuller. an ambition to be all-inclusive, to develop a double or perhaps even
dvdh10PRINT.indd 144 21-04-13 16:56

multiplicitous kind of perspective, and from all that, an ambition to
arrive at some sort of new ‘unity of principles’ in the post-war era.
How did that work for the Smithsons with regard to the debates
on Englishness and modern architecture?
‘A Secret Life’
As noted much of the debates of the English crucible was

structured around the creation of oppositions, and not just by
the younger generation; in his Englishness of English Art Pevsner
would make this an explicit methodology deploying the rhetorical
figures of ‘polarities’, and ‘pairs of apparently contradictory
qualities’.127 But as demonstrated, more often than not, there
exists a fluidity between such apparently oppositional positions
and groupings. Partly because we are dealing with ideas under
formation, but also because of such a Protean aspiration for a
‘Style’, the ambition to come to an ‘unity of principles’ that might
encompass the totality or universality of human culture, and yet,
still seeks to also acknowledge the specificity of the architectural
project in terms of local conditions and historical precedent.
The most prominent case of definition by opposition might be

exemplified by Reyner Banham when he defined the New Brutalism
in his 1955 essay, as being opposed to both the Picturesque and
the neo-Palladian. The Smithsons seemed to have accepted this,
at least they never openly opposed this particular suggestion of
Banham’s. Yet, at the same time, we see a consistent classicist
leaning present in the Smithson projects, not only in Hunstanton,
but throughout their career. Banham notoriously hypothesized in
his Brutalism essay that the ‘formal axiality’ of Hunstanton was
not ‘integral’ to Brutalist architecture, ‘Miesian or Wittkowerian
geometry was only an ad hoc device’ he said.128 This was the only
acceptable way to present the interrelations between the New
Brutalism and neo-Palladian principle as thoroughly oppositional
and mutually exclusive. Perhaps this was necessary then, to
save the Brutalist impulse from appropriation by Philip Johnson
as an updated version of the International Style. But in 1956,
at the occasion of the second manifesto of the New Brutalism
127 Nikolaus Pevsner, The En- which was the Patio and Pavilion installation, this installation
glishness of English Art, 1956,
p. 18. was nothing but a small temple disguised as a back-yard shed;
128 Reyner Banham, ‘The New Kenneth Frampton was actually the only one who recognized
Brutalism’, in: The Architectural
Review, December 1955, p. 361. this when he called the installation a ‘temenos’, a sacred place,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 145 21-04-13 16:56

fenced and secluded. The Economist too, as a contemporary
‘acropolis’ holds clear classicist overtones, while Robin Hood
Gardens was modelled on the use of repetition as found in (neo-)
Classicist architecture, and we see it also return in the follies
for Axel Bruchhäuser, for instance the rustic, yet perfectly
symmetrical tea hut with a thatched roof overlooking the garden.
If one were to construct an oppositional axis from the ICA debates,

the one most appropriate to situate the Smithsons would probably
be the one of form versus process, formalism versus the ‘as
found’. Eventually, when the Smithsons criticized a certain strand
of routine Functionalism, when they distanced themselves from
the Pop tendency within and outside the Independent Group,
from Picturesque sentimentality or neo-Classicist revivals, this
was always the ultimate argument: the rejection of any sort of pre-
given formal apparatus or system, of architectural design as the
application of a ‘pattern book’.
In Without Rhetoric of 1973, we find the most extensive summary

of the Smithson position, with both the Picturesque and
Classicist prominently present throughout their argument for
a ‘non-demonstrative’ language of architecture. The opening
statement of their 1982 publication of The Shift might serve as
another, most elegant example of their way of distinguishing
between tendencies, while also keeping them balanced and
interrelated. In 1982, historicist postmodernism was at its peak
of course, and this is reflected in the Smithson statement as well.
They distinguished two main trends of thought. Using the tree,
roots, branches, seeds and fruit as metaphors, they spoke of the
tree of ‘classicism’ and of the tree of ‘enquiry’ as representing the
tradition of modern architecture and functionalism. First of all, they
restated their belief in the interconnection of past and future, after
which they would explain their own interest:
‘Concerning the future, only one thing is certain: that the tree of
enquiry has well-established roots reaching into new ground with
each turn of the seasons, the trunk sturdy enough to support much
new growth at its head.
The tree of enquiry started rooting strongly in the European
garden in the seventeenth century, for by then it was not
only moral to enquire but it was felt that understanding of
the curiosities of nature carries with it an obligation to bring
to a quality of flowering the nodes of growth revealed by
understanding.
The flowering of this tree in terms of architecture was
dvdh10PRINT.indd 146 21-04-13 16:56

spectacular for enquiry had led to a capacity to change the
seeming nature of materials and to anticipate their performance
in new forms. This happened at a time when a much older tree,
but one of related species, the tree of classicism, was enjoying a
late flowering. The first crop came during the last good years of
the older tree. The old tree had suddenly produced outstanding
fruit with a dry, lucid taste (...). This fruit was neo-classical
architecture.
The first fruits from the new tree were the iron bridges and it
is along the same branch, nourished by the still-searching roots,
that architecture continues to grow.’ 129
Note the way morality and obligation are connected with

the pursuit of knowledge and the deployment of technology.
Also note the idea that architecture and its form-language
unfold over time, or as the Smithsons put it, how they ‘grow’.
And also note how they viewed the architecture that came after
the last blooming of the tree of classicism; in a footnote the
couple mentioned the Altes Museum of Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
and his Neue Pavillon in Charlottenburg as the last fruits of that
tree, concluding ‘it was the clear, clean end of unquestioned
classicism, of classicism spoken not quoted.’ 130
This emphasis on a lived language of architecture, not a

mannerist one was a pointed swipe at the postmodernist fashion
of the early 1980s, which they further elaborated talking about the
129 David Dunster (ed.), Alison ‘fallen giant of classicism’ still ‘resting in the orchard’ and how
and Peter Smithson. The Shift,
Architectural Monographs nr. ‘some’ were ‘stealing’ its dry seeds. The Smithsons concluded
7, Academy Editions, London,
1982, p. 8. by shifting attention to the ‘younger tree’ and how it would need
130 Ibid. more work, more attention and care:
131 Ibid.
‘… the cultivation of the younger tree is arduous. It demands effort
132 The history of the Hunstan-
ton Secondary Modern School and the crop sometimes fails. But in good years, well-husbanded,
has been extensively documen-
ted and described at various the new fruit is wonderful and the best years are still to come.’ 131
places, among others how it
was proposed by the Smithsons
as an alternative to the kind of But if too rigid an opposition could be overcome and some
modern architecture of Maxwell
Fry (Impington Village College measure of fluidity maintained by using metaphors, talking about
in particular) and the modular
system of the Hertfordshire trees in an orchard in need of proper husbandry, how did this work
schools; a good summary is given
by Peter Smithson himself in a
out in actual design practice?
conversation with Peter Carolin,
published as ‘Reflections on
Hunstanton’, in: ARQ, Vol. 2, The Hunstanton school remains an astonishing case here in
Summer 1997, pp. 32-43; ; see also
Christoph Grafe, ‘Finite Orders every respect.132 It has often been said that the school presents
and the Art of Everyday Inhabita-
tion. The Hunstanton School by
a contradiction as the first built example of the New Brutalism,
Alison and Peter Smithson’, in: since its design stemmed from the pre-ICA-years and Independent
OASE, nrs. 49-50, ‘Convention’,
1998, pp. 66-85.. Group exchanges from which the New Brutalism was born. Banham
dvdh10PRINT.indd 147 21-04-13 16:56

acknowledged this too, when launching the New Brutalism. Yet, as
pointed out, much of the ingredients of later events were already
present in the late 1940s, including the antagonistic attitudes
toward the New Empiricism and the Festival. There is no real
ground to not regard the building as Brutalist in this respect. Nor
should one excuse the supposedly ‘ad hoc’ decision regarding
the Miesian or Wittkowerian geometry, as Banham did. Since
arguably, the Smithson design embodied the most eloquent example
of the outcome of a quest for an ‘unity of principles’ that would
establish a language of modern architecture that not only built on
the achievements of the founding generation but also on ‘English
precedent’ as the Smithsons mentioned (Hardwick Hall, and
Butterfield churches). At Hunstanton the Smithsons succeeded,
as young as they were, to establish their proposition for a language
of modern architecture, while integrating the Picturesque and neo-
Classicism. Thus Hunstanton shows too, how the New Brutalism is
inextricably linked to the debates on Englishness. Any ‘oppositional’
reading of the school building inevitably leads to a reduced
understanding of the design. Banham’s reading is a case, but Philip
Johnson’s equally so.
Whereas Banham aimed to uncouple Brutalism and neo-

Palladianism, with the Hunstanton school firmly embedded in the
former, Johnson insisted on the ‘formal’ qualities of the school
and hence as not belonging to the ‘Adolf Loos type of Anti-Design
which they [Alison and Peter Smithson] call the New Brutalism’.133
Johnson didn’t link the design with the neo-Palladian directly,
but discussed the building’s qualities exclusively in terms of ‘not
only radical but good Mies van der Rohe’, slightly condescendent
as ‘Mies vernacular’, and much more critically as ‘Mies on the
cheap’.134 The basic characteristics of this Miesian manner were in
his view ‘the exposed steel-glass-and-brick-filled-frame grammar’
and the ‘formal pattern’ into which the programme was succesfully
‘shoe-horned’. Johnson’s remark that the ‘gymnasium facade,
the most formal, is also the most successful part of the building’,
summarized his assessment of the building. Only by referring to
Mies, he highlighted the neo-Classicist tendencies present in the
design. Anything a-symmetrical just ‘disturbed’ the whole ‘formal
composition, which is so clear from the rear’, including the raised
133 Philip Johnson, in: The
Architectural Review, September Braithwaite water tank, the chimney and the projecting volumes of
1954, p. 152; an added footnote ex-
plicitly mentioned the architects’
kitchens and other facilities.135
disagreement with this particular
remark by Johnson.
134 Ibid., p. 148. Why wouldn’t Johnson recognize the overtly Picturesque
135 Ibid. elements here? Was it because of his own embarking upon the neo-
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Classicist fashion of the time, following Rowe and his analyses of
Le Corbusier, and post-war ‘modern mannerism’ as Rowe called
it – not pejoratively but as a possible escape from banal, routine
Functionalism. Paradoxically of course, Johnson’s house at Canaan
equally contained Picturesque principle – it even displayed a
Poussin painting in its famous interior as some sort of cultural
trophy, ostentatiously present in publicity photographs. Banham too,
studiously avoided to mention any Picturesque principle present
at Hunstanton, the clearly visible ha-ha was not explained, nor any
other element of the Smithsons’ ‘language of connective landscape
forms’ as they themselves called it, and of which they stated as
having begun with Hunstanton.136 In their own description of the
outdoor spaces of the school the almost seamless connection
between the ‘English landscape garden’ tradition and their own idea
of a tradition appear once again:
‘The school’s approach side had the indented verge to the ha-ha,
by which the school territory was separated from the road (as at
Vanbrugh’s Seaton Delaval); making clear which was public ground
and which was the school. The walking surfaces were gravel, as
befitted a country school, but slightly formal, echoing the walks of
nearby Sandringham. By being raised up, the gravel walk on the playing
fields’ side mastered the field’s surface; its grass fore-slope took up
the difference in the crossfall, forming a softer edge to the podium on
which the school stood.’ 137
The Picturesque sensibility is simply all-pervasive at Hunstanton.

Tony Vidler, in his recent assesment of modernist histories, noticed
this too, when he described the published photographs of the
school in the pages of the Review as a ‘walk around the house’,
just as he almost too casually mentioned that Banham grafted the
New Brutalism on Pevsner’s ‘mixture of picturesque visual criteria
and a critique of functional pretense’.138 The oblique angles under
which the building was photographed – the canonical modernist
photographic perspective since the stairs at Fagus and the Bauhaus
corner – unequivocally brought out the Picturesque sensibility,
qualities of informality, asymmetries, dynamic movement, the
gymnasium building as the counterpoint folly and so forth and so on.
The Shift, 1982, p. 40
137 Ibid., p. 36.
Indeed, the a-symmetrical composition or the free planning of the
138 Anthony Vidler, Histories
of the Immediate Present, 2008, whole building ensemble with the main volume itself being quite
p. 100, and p. 114; the page in
question is page 150 in the symmetrical as a contrast is in function of a proper contextualizing
Architectural Review documen-
tation of the Hunstanton school,
of the building volumes and its programme. The first thing one
September 1954, with photo- notices is how the street condition and access to the school building
graphs by John Maltby and De
Burgh Galwey. are treated very differently from the side that overlooks the green
dvdh10PRINT.indd 149 21-04-13 16:56

playing grounds. Whereas on the street side the building is a
composition of accident and variation built up from such ordinary,
common and industrial elements as the kitchen and workshop
annexes, and the raised water tank, on the rear side the building
appears as a glorious, aristocratic estate commanding the vast
horizontal fields of Hunstanton; Classicist and Picturesque at the
same time, just as the raised water tank is both proto-Pop and
proto-High-Tech one might add.
If one doesn’t need to be a very acute observer to see that the

building, just as Brutalism itself, is riddled with Picturesque
aspects, why has this been repressed from historiography for so
long? The most straightforward answer would be that the Banham
version of opposition (Brutalism versus the ‘New Sentimentality’,
Brutalism versus the neo-Palladian, a younger generation versus
the elders and so forth) is still the most dominant one. The other
would be that the Smithsons also may have leaned too much on
Banham’s interventions, at times joining him in dismissing the
Picturesque as well. Peter Cook was probably the first to uncover
the profound Englishness of the Smithsons, including the role of
the Picturesque tradition in their thinking. He did so in his 1980
hommage to his intellectual parents: ‘Regarding the Smithsons’
published in the Architectural Review. While defining the quality
of their work he stated:
‘... in the end it is their congruity with those especially English
characteristics of contemplation and gentle assembly of the
ambiguous that remains uppermost. In their own words their
aesthetic is created “without rhetoric”, but what emerges also is a
perceptible taste for the picturesque that they might never admit to,
but which also exposes their characteristic Englishness.’ 139
Still, just as the Englishness of the Smithsons was very different

from Pevsner’s Englishness, the Smithsons’ Picturesque was very
different from Pevsner’s proposition. It is as if a second, more
secretive discourse is played off here. My conclusion would be that
to fully understand the Brutalist agenda of the Smithsons, and not
so much the one of Banham (and there is a major difference as we
will see in the next chapter), one should put aside the opposition
139 Peter Cook, ‘Regarding the between the Picturesque and Brutalism, as well as between the
Smithsons’ in: The Architectu-
ral Review, July 1982, pp. 36-43; neo-Palladian and Brutalism. Just as one cannot uncouple the
it is only very recently that the
reinvestigations of the post-war historical Picturesque of the eighteenth century from the historical
debates make it possible to
discuss the ambiguities at play,
neo-Palladian of the same period, one cannot uncouple the
Jonathan Hughes and Simon twentieth century revivals of the Picturesque and of Palladianism,
Sadler’s Non-Plan of 2000 being
an early instance. and the invention of the New Brutalism.
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The quest for an unity of principles – as the assumed proper
foundation for any architecture – should be regarded as the central
issue. It is in that sense that Alison and Peter Smithson were
looking for a new, coherent language of architecture, fit for a mobile
society, a consumer culture curbed by welfare state institutes.
About their ambition for Hunstanton they said:
‘The idea behind this school was to try and prove that in every
programme there exists an inherent order which once discovered
appears static, immutable, and entirely lucid. In other words,
we were determined that we would, from the requirements of
the client and the recommendations of the educationalists,
create architecture.’ 140
It is a paraphrasing of their Brutalist credo to ‘drag a rough poetry

out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work’.141
Several things should be noted at this point. First of all, that it was
the very ambition to achieve an unity of principles which proved
to be highly problematic throughout the post-war debates, not so
much because of the latter part of the term (the principles), but
because of the former: the notion of unitfication. The fluidity of
the Independent Group discourse, the broadness of its scope, and
the resultant multiplicity of positions already point to an almost
endless process of consistent negotiations between the ‘forces
which are at work’ and which were to be synthesized, reconciled,
or at least kept in balance through some sort of poetic intervention.
This idea of an architectural unity seemed at first to coincide
with the project for the welfare state, the project of re-building
Great Britain after the war, of making the country ‘safe for modern
architecture’. Perhaps this idea had already faltered with the event
of the Festival in 1951, as Forty has suggested, but it wouldn’t be
until the 1970s when this marriage fully and irrevocably broke down
in a most traumatical way regarding the interrelationships between
modern architecture and the avant-garde vis-à-vis planning
policies and political agendas. The two notions of fragment and
enclave move to the foreground then in the further development
of the work of the Smithsons, just as one might observe this in the
general architecture discourse.
140 Alison and Peter Smithson, In the meantime, the idea of a possible unity of principles was
2001, p. 41. salvaged by a set of conceptual shifts. First of all, there is the
untitled comments in as part
notion that a coherent language of modern architecture was
of ‘Thoughts in Progress. The an undertaking which could only be established within each
Design, April 1957, p. 113. project anew. We find this with all positions, there is a fantastic
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genealogical line of historians to draw here: Pevsner would
highlight the Picturesque ‘every case on its own merit’, Banham
would alternately scorn and embrace this and ultimately talk
of ‘the style for the job’ when explaining Stirling and Gowan’s
architecture in particular, a phrase that Jencks would later use to
prop up his plea for postmodernist whimsicality. Another phrase
used in this respect was the one of ‘Ad-Hoc-ism’.142 With the
Smithsons we see this – albeit in a very different way of course
– emerge in their Brutalist definition of poetry as the outcome of
the ‘as found’, and their idea of design as a finding process.
Secondly, the notion of time itself was rethought in a structuralist

way, something which ironically seems to be overlooked by most
historians. If recognized at all, it is usually criticized since it is
not in accordance with the neo-Marxist understanding of the
historicity of design and culture production, which dominates
the historiographical discipline. The rethinking of time and its
workings seemed necessary at the time, since it was only through
the synchronizing of traditions that an all-inclusive new unity
142 Nikolaus Pevsner, among
others in The Englishness of could be proposed. The seminal example would be Aldo van
English Art, for instance p. 55 and
168; Reyner Banham, ‘The Style Eyck and his proposition to bring together what he saw as the
for the Job’, in: A Critic Writes.
Essays by Reyner Banham, three major traditions of the vernacular, the avant-gardes and
University of California Press, ancient culture as he did in 1959 at the Otterlo congress, and
Berkeley, 1996, pp. 96-99, origi-
nally published in New States- as exemplified in his famous diagram of the Otterlo Circles.143
man, nr. 67, 14 February 1964,
p. 261. The phrase ‘ad-hoc-ism’ But we see it too, in the British post-war discourse, for example
is also used by Archigram and
Peter Cook, Charles Jencks and with the writings of Colin Rowe, his proposition for a Collage
Nathan Silver made it a book: Ad- City, in which he also referred to Claude Levi-Strauss’ work and
hocism, The Case for Improvisa-
tion, Doubleday, New York, 1972. idea of ‘bricolage’, or even much earlier in his ground-breaking
143 Oscar Newman (ed.), CIAM
’59 in Otterlo, Uitgeverij G. Van
rereading of Le Corbusier’s design production of the 1920s.
Saane, Hilversum / Karl Krämer His demonstration of neo-Classicist principle at work in the
Verlag, Stuttgart, 1961, pp. 26-35.
144 Colin Rowe, ‘The Mathe- modernist, free plan and free facade compositions of the so-called
matics of the Ideal Villa’, in: white villas of the master remains a hinge point in the first critique
The Architectural Review, vol. 101,
nr. 603, 1947, pp. 101-104. of the modern tradition as formulated in the post-war period.144
145 There is much more to point
out here – but this may be too ex-
Obviously, in a similar vein one can reread the Smithsons’
tensive a subject to dwell on. Two work at Hunstanton and see the Picturesque and neo-Palladian
things that may be mentioned
perhaps include how the Smith- principles at work, while at the same time – and this is crucial –
sons think of major examples of
architecture as ‘outside time’: a new language of architecture is being developed. At Hunstanton
[the Unité] is the most significant
building of our time, existing in
this language is a rough and ready appropriation of the Miesian
space but outside time, like the IIT buildings, based on the latest steel technology, using industrial
Temple of Poseidon at Paestum,’
in: Ordinariness and Light, p. 89; products ‘as found’ in Britain, applying the then new and advanced
and regarding ideas and the
‘transmitting’ of ideas they would concept of plastic theory regarding the stability of structures as
consistently keep pointing out
how books are like ‘cultural par-
developed by Ronald Jenkins of the Ove Arup office, and most
cels’ that enable ideas to travel, acutely represented by the Surrealist photography of Henderson,
not just through space but also
through time and history. and the building under construction.145
dvdh10PRINT.indd 152 21-04-13 16:56

A third and final shift concerns a rethinking of the relation part
and whole – which is in itself a seminal (neo-)Classicist trope.
This is perhaps the most difficult one to pin down in theoretical
terms, also because it keeps being reformulated time and time
again. In their ‘Urban Re-identification’ manuscript as published in
Ordinariness and Light the Smithsons would say for instance this:
‘In the twenties a work of art or a piece of architecture was a finite
composition of simple elements, elements which have no separate
identity but exist only in relation to the whole; the problem of the
fifties is to retain the clarity of intention of the whole but to give
the parts their own internal disciplines and complexities. This kind
of ordering, as opposed to geometric ordering, must be the basis of
all creative endeavour from the city to the object.’ 146
The reference to ‘geometric ordering’ is quite naturally to the

kind of neo-Palladianism that was inspired by Wittkower’s
studies, and to the debate in England whether some sort of
dimensional coordination based on the Golden Section or
Modulor may contribute to guarantee an aesthetic quality of all
generic architecture production.147 Next to this passage we find
a photograph of Jackson Pollock included, busy with his action
painting, and the following pages display images of Paolozzi’s
work (two sculptures), Dubuffet (‘Dématérialisation’, ink drawing)
and Victor Pasmore (his mural for the Festival of Britain). With
regard to this shifting relation of part and whole they claimed it
was Pollock in the first place who showed them the way forward:
‘In 1949 at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in Venice we saw
the first manifestation of the new ordering, in the painting
of Jackson Pollock.’ 148
146 Alison and Peter Smithson, And they further explained:

147 This idea was even put to a ‘The painting of Jackson Pollock is a different sort from any that
vote at the RIBA, see ‘Report of a
Debate’, in: RIBA Journal, vol. 64,
we had ever seen before. It is more like a natural phenomenon,
nr. 11, September 1957, pp. 460- a manifestation rather than an artifact; complex, timeless,
461; the Smithsons dismissed
of this proposition. Henry Millon n-dimensional and multi-vocative.
wrote an excellent essay on this
debate in post-war Britain and Comparable developments have taken place in structural design,
the impact of Wittkower’s studies
on architects: ‘Rudolf Wittkower,
in which the actual behaviour and the properties of the materials
“Architectural Principles in the are more accurately accounted for. This has led, as in art, to the
Age of Humanism”. Its Influence
on the Development and Inter- consideration of the parts not as simply acting, but as things in
pretation of Modern Architec-
ture’, in: Journal of the Society of themselves with their own internal disciplines complexly acting
Architectural Historians, nr. 31,
1972, pp. 83-91; see also Alison
in a total system of forces.’ 149
and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness
and Light, 1970, pp. 93-94.
148 Ibid., p. 86. This is the Smithsons’ connection between Jenkins’ plastic
149 Ibid. theory and the new aesthetic models as debated with their artist
dvdh10PRINT.indd 153 21-04-13 16:56

friends from the Central School and ICA. How things (or people
for that matter) come together, how they make up a larger whole,
lies behind the quest for a unity of principles, and the Smithsons
would continue to propose various concepts or models to capture
this ‘complexly acting in a total system of forces’ be it their
‘select and arrange’-technique, ‘space between’, ‘mat-building’,
‘conglomerate order’ and so forth and so on.
Another example of this is the so-called ‘Play Brubeck’-diagram.

It may explain how Alison and Peter Smithson envisaged the
translation of the ‘complex, timeless, n-dimensional and multi-
vocative’ into architectural order. They have published the diagram
at several occasions, in their Charged Void: Architecture volume to
explain the ‘Extensions of Man’ exhibition, in the Team 10 Primer,
and with their essay ‘Mobility’, published in Architectural Design
in 1958. The latter holds the most extensive explanation with regard
to the issue of ‘form’ and ‘relations’. The essay, which discusses
‘road systems’ as a new way of town building with Louis Kahn’s
scheme for Philadelphia and their own proposal for Berlin as
demonstrations of this, opens with a clear statement on this aspect:
‘The form of the city must correspond to the net of human relations
as we now see them.
The changing arrangements of this net are caused by constantly
changing standards of value operating on a field of communications.
The architect can act directly in this situation. He can control
systems of physical communication and he can offer new
concepts which change standards of value. And, in fact, the two
things are wrapped up with each other, for putting increased
emphasis on physical communications involves throwing over
traditional easthetic values which were mostly concerned with
fixed relationships; and, on the other hand, rejection of Carthesian
aesthetics, since they are incapable of carrying the cultural
loading of our time, inevitably leads to an “aesthetic of change” –
the plastic resolution of the problems of mobility.’ 150
This is perhaps the closest the Smithsons will ever come to a

neo-Futurist position as propagated by Banham in those years.
And just as Peter Smithson would refer to jazz in his comments
on Banham’s exposition on Futurism at the RIBA, here again,
jazz music is proposed as an analogy to explain the way Brutalist
poetry is dragged from the forces at work. The ‘Play Brubeck’-
diagram – a rough sketch that shows a web of lines randomly
‘Mobility. Road Systems’, in: Ar- connecting a series of scattered dots – is positioned next to
chitectural Design, October 1958,
pp. 385-388. the opening statement. Its caption reads:
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‘the diagram illustrates that the net of human relations is more like
a constellation with different values given to different parts in an
immensely complicated web crossing and recrossing the system.
The implication of “Brubeck” is that the pattern can emerge in spite
of complexity. When Brubeck plays it seems as if it is impossible
to hold the musical structure together, but at the end he always
manages to gather up the threads and knot them.’ 151
The ‘plastic resolution of mobility’ as an ‘emergent pattern’ then,

a mobility which is not only physical, but also socio-cultural, and
constantly ‘changing’. This is not transfigured into an equally
‘changing’ architecture. With regard to the Hunstanton School
one could point out a very specific strategy as developed by the
Smithsons. Rather than a singular ‘architecture of reality’ the
project encompasses the bringing together of various ‘realities’,
a ‘multi-reality’ perhaps as in line with ‘n-dimensional’ and ‘multi-
vocative’, or even ‘counter-realities’ (just as we were discussing
‘counter-histories’ before) that may exist next to one another, a
simultaneous accommodation of various ‘parallel’ phenomena.
Regarding the different ‘lives’ of the Hunstanton school the

Smithsons stated:
‘Consider, therefore, the Hunstanton School as having two lives:
an everyday life of teaching children, noise, furniture, and chalk
dust, as equals with the building elements, all of which add up to
the word “School”.
And a secret life of pure space, the permanent built Form which
will persist when School has given way to Museum or Warehouse,
and which will still continue to exist as idea even when the
Built Form has long disappeared.’ 152
This ‘secret life’ – where ‘pure space’ and ‘Form’ reside – is then
best communicated through the images of Henderson, images
of the emptied interiors without the children and the school
furniture. It was a request from the architects as the Review
editors mentioned in an aside, and it simply infuriated the readers
who called it inhumane, because of the very choice to show the
architecture as a bare structure awaiting appropriation.
151 Ibid.
2001, p. 42.
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dvdh10PRINT.indd 156 21-04-13 16:56

4 THE NEW BRUTALIST GAME OF ASSOCIATIONS
On Principles of Ordering and Finding Processes
1 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind
E. Krauss have edited an antho-
logy on the formless in twentieth
century art (Formless: A User’s
Guide, Zone Books, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 2000), but I am
not aware of a systematic study Principia
of this phenomenon in architec-
ture. See for a brief discussion
of ‘formlessness’ and the work of
the Smithsons: Irénée Scalbert, The deliberate vagueness regarding formal definition of the
‘Towards a Formless Architec- everyday in the architecture of Alison and Peter Smithson
ture, the House of the Future by
A+P Smithson’, in: Archis, nr. 9, is continued throughout their body of work. This is in perfect
1999. pp. 34-47.
2 To mention one instance: the accordance with one of the main avant-garde strands of the
case of the British embassy in modern tradition in architecture: formlessness, including anti-
Brasilia, which was aborted by
the Labour government in 1965, academicism and the rejection of formulas. These were all part
Peter Smithson noted how ‘the
form derived from the circums- of the historic avant-garde and often enough traced back to
tances’, how it was generated
by climatic and geographic con- Romanticism.1 To the Smithsons this notion of formlessness didn’t
ditions as well as studies of the mean that form was altogether absent but that form was to be
work pattern of the embassy and
the ambassador’s life, very much found so to speak in the actual project and its specific conditions.
in the same vein as the designs
for St Hilda’s College or the new Confirmation of this comes from many of the Smithsons’
Model House were developed as
discussed in the former chapter; comments on their own work and aspirations;2 just as it informs
see for full quotes: Hans Ulrich the much quoted statement of 1957 summarizing the Smithsons’
Obrist, Smithson Time. Peter
Smithson & Hans Ulrich Obrist. idea of the New Brutalism:
A Dialogue, Verlag der Buchhand-
lung Walther König, Cologne, ‘Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society, and
2004, pp. 24-25.
drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces
comments as part of ‘Thoughts in which are at work.’ 3
Progress. The New Brutalism’, in:
Architectural Design, April 1957,
p. 113.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the statement is a paraphrasing of the
4 The famous quote from Mies’
1938 inaugural address at IIT, then Miesian credo ‘to create order out of the desperate confusion
Armour Institute of Technology
as included in Philip Johnson’s of our time’.4 Hugo Häring, with whom Mies shared offices, and
book on Mies’s work, published his notion of Form Findung is just one other such reference.5
by the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1947. This unstable, dynamic relationship between form and the notion
5 One wonders to what extent
the Smithsons were aware of
of order, the larger societal conditions and the specifics of the
Form Findung and Häring’s architectural project, is one of the larger, unresolved riddles
theories, but his name appears
in notes on the New Brutalism, of the modern tradition. Its possible resolution was at the core
for instance in an unpublished
typoscript dated 7 March 1955 by of the post-war debates in Britain, from which the New Brutalism
Alison Smithson in the Smithson
archive; next to the ‘Garkau Farm’
emerged. To arrive at some sort of resolution, the search was
she mentioned ‘recent works not so much for new forms as such, but as noted before for new
by Aalto’ and ‘the work of Paul
Rudolph in Florida’ as Brutalist; principles of ordering.
Häring is also included in their
account of the origins of modern
architecture, The Heroic Period of
Modern Architecture, the special
The one historian who most profoundly expressed and
1965 Architectural Design issue explained this problematic as a veritable paradigm shift was
for which they served as guest
editors. John Summerson, the eminent historian of Georgian architecture
dvdh10PRINT.indd 157 21-04-13 16:56

and curator of the Soane’s Museum. His lecture ‘The Case for a
Theory of Modern Architecture’, still serves as a key referent.
The lecture was given at the RIBA, also in 1957, a month after
the Smithsons’ statement on Brutalist rough poetry appeared in
the pages of Architectural Design; and it was organised as part
of the continuous attempts to define the modern tradition while
assessing its future value.6 The notions of process and the social
as process return here as being central to the development of the
modern architecture discourse of the period. Reflecting on the
revisionary debates on the future direction of modern architecture,
Summerson speculated on the possible principia, that might
unify the new tradition. Summarising the literature on modern
architecture and its principles, and giving a rather fantastic,
erudite overview of the historic development of the ideas and
critique involved, Summerson extensively discussed Le Corbusier
and László Moholy Nagy’s contributions (among many others) with
regard to the concepts of rationalism, biology and the organic in
architecture, before he focused on Bruno Zevi’s history of modern
architecture.7 Rereading Summerson it seems he didn’t hold Zevi
in as high esteem as he would other authors, but nevertheless
according to Summerson, it was Zevi who hit the ‘nail exactly on
the head’ by the remark that the new conception of architecture
was based ‘on a social idea and not a figurative idea’. Summerson
then claimed that:
‘The source of unity in modern architecture is in the social sphere,
in other words in the architect’s programme.’ 8
for a Theory of Modern Architec- To Summerson this marked a major shift within the architectural
ture’, in: RIBA Journal, June 1957,
pp. 307-313; lecture given at the discipline:
RIBA on 21 May 1957; another
contribution was the lecture by ‘from the antique (a world of form) to the programme (a local
Reyner Banham on futurism: ‘Fu-
turism and Modern Architecture’, fragment of social pattern).’ 9
in: RIBA Journal, February 1957,
pp. 129-139.
7 For all Summerson’s erudition, Eventually, he defined ‘programme’ as involving ‘a process in time’
Gevork Hartoonian critically
noted that Pevsner was left out stating that:
of his account of the development ‘it is difficult to imagine any programme in which there is not some
of a theory of modern architec-
ture. Hartoonian suggests a rhythmically repetitive pattern – whether it is a manufacturing
fundamental difference of opinion
between the two regarding the process, the curriculum of a school, the domestic routine of a house,
issue of historicism, see Hartoo-
nian, The Mental Life of the Archi- or simply the sense of repeated movement in a circulation system.
tectural Historian, 2011, pp. 49-51; Of course this pattern does not dictate a corresponding pattern in
Robin Middleton remarked that
Pevsner was ‘simply writing a the architect’s plan or anything crude like that but it does sanction
particular historical account,
not a theoretical analysis’, letter relationships which are different from those sanctioned by the static,
to the author, 4 January, 2012.
axially grouped dominants and subordinates of the classical tradition
8 Ibid., p. 309.
9 Ibid. – different, but carrying an equivalent authority.’ 10
10 Ibid.
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By clearly defining the distinctions between these two traditions
– a world of form versus social pattern – Summerson probably
made one of the more important contributions to the debate on the
future of modern architecture and the establishment of modern
architecture as a legitimate, new tradition of its own; perhaps
even more so than the historians and theorists who defined space
as the distinctive category of modern architecture, even though
Summerson himself credited both Moholy-Nagy and Giedion for
the ‘brilliant’ way they formulated the new ‘space-time unity’.
In the discussion that followed after Summerson’s lecture

Peter Smithson responded affimatively to Summerson’s
statement. In particularly, he embraced the notion of process:
‘“process” has indeed something to do with the new unity for which
we are looking. “Process” does not have overtones of “geometry”,
but has overtones of collaboration, co-operation between various
related techniques, and so on.’ 11
And:
‘Architecture as something form-giving is involved in this business.
It cannot be separated from “process.”’ 12
And vice versa, still according to Smithson:

‘form transforms “process” by taking part in it.’ 13
Here, it appears that Smithson was talking about a notion of

process slightly different from Summerson’s propositions.
Summerson seemed to have thought of process and form as
basically equal, yet unrelated categories, whereas Smithson
thought of form as part of the process. On the other hand, both
appeared to agree on the gap between architectural form, form
language and the notion of process as the new unifying principle
of modern architecture.
Summerson spoke of a ‘hiatus’, even a ‘missing architectural

language’, meaning language as a set of ‘continuously related
systems of inventions’ capable of translating the programme,
the process and the set of interdependent relationships into a
‘visually comprehensible whole’. Summerson even went as far as
to say that if one did not want to fall back on classical notions as
‘expression or style’ and thus become a ‘crypto-neo-classicist’,
one just may have had to accept that:
11 Ibid., p. 312.
12 Ibid. ‘the missing language will remain missing, and that in fact the
13 Ibid. slightly uncomfortable feeling which some of us have that it ought
dvdh10PRINT.indd 159 21-04-13 16:56

to exist is nothing but the scar left in the mind by the violent swing
which has taken place in the lifetime of one generation from an old
order of principles to a new.’ 14
Smithson, in his turn, confirmed the existence of the hiatus and

missing language:
‘To say that you can evolve a form from a social programme or
from an analysis of the situation in terms of flow and so on is
meaningless, because analysis without the formal content, the
architect’s particular specialisation, has one factor missing from it.
This “process”, therefore, is more complicated than has previously
been admitted.’ 15
‘Process’ does not simply replace the world of form, the idea of
process itself is deployed to bridge this hiatus between ‘form’ on
the one hand and ‘social programme’ or ‘flow’ on the other. Again,
we touch here on a classic avant-garde notion (the one of process),
next to the already noted ones of formlessness and form finding.
And as such it was part of the Independent Group exchanges of
the early 1950s.
14 Ibid., p. 310.
Various authors have characterised the Independent Group
15 Ibid.
16 Many publications have taken discourse as one that largely revisited avant-garde and modernist
this as a premise, such as the concepts of the pre-war, historic avant-garde, while elaborating
already quoted Modern Dreams.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop, and further developing these by interbreeding them with the
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1988;
David Robbins (ed.), The Inde- new concepts from science and technology, as well as the
pendent Group. Postwar Britain
and the Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT new sensibilities emanating from a new emerging consumer
press, Cambridge MA, London, culture. In hindsight Independent Group exchanges emerge as
1990; and more recently Mark
Crinson, Claire Zimmerman a hothouse for the later much more clearly defined concepts of
(eds.), Neo-avant-garde and Post-
modern. Postwar Architecture in Pop, postmodernism and high-tech, and not just in Britain but
Britain and Beyond, Studies in
British Art, nr. 21, The Yale Center throughout the western world.16 Graham Whitham was probably
for British Art and The Paul Mel- the first to map the Independent Group meetings and events, while
lon Centre of Studies in British
Art, New Haven, 2010. Anne Massey specifically focused on the idea of an aesthetics
17 Graham Whitham, The Inde-
pendent Group at the Institute of
of expendability resulting from the group’s interest in both
Contemporary Arts: Its Origins, technology and consumerism. Mark Wigley expanded this idea
Development, and Influences
1951-1961, PhD Thesis, University in relation to the Group’s fascination with the new media of mass
of Kent, 1986; Anne Massey, The
Independent Group, Modernism communication. Irénée Scalbert gave an insightful overview of
and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-
59, Manchester University Press,
the exchanges between the Parisian art scene and the Brutalist
Manchester, 1995; Mark Wigley, faction of the Independent Group, suggesting that such notions
‘The Architectural Cult of Syn-
chronization’, in: October, nr. 94, as anti-beauty and anti-form were derived from the Dada and
2000 pp. 31-62; Laurent Stalder,
‘“New Brutalism”, “Topology” Surrealist tendencies as represented by the figures of Tristan Tzara,
and “Image”: some remarks
on the architectural debates in
Michel Tapié and Jean Dubuffet. Laurent Stalder has investigated
England around 1950’, in: The the relations between formlessnes, the concept of topology
Journal of Architecture, nr. 3, 2008,
pp. 263-281. and the proposition of the New Brutalism by Reyner Banham.17
dvdh10PRINT.indd 160 21-04-13 16:56

Stalder has summarised most succinctly the various avant-garde
sources Independent Group members drew from: especially
Alexander Dorner and his The Way Beyond Art; D’Arcy Wentworth
Thompson’s On Growth and Form; Gyorgy Kepes’ work Language of
Vision; Michel Tapié and his Un Art Autre; and of course, too often
overlooked as a carrier of prewar avant-garde notions between the
generations as well as the two Atlantic continents: László Moholy-
Nagy’s Vision in Motion.18
The New Brutalism was (among others) the result of the revisiting
and reconceptualising of avant-garde sources as undertaken by the
Independent Group. Banham claimed that the Parallel of Life and
Art exhibition of 1953, made by Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi
and Alison and Peter Smithson, was the locus classicus of the
movement. Here the call to come to a ‘rough poetry’ found its first
manifesto-like expression. The foursome would present the whole
event as the staging of a ‘finding process’, a kind of Surrealist
game of ‘picking up, turning over and putting with...,’ not only
involving the artists and architects but also the visitors, who were
challenged to undergo a situation in the words of Henderson,
and without much reference to rely on to recreate some sort of
coherent order out of the collection of disparate materials brought
together in the show. Unsurprisingly then, the New Brutalism
‘eludes precise description’ as Banham put it. Again, ‘vagueness’
is key to the discourse unfolding, with the main protagonists
not always talking about quite the same thing.
Rereading the Brutalist Discourse
Conventionally, historians and theorists alike turn to Reyner

Banham’s essay of 1955 as the prime source to explain the
Brutalist discourse. Because of this, Banham’s notion of ‘Image’
as developed in this essay, is made the central theoretical
concept of the New Brutalism. The second concept proposed
by Banham is the one of ‘topology’, in order to replace the
geometries of routine functionalist rationalism and especially
of the neo-classicist revival under the influence by Wittkower’s
studies. Also, conventionally, and despite the acknowledgement
18 See Stalder, 2008, but also
Nigel Whiteley’s essay ‘Banham of Brutalist slipperiness, the so-called movement is portrayed as
and “Otherness”. Reyner Banham
(1922-1988) and his quest for an
a singular event with a coherent programme. Yet, the Smithsons
architecture autre’, in: Archi- never elaborated the notions of ‘Image’ and ‘topology’ in their own
tectural History, nr. 33, 1990,
pp. 188-221. writings; they are completely absent from their own statements
dvdh10PRINT.indd 161 21-04-13 16:56

that specifically address the New Brutalism. And in a very late
interview between Peter Smithson and Hans Ulrich Obrist in
2000, Smithson simply noted that ‘Brutalism was not what Reyner
Banham was talking about’.19 Smithson never really challenged his
friend and historian of the movement in such unveiled terms, but
when rereading his and Alison’s review of Banham’s 1966 book on
the New Brutalism with these words in the back of one’s mind, the
disagreement behind the ambiguous and sometimes jocular tone
becomes all too clear.20 A footnote in their 1973 Without Rhetoric
also demonstrates their discontent. Talking about ‘the root of
our way of seeing and thinking about things that we called New
Brutalism’ the Smithsons added the swipe:
‘Not much to do with the Brutalism that popularly became lumped
into the style outlined in Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism.’ 21
When following the trail of the various statements on Brutalism,

it also becomes clear that the Brutalist discourse continuously
shifted. It is not just elusiveness we are dealing with. The first
description of the Smithsons, concerns a certain ‘warehouse’
aesthetic applied to a domestic context (December 1953); later
descriptions allude to American advertising as Dada, and to the
modernist indebtedness to traditional Japanese architecture
(January 1955); human association, a social programme and ethic
imperative come in only at a later stage, just as the issues of
urban planning and mobility (April 1957). Smithson statements on
the New Brutalism have always been published as part of listings,
editorial comments by others (Banham or Crosby most notably)
or debates, never as an autonomous statement or manifesto.
The first mention in print is in Architectural Design, in December

1953, the very first issue Crosby was involved as editor; Crosby
was the first propagandist of the Smithsons, just before Reyner
19 Obrist, Smithson Time, 2004,
p. 17.
Banham. A small item in the editorial columns is devoted to the
20 Alison and Peter Smithson, Smithsons’ design for their House in Soho, which included a
‘Banham’s Bumper Book on
Brutalism’, in: The Architects’ straightforward project description, largely written by Alison even
Journal, 28 December 1966, though Peter’s initials ‘P.D.S.’ appear as author. The second half of
pp. 1590-1591; there is an unpu-
blished review as well (dated 1 the text addressing the architecture and the principles of ordering
December 1966, revised 21 April
1967) which speaks of ‘blockage’, at work, reads as follows:
a hand-written note on the
typoscript says ‘commisioned & ‘It was decided to have no finishes at all internally - the building being
later refused by New Statesman’. a combination of shelter and environment.
Robin Middleton noted during
various conversations that Ban- Bare concrete, brickwork and wood. The difficulty of unceiled
ham didn’t consult the Smithsons
once when writing the book. rooms was satisfactorily overcome by the disposition of rooms
21 Alison and Peter Smithson, which were also placed high up or low down according to light-
Without Rhetoric, 1973, p. 6,
note 6. sunlight desired.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 162 21-04-13 16:56

Brickwork may suggest a blue or double burnt or coloured
pointing; but the arbitrary use of colour and texture was not
conformed with, and common bricks with struck joints were
intended. The bars and colour variation have some sort of natural
tension when laid by a good bricklayer.
In fact, had this been built it would have been the first exponent of
the “new brutalism” in England, as the preamble to the specification
shows: “It is our intention in this building to have the structure
exposed entirely, without internal finishes wherever practicable.
The Contractor should aim at a high standard of basic construction
as in a small warehouse.”’ 22
A second mentioning by the Smithsons appears in

The Architectural Review, April 1954, among the various editorial
commentaries one is devoted to ‘The New Brutalism’ under the
heading of ‘Future’; most probably introduced by Reyner Banham
(who remained anonymous) the Smithsons stated the following:
‘It is necessary to create an architecture of reality.
An architecture which takes as its starting point the period of 1910
– of de Stijl, Dada and Cubism – and which ignores the waste land
of the four functions.
An art concerned with the natural order, the poetic relationship
between living things and environment.
We wish to see towns and buildings which do not make us feel
ashamed, ashamed that we cannot realise the potential of the
twentieth century, ashamed that philosophers and physicists
must think us fools, and painters think us irrelevant.
We live in moron-made cities.
Our generation must try and produce evidence that men are
at work.’ 23
In January 1955 a third and extensive statement by the Smithsons

appeared as part of an Architectural Design editorial. By then
the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School had been realized,
and widely published while being discussed as a manifestation
of the New Brutalism, among others in the Architectural Review.
Banham’s essay on the New Brutalism as a new movement would
not appear before the end of the year in the December issue of
the Architectural Review. The couple, introduced by the editor as
22 ‘House in Soho, London. ‘the prophets of the movement’, stated now:
Alison and Peter Smithson’, in:
Architectural Design, December ‘Our belief that the New Brutalism is the only possible development
1953, p. 342; in the archive there
is a typoscript with Alison Smith- for this moment from the Modern Movement, stems not only
son mentioned as author.
from the knowledge that Le Corbusier is one of its practitioners
23 in The Architectural Review,
April 1954. (starting with the “béton brût” of the Unité), but because
dvdh10PRINT.indd 163 21-04-13 16:56

fundamentally both movements have used as their yardstick
Japanese architecture – its underlying idea, principles, and spirit.
Japanese Architecture seduced the generation spanning 1900,
producing in Frank Lloyd Wright, the open plan and an odd sort
of constructed decoration; in Le Corbusier, the purist aesthetic
– the sliding screens, continuous space, the power of white and
earth colours; in Mies, the structure and the screen as absolutes.
Through Japanese Architecture, the longings of the generation
of Garnier and Behrens found FORM.
But for the Japanese their FORM was only part of a general
conception of life, a sort of reverence for the natural world and,
from that, for the materials of the built world .
It is this reverence for materials – a realization of the affinity
which can be established between building and man – which is at
the root of the so-called New Brutalism.
It has been mooted that the Hunstanton School, which probably
owes as much to the existence of Japanese Architecture as to Mies,
is the first realization of the New Brutalism in England.
This particular handling of Materials, not in the craft sense of
Frank Lloyd Wright but in intellectual appraisal, has been ever
present in the Modern Movement, as indeed familiars of the early
German architects have been prompt to remind us.
What is new about the New Brutalism among Movements is
that it finds its closest affinities, not in a past architectural style,
but in peasant dwelling forms. It has nothing to do with craft.
We see architecture as the direct result of a way of life.
1954 has been a key year. It has seen American advertising equal
Dada in its impact of overlaid imagery; that automotive masterpiece,
the Cadillac convertible, parallel-with-the-ground (four elevations)
classic box on wheels; the start of a new way of thinking by CIAM;
the revaluation of the work of Gropius; the repainting of the
24 ‘The New Brutalism’, in: Ar- Villa at Garches?’ 24
chitectural Design, January 1955,
p. 1; no authors are mentioned,
although the Smithsons were
credited with the statements;
A later statement appears in April 1957, again in Architectural
a slightly different draft is in Design, as a response to a panel discussion on the New Brutalism:
the Smithson archive; Theo
Crosby is probably responsible ‘If Academicism can be defined as yesterday’s answers to
for the whole text as published.
Curiously enough, the final lines today’s problems, then obviously the objectives and aesthetic
do not have quotation marks as
the others, as if they are not by
techniques of a real architecture (or a real art) must be in constant
the Smithsons but by the editor, change. In the immediate post-war period it seemed important
who already mentioned in his
introduction that he ‘somewhat to show that architecture was still possible, and we determined
edited’ the architects’ statement.
In a first republication (in Arena, to set against loose planning and form – abdication, a compact
1966), these lines were omitted,
however, in a later republication
disciplined, architecture.
of the statement as part of the Simple objectives once achieved change the situation, and the
1973 book Without Rhetoric these
lines were incorporated again. techniques used to achieve them become useless.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 164 21-04-13 16:56

So new objectives are established.
From individual buildings, disciplined on the whole by classical
aesthetic techniques, we moved on to an examination of the
whole problem of human associations and the relationship that
building and community has to them. From this study has grown
a completely new attitude and a non-classical aesthetic.
Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if it does not take
into account Brutalism’s attempt to be objective about “reality” –
the cultural objectives of society, its urges, its techniques, and so on.
Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society, and drag a
rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at
work.
Up to now Brutalism has been discusses stylistically, whereas its
essence is ethical.’ 25
Finally, there are two occasions at which the Smithsons once

again debate the idea of the New Brutalism outside their usual
platforms of the Review or Architectural Design.26 First there is
a ‘Conversation on Brutalism’ published in the Italian Zodiac in
1959, which is a staged conversation as suggested by the title, and
interestingly enough between two couples and two generations so
to speak, namely Alison and Peter Smithson and Maxwell Fry and
Jane Drew; second there is the review of Banham’s book of 1966,
already noted, written by the Smithsons for the Architects’ Journal.27
In a way, the ‘Conversation on Brutalism’ contains the most

comprehensive of definitions of Brutalism by the Smithsons.
At the same time, the shift from the domestic warehouse to
principles of town planning is now complete. The conversation
starts with discussing the legacy of the first generation of
modern architects and the way they conceptualized a possible
machine aesthetic in relation to the actual making and building
25 ‘Thoughts in Progress. The
of architecture, but soon enough the discussion moves to issues
Design, April 1957, pp. 111-113. of town planning whereupon Peter Smithson claims that ‘the
26 In later publications such as
Without Rhetoric of 1973, some essential ethic of brutalism is in town building’. He also explains
additional remarks are inclu- that what matters is:
ded, yet these are mostly of a
retrospective nature; the steam ‘the way the buildings themselves fit together and inter-act with each
of the debates surrounding the
New Brutalism had evaporated other which creates the actual places in which you move, and have
by then.
a feeling identity or lack of identity. In consequence of this sort of
27 Peter Smithson, Alison Smith-
son, Jane B. Drew, E. Maxwell way of thinking, in terms of direct responses of building to building,
Fry, ‘Conversation on Brutalism’
in: Zodiac, nr. 4, 1959, pp. 73-81; you tend to get buildings which are less (in the Renaissance sense)
and Alison and Peter Smithson,
complete. One puts less value on the thing being symmetrical or
Brutalism’, in: The Architects’ cubic and more on the fact that it’s particular geometry, builds
Journal, 28 December 1966,
pp. 1590-1591. up into a relationship with other geometry not in a Camillo Sitte
dvdh10PRINT.indd 165 21-04-13 16:56

romantic way, but in a functional way; that you read the building
for what it is, and not for some idea that is constructed on it.’ 28
And Alison added that:

‘the building (…) owes a greater responsibility to the whole of “town
building” and (…) it always has to imply that behind the immediate
relationship is the relationship to the rest of the village, or the rest
of the district or the town, or the rest of the quarter of the city.’ 29
It should be kept in mind that these statements are made after

the Hauptstadt Berlin competition, and straight after a visit to
the Hans Scharoun office in Berlin of which Peter makes explicit
mention, but still before the Smithsons start working on the design
for the Economist’s headquarters.30
From the idea of town planning in terms of establishing relation

ships the foursome – in apparent unison – debate how a city and
its spaces should be understood as a ‘net of communication’,
among other things based on the new requirements of mass car
ownership and mobility, while comparing the pros and cons of
American engineering versus English New Towns and garden city
ideas. At the conclusion Brutalist aesthetic is once again put on
the table by Maxwell Fry who states that the morality of Brutalism
is incorrectly reduced to the use of ‘London stock brick’ and ‘bush
hammered concrete’ as the only valuable means of expression.
The Smithsons respond by agreeing that Brutalism is not about
such easy formalisms, Peter:
‘There has been an awful lot of writing by people assuming what
we mean. A modern architect does not think of a theory and then
build it; you assemble your buildings and your theories as you go
along. The theory is evolved, a decision made 5 years ago will be
a completely different decision from one made today.’ 31
And Alison adds in another act of withdrawal:

‘Now everything is being done in brick, rough concrete, vast
sections of this and that, and varnished planks. We have again to
say that this is not [a] solution for every possible thing.’ 32
28 Zodiac, nr. 4, 1959, pp. 74-75.
29 Ibid.
30 Scharoun’s work had quite an Ultimately, by 1966 when Banham published his book on the
impact on the Smithsons; they
used Scharoun’s scheme for New Brutalism the whole cause seemed to have become part
Berlin in their Urban Structuring
book, and he was also invited
of history. The Smithsons’ review of Banham’s ‘memoirs’ does
to Team 10 meetings, yet never not propose new definitions, but mostly corrections of error and
attended.
31 Ibid., p 81. misinterpretation. They start their piece by critically debating
32 Ibid. the pitfalls for involved historians like Banham, stating:
dvdh10PRINT.indd 166 21-04-13 16:56

‘For the period up to 1958 Banham is well up to Time standards. He
was engaged and it shows. From 1958 onwards he seems not to have
been paying attention and the reality of what we were all up to has
got away from him.’ 33
The closest the Smithsons come to some sort of retro-active

definition in this particular review, reads:
‘For let there be no doubt, there was a movement, a sense of certainty
about what to do, as far as we were concerned, shared at its most
intense by the hard-core Team X, from 1953 to around 1963. (…)
Banham gets this right.
He also gets right that it is an architecture – an architecture
committed to some sort of social dialogue – that we are after.
The people in this book are not in any way involved with technology
as mystique.’ 34
From thereon the review is a long list of small and large

corrections, yet, the last sentence already spells out one of the
major differences of opinion between the couple and Banham,
namely the role of technology vis-à-vis architecture. Mid-1960s,
having built the Economist’s and re-interpreted Mies van der
Rohe’s work in America (Seagram Building, Lafayette Park),
the Smithsons started to speak of an architecture ‘without
rhetoric’, and of the ‘machine-served society’, in which technology
was under control and at the service of society rather than
the ‘technology as mystique’ of Banham’s new favourites, the
Archigram collective. The disagreement on the role of technology
is one of the clearer moments in the exchanges between the
Smithsons and Banham. Another clear distinction between the two
parties would be the possibility or desirability of a Pop aesthetic
for architecture. Mostly though, the positions overlap or are
complementary. It was Francesco Tentori in his 1968 essay ‘Phoenix
Brutalism’ for Zodiac, who put the tension between Banham and
the Smithsons at the centre of the Brutalist ‘movement’, while at
the same time pointing out all sorts of flaws and contradictions
regarding both individual positions.35
The Smithsons could limit their contributions to succinct,

aphoristic statements, because of Banham’s attempts to provide
33 Alison and Peter Smithson, the more coherently theoretical underpinning of the Brutalist
Brutalism’, 1966.
ideas. While the extensively quoted Smithson statements already
34 Ibid. revealed how the elusiveness of the New Brutalism was part and
35 Francesco Tentori, ‘Phoenix parcel of the whole project, due to the shifting ‘objectives’ with
Brutalism’, in: Zodiac, nr. 18, 1968,
pp. 257-266. regard to ‘today’s problems’ of which they spoke, and due to the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 167 21-04-13 16:56

evolution of ideas while working on projects, the dynamic between
the protagonists thus substantially added to the impossibility of
achieving a clearcut Brutalist argument or theory.
Another complicating factor involves the way the term

New Brutalism is appropriated by third parties. The bold
interventions and claims by the Smithsons and Banham were
rather unusual at the time; they introduced a new form of
architectural polemic which provoked a consistent stream
of letters to various journals. One finds readers’ responses
of indignation and support alike not only in the pages of the
Architectural Review and Architectural Design, but also in those
of the Architects’ Journal, The Observer, and New Statesman.
Together they make a curious compilation adding to the confusion
while further expanding Brutalist definitions. Apparently, the
slipperiness, or ‘vagueness’ had the effect of an open invitation
to join in and make one’s own claims. There is for instance the
famous letter of the photographer Eric de Maré claiming that he
had a letter from Hans Asplund, son of the Swedish architect,
36 Published in The Architec- who claimed that the term ‘neo-Brutalism’ was – irony of ironies
tural Review, August 1956, p. 72,
including a photo of the house in – of Swedish origin, and involved a private house in Uppsala by
question.
37 The critic (and architect) Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm, built as early as 1950.36 And there
Robert Furneaux Jordan had said is a slightly annoyed reader of Architectural Design who suggested
that the New Brutalism entailed
nothing else but the Smithsons that the New Brutalism meant nothing else but the architecture of
talking to each other, as quoted
by Banham in his 1955 essay the Smithsons themselves,37 basing himself on that well-known
‘The New Brutalism’ in: The
Architectural Review, December anecdote that Peter was nicknamed Brutus by his fellow students
1955, top of p. 356. in Newcastle.38 In line with this account are the jocular stories
38 Letter by Edward J. Armitage,
in: Architectural Design, May 1957, that Brutalism is short for ‘Brutus and Alison’, or even ‘Brutal
p. 220; also recounted to author
by Ron Simpson, fellow student
Alison’.39 The Smithsons cherished their own version of the origin
of Peter at Durham University. of the term; in retrospective statements they revealed that the
39 Reyner Banham in his 1966
book, and Kenneth Frampton ‘brutal part was taken from an English newspaper cutting which
during conversations at our first gave a translation from a French paper of a Marseilles official’s
Team 10 seminar at TU Delft,
5 November 2001. attack on the Unité in construction, which described the building
as “brutal”.’ 40
Brutalism’, 1966; also recollected
Without Rhetoric, 1973, p. 2, In many ways, this last revelation is representative for the
note 2: ‘Coined on sight of a
newspaper paragraph heading Smithsons’ shifting position within the debate on the future course
which called (by poor translation
of Beton Brut?) the Marseilles
of modern architecture. First of all, there is the indebtedness
Unité “Brutalism in architecture” to Le Corbusier (next to the already mentioned paraphrasing
– that was for us: “New”, both
because we came after Le Corbu- of Miesian thought), and more importantly, there is his crucial
sier, and in response to the going
literary style of the Architectural incorporation in the Brutalist genealogy. Second, there is the
Review which – at the start of the
‘fifties – was running articles on
presentation of the ‘brutal’ as a counter-movement: officials are
the New Monumentality, the New hostile to Brutalist architecture, ‘attacking’ it. Third, there is the
Empiricism, the New Sentimenta-
lity, and so on.’ issue of erroneous ‘translation’ from one language to another,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 168 21-04-13 16:56

the French brut into the English brutal – a discursive figure, which
is common practice to the architectural debate as we know it,
certainly in avant-garde circles. And finally, there is the reference
to the ‘newspaper cutting’, a reference to the world of newspapers
and media, where – perfectly in line with Independent Group ideas
– the forces of contemporary reality can be monitored, and from
which the ‘rough poetry’ of the Brutalist architecture is dragged.
Ultimately though, the instigators of the Brutalist intervention

lost control over the definition and reception of the New Brutalism.
Despite assertions of the opposite by Smithson and Banham,
conventionally Brutalism continues to be discussed mostly in
stylistic terms, with all sorts of subcategories and denominations:
from brick Brutalism and concrete Brutalism to welfare state
Brutalism or municipal Brutalism, to American Brutalism
(Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph in particular), Japanese
samurai Brutalism or even Brazilian Brutalism.41 And in 1967
Robin Middleton gave a beautiful account of how the Brutalism
was really a northerners’ invention, revealing a web of personal
connections between the Smithsons and the lesser known
Gordon Ryder, Ronald Simpson, Jack Lynn, Ivor Smith and others.42
Still, one could classify these interpretations among the more

friendly, sympathetic ones. There are also (mis)appropriations
beyond control of Banham and the Smithsons from those who
41 The proliferation of inter-
pretations is continued up until one might call the enemies of Brutalism. Take for instance Denise
today; see for instance the issue Scott Brown and her retrospective text ‘Learning from Brutalism’,
of CLOG, March 2013, entirely
dedicated to the New Brutalism commenting on the brief history of the Independent Group and her
and its legacy.
42 In his review of the 1966 Ban-
student years in London (1952-1954), claiming her right of territory
ham book: ‘The New Brutalism, as part of this history. In her view, Colin Rowe of all people should
or a Clean, Well-lighted Place’,
in: Architectural Design, January be considered a proto-Brutalist bringing the message to East
1967, pp. 7-8.
Coast America where it was translated into what she calls the
43 Denise Scott Brown, ‘Learning
from Brutalism’, in: Robbins, ‘“White” architecture of the late 1960s and early 1970s’, while her
1990, pp. 203-206; the so-called
white architecture of the late own work would presumedly represent ‘another link that had gone
1960s, early 1970s is of course a
reference to the New York Five unnoticed’ with regard to an architecture of ‘reality’.43 Or Rowe
and the book Five Architects of himself, an advocate of mannerism as an underrated working
1972 in which the neo-avantgarde
work of Hejduk, Meier, Gwath method for architects, he speaks of his appreciation of Brutalism
mey, Graves and Eisenman was
published. as a tentative style (in Collage City), remarking he doesn’t quite
44 See for an excellent discus- understand why the inventors expressed their dissatisfaction with
sion of this historiographical
oddity Elain Harwood, ‘Butterfield such achievement. And Pevsner and other historians of Victorian
& Brutalism’, in: AA Files, nr. 27,
1994, pp. 39-46; the source of architecture would start to use brutalist as an epithet, most notably
the Butterfield revival is John
Summerson’s Heavenly Mansions
for the architecture of William Butterfield – whose All Saints’
of 1949, including the chapter church had already been re-appropriated as ‘precedent’ by the
‘William Butterfield, or the Glory
of Ugliness’. Brutalists themselves in the case of the Hunstanton school.44
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By then the New Brutalism is fully historicised and neutralised
so to speak to make it available as part of a taxonomy of
architectural fashion, the ‘fancy dress ball’ as Pevsner called it
in his Englishness of English Art.
Because of this confusion, and in order to try and recapture the

Brutalist discourse of the 1950s we may want to have a closer look
at the words used by the threesome, who Tentori defined as the
central axis behind it all. What dynamic can one detect behind
the Brutalist exchanges, the play of words going on between
the historian and the architects? As already noted, one of the
complications is that one does not quite know how to assess
the things not said, not written about and slipped away from
memory. For sure, there existed friendship and quite an amount of
agreement between the Smithsons and Banham, but as pointed
out too, there is a process of falling out.45 First of all then, we
have to return to Banham’s essay of 1955, even though he himself
would later urge his readers of the New Brutalism book to regard
the essay, which established the ‘movement’, with a grain of salt.
Because despite the differences this must also be acknowledged:
without Banham’s support and his attempt to theoretically
underpin the New Brutalism – as ambiguous as we now might
view it – the Smithsons’ architecture and ideas would have had
much less impact without Banham’s support of Brutalism. Second,
we might use the classic double terms of image and process as
used by the protagonists to map the differences and ultimate
disavowals.
The Historian’s Image
Banham opened his 1955 essay ‘The New Brutalism’ by

distinguishing between two kinds of ‘-isms’, one being a style
label describing ‘consistent principles’, ‘whatever the relation
of the artists’ such as the label of Cubism, and the other being a
slogan adopted by a group of artists, such as the one of Futurism,
‘whatever the apparent similarity or dissimilarity’ between the
works of the artists involved. According to Banham the New
Brutalism escaped clear definition, because it belonged to both
45 Adrian Forty confirmed in con-
versation the falling out between kinds of ‘-isms’. After having thus situated the New Brutalism
Smithson and Banham; when
asked to have an interview on
on an equal footing with two of the major historical avant-
her relationship with the Smith- garde moments on the Continent, Banham then went on to
sons, Mary Banham refused to
grant this. recontextualize the origin of the term.
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According to Banham the term emerged within characteristic
Cold War polemics as present within the circles of the London
County Council and other planning institutes in control of the
building up of the welfare state. It was ‘Communists versus
the Rest’ in Banham’s words, and originally, the New Brutalism
was a term of ‘Communist abuse’ intended to denounce the
then dominant vocabulary of modern architecture. Apparently
– Banham phrased this with some innuendo – this abuse was
not so much directed to a specific ‘class’ but rather ‘persons’,
persons who would have a ‘tendency to look toward Le Corbusier,
and to be aware of something called le beton brut, (…) to know
of the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet and his connection in Paris.’ 46
This is a direct reference to the Independent Group meetings,
which Banham would not mention as such in ‘The New Brutalism’
essay, although he speaks of the ICA.47
Still according to Banham, this abuse would be reversed:

‘Words and ideas, personalities and discontents chimed together
and in a matter of weeks (…) it had been appropriated as their own,
by their own desire and public consent, by two young architects,
Alison and Peter Smithson.’ 48
From there onward Banham set out to reframe the work of the
Smithsons and the idea of the New Brutalism, first by pointing out
46 Reyner Banham, ‘The New the connections with artistic practices abroad and at home, and
Brutalism’ in: The Architectural
Review, December 1955, pp. 355- second by comparing the three projects he considered key to the
361; reprinted in: Mary Banham et
al (eds.), A Critic Writes. Essays Brutalist sensibility, namely the Smithsons’ Soho House, their
by Reyner Banham, University of Hunstanton School and one outsider’s project, Louis Kahn’s Yale
California Press, Berkeley, 1996,
pp. 7-15. Art Centre.49 This comparison culminated in the conclusion that the
47 The moment when the
Independent Group meetings Smithsons’ school project was superior to Kahn’s art gallery, since
entered the writings of Banham it was in the words of Banham ‘an image’. This notion of ‘Image’
and official historiography has a
specific moment of its own and with a capital ‘I’ was the core around which Banham’s argument
is connected to the appropriation
of the term of Pop Art and its ori- revolved. A Brutalist building was in his definition ‘an immediately
gins, as already noted in Chapter
3, footnote 122. At the time, in the apprehensible visual entity’, and as such ‘affecting the emotions’ –
1955 New Brutalism essay, it was quite in line with Le Corbusier’s statement: ‘l’Architecture, c’est avec
apparently more important to talk
of the ICA rather than the ‘Young des matières bruts, établir des rapports émouvants,’ which Banham
Group’ as a separate identity.
48 Ibid., p. 356.
had used as opening words to his essay.
49 There is an interesting cor-
respondence between Louis
Kahn and Colin Rowe, in which The New Brutalist architecture required that:
the latter scorns the way Banham ‘the building should be an immediately apprehensible visual
integrates Kahn in his Brutalism
essay and how he attacks the entity, and that the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed
assumed ‘pseudo-Palladian
formalists’, i.c. Colin Rowe, by experience of the building in use. Further, that this form should
see AA-files, nr. 62, 2011, p. 99.
be entirely proper to the functions and materials of the building,
50 Banham, ‘The New Brutalism’,
1955, p. 358. in their entirety.’ 50
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Banham admitted that in itself this specific ‘relationship between
structure, function and form’ was not a new thing, but the ‘basic
commonplace of all good building’. The ‘apical uncommonplace’
of the New Brutalism was then the aspect of ‘Image’, or what he
called ‘the demand that this form should be apprehensible and
memorable’. According to Banham, this ‘makes good building into
great architecture’. At that point, even Banham himself mentioned
this wasn’t very new either: ‘All great architecture has been image-
making’.51 The event of the New Brutalism was a straightforward
rappel à l’ordre, rather than a truly new direction deviating from the
established tradition of modern architecture. Yet, this call to order
was necessary to properly distinguish between the ‘substandard
architectural practices of the routine-functionalists’ and truly
‘conceptual buildings’.
The Hunstanton School served as the perfect case for such a call,
Banham:
‘most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash or patent
glazing, even when they are made of concrete or steel. Hunstanton
appears to be made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and is in fact
made of glass, brick, steel and concrete. Water and electricity do not
come out of unexplained holes in the wall, but are delivered to the
point of use by visible pipes and manifest conduits. One can see what
Hunstanton is made of, and how it works, and there is not another
thing to see except the play of spaces.’ 52
The correspondence, or non-correspondence, between appearance

and what a building was actually made of, was to be the first
and foremost criterion of the Brutalist reformulation of modern
architecture as proposed by Banham. It was also the first point
of departure for the Brutalist ethic, even though – it should
be noted – that at this point (in 1955) the ethic programme of
the New Brutalism remained largely implicit and was neither
discussed as such by Banham, nor by the Smithsons. The issue of
ethics was introduced by the Smithsons in their 1957 statements.
Yet, parallel to this call for order two major shifts were eventually
proposed, and these touched on the neo-Palladian or neo-
classicist subtext which was part and parcel of the British
revision of the tradition of modern architecture of those years.
One shift concerned the displacement of ‘Tomistic “beauty”’ by
‘Brutalist “Image”’, and the other the displacement of ‘elementary
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 357. Platonic geometry’ by an ‘aformalism’ based on an ‘intuitive sense
53 Ibid., p. 361. of topology’.53 Banham observed these shifts in the so-called
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locus classicus of the New Brutalism, the exhibition Parallel of Life
and Art of 1953, and two competition entries by the Smithsons,
Golden Lane and Sheffield University. Here, symmetry and
geometry gave way to the ‘topological’ organisation of flows and
movement. It was here that Banham situated the anti-beauty and
anti-classical tendency characteristic of the New Brutalism.
From this point of view Hunstanton turned out to be most

problematic as a didactic example. The seminal Brutalist
building by the Smithsons had all the characteristics of the neo-
classicist manner as legitimized by and appropriated through both
Wittkower’s studies of Palladio and Mies’s work in Chicago. And
at this point Banham – who obviously positioned the Brutalists,
himself and the Smithsons in the camp opposite of the so-called
‘crypto-academicists’ of the neo-classicizing party – had to untie
this paradoxical knot before he could cast the Brutalist sensibility
as aformal, or brut. He did so by suggesting that the formal axiality
of the Hunstanton School was nothing else but some ‘ad hoc
device’ to realize the so-called Brutalist ‘Image’.
According to Banham, it was through the collaborations with

Henderson and Paolozzi that the Smithsons were capable of
rethinking their aesthetic ambitions and of discarding the neo-
Miesian or neo-classicist geometric schemas. This was in fact
only partly confirmed by the Smithsons. In their text ‘The Stuff
and Decoration of the Urban Scene’ written in the early 1950s,
they pointed to the work of Jackson Pollock in the first place:
‘In 1949 at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in Venice we saw the first
manifestation of the new ordering, in the painting of Jackson
Pollock. In a roomful [sic] of academic abstract painting Pollock
seemed to be too good to be true: the ghost of the twenties had at
last been laid and the way was clear. At last we were free from the
shadow of our international grandfathers, free to solve our problems
in our own way.’ 54
In later writings they also acknowledged Henderson and Paolozzi,

for instance in Upper Case, nr. 3, published in 1960, and in Urban
Structuring, published in 1967. At any case, Banham concluded
that what could be defined as neo-classicist inclination in the
54 Eventually published in: project for Hunstanton, was left behind by the Smithsons from
Alison and Peter Smithson, Ordi-
nariness and Light, 1970, p. 86. 1952 onward, while preparing the Parallel of Life and Art show, and
55 The Smithsons together with
Henderson and Paolozzi pro-
working on the schemes for Golden Lane and Sheffield.55 Platonic
posed their idea for an exhibition geometry had made way for topology and beauty for powerful
at the ICA in April 1952; see also
Robbins, 1990, p. 18. ‘images’ capable of direct communication. Summarizing his
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arguments he came up with three basic requirements for a building
to be classified as Brutalist:
‘1. Memorability as an Image; 2. Clear exhibition of Structure;
3. Valuation of Materials “as found.”’ 56
As a final remark, slightly speculative, yet possibly clarifying how

various traditions simultaneously remain at work, one might argue
that one of the puzzling aspects of Banham’s notions of image
and topology concerns the fact that they are not incompatible
with both the neo-classicist or the Picturesque. As difficult as it
was to present the movement as something ‘new’ with regard to
modernist orthodoxy, in hindsight it is also hard if not impossible
to escape neo-classicist axiom; this of course already starts with
the very notions of unity and architectural principles of ordering.
Picturesque sensibilities too, remain at work, even though Banham
attempted to define an alternative discourse. As noted before, it
should be kept in mind that the 1955 essay was written at the same
time Pevsner’s BBC lectures on the Englishness of English art and
architecture were broadcast.
For instance, the way Banham explained his idea of ‘Image’

as something ‘conceptual’ comes very close to the idea of the
Renaissance concetto – the diagram connecting the world of ideas
with the material one. Banham himself must have been aware of
this, when he spoke of ‘all great architecture’ as being ‘conceptual’
– Bramante’s Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi is even
included as an example of architecture as ‘Image’. Topology too,
is perhaps not so much a substitute of Platonic geometry, it might
also be considered its expansion. Additionally and paradoxically,
behind image and topology we can see Picturesque notions at
work, too: this time as the critical transformation of the pictorial
and the geometries of movement.
Banham’s attempt to come up with a formulation of Brutalist

principles thus remains deeply unresolved, while at the same
time opening the door for completely new and unsuspected
trajectories. For instance, how Banham’s ‘Image’ is a precursor
to Charles Jencks’s semantic exercises of the late 1960s and
later, must be left unanswered here. But despite Banham’s
refutation of postmodernist eclecticism (and one wonders what
he would have made of Jencks’s propositions for an iconic
architecture), it is difficult not to see a connection. Topology
too, has its unsuspected elaborations; it is not unrelated to the
56 Reyner Banham, ‘The New
Brutalism’, 1955, p. 361. geometries of the digital paradigm and the concomitant interest
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in an architecture of surfaces and envelopes, nor is it alien to site
specific architecture, in which territory and its manipulation are
part of the design project.
The Architect’s Process
Comparing Banham’s position with the Smithsons’ statements

of the period some differences emerge. First of all, and as
important as it may be surprising, the Smithsons didn’t make
the idea of ‘Image’, or anything similar a central notion to their
argument for Brutalism. It was simply absent from their statements
on the New Brutalism. Of course, this doesn’t mean the Smithsons
were disinterested in the topic of images. On the contrary, in
a retrospective statement from the 1990s Peter Smithson noted:
‘Image was the favourite word of the period ... “a good image”
was the highest possible praise, for a newspaper photograph,
for an advertisement ... in fact for anything.’ 57
57 Peter Smithson, ‘Team X in
Retrospect’, manuscript from
the Smithson archive, dated 1 Hence, the two main moments of reference for historians who
October 1993, revised 1994-2001,
p. 2. Staying close with the would stick with Banham’s definition of the New Brutalism as
Smithsons statements of January ‘Image’, are first and foremost the collection of photographs
1955 in Architectural Design,
Banham listed the following in of the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition of 1953, as well as the
his essay of December 1955 as
‘images’: ‘A great many things Smithsons’ short essay on advertising of 1956, ‘But Today We
have been called “an image” –
S.M. della Consolazione at Todi, Collect Ads’, in which they discuss the advertisements as ‘good
a painting by Jackson Pollock, the “images”’ of a special, ‘almost magical technical virtuosity’.58
Lever Building, the 1954 Cadillac
convertible, the roofscape of the The former serves then as an entry to investigate the possible
Unité at Marseilles, any of the
hundred photographs in Parallel reconceptualizations of pre-war avant-garde practice and
of Life and Art’.
principle, while the latter represents the connection with post-
‘But Today We Collect Ads’, in: war consumer culture and proto-Pop sensibilities. Yet, images,
Ark. Journal of the Royal College
of Art, November 1956, pp. 49-50; or ‘Image’, occupy a very different place in the Smithsons’
see for instance Stalder, 2008, but
also Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Ban-
conception of the New Brutalism, and certainly not such a
ham. Historian of the Immediate crucial one as in the ‘New History’ formulations by Banham,
Future, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 2002. in which iconographic analysis was apparently the crucial and
59 I do not know of a text by directive methodology.59 Following the Smithson statements that
Banham in which he explains his
own methodology, although natu- Brutalism should try and drag a rough poetry out of the forces
rally there are quite a few essays
holding most explicit arguments at work, that architecture should be the direct result of a way
about the role of historiography
vis-à-vis the ongoing discourse, of life, we might turn to Peter Smithson’s intervention at the
also within the texts on the New end of John Summerson’s RIBA lecture of 1957, and reconsider
Brutalism; for a discussion of
Banham’s training and practice his acceptance of the notion of ‘process’.60 Also because the
as a historian see Nigel White-
ley’s biography. discussion ensuing Summerson’s lecture partly referred to the
60 John Summerson, ‘The Case Brutalist discourse.
for a Theory of Modern Architec-
ture’, in RIBA Journal, 1957, p. 312.
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There, Summerson had dismissed Brutalism as the fashion of
plans ‘wriggling in the wildest of “free” curves’; Summerson more
or less explicitly refuted Banham’s proposition for a New Brutalism
as a possible resolution to the problem of a missing form language
in the case of modern architecture, calling the idea of topology
nothing but a ‘red-herring’.61 Banham, present in the audience,
retorted that the idea of topology was ‘dragged into the discussion’
precisely because to him topology itself was ‘a-formal’, providing
a ‘method of analysis’ that was not committed to ‘any particular
set of forms’.62 It is after Banham’s intervention that Peter
Smithson took up the challenge that Summerson had proposed
to his audience, by elaborating the possible relationship between
process and form – form, which as we have seen in the Smithson
statements of 1955 was a key notion indeed. Process, and how form
might be part of this process then become the central notion that
structured the Smithson project for a New Brutalism.
Another retrospective and rather late Smithson statement

regarding Independent Group collaborations, the one concerning
the As Found of 1990, also makes reference to process, and
interestingly enough, also to the notion of image. Explaining why
Pollock’s work, but also that of Dubuffet, was so crucial to them
and represented a next step in comparison to the prewar avant-
garde, they wrote:
‘The image was discovered within the process of making the work.
It was not prefigured but looked-for as a phenomenon within the
process.’ 63
It is crucial to note that the aspect of process is decisive here,

and not so much the aspect of image. It is not dissimilar to
Peter Smithson’s response to Summerson in 1957 that ‘architecture
as something form-giving (…) cannot be separated from “process”’
and how form takes part in this ‘process’, and thus actually
transforms the process.64
The other connection one should not overlook is how process

is described here as the process of ‘making the work’, as noted
before this concerns a continuity of Arts and Crafts ideas
regarding the moral and aesthetic appreciation of objects well-
61 Ibid. made and things well-done, even though this continuity with the
62 Ibid., p. 312.
Arts and Crafts movement was suppressed from the Smithsons’
son, ‘The “As Found” and writings. The importance of the ‘process of making the work’
the “Found”, in: Robbins, 1990,
pp. 201-202. as stated in 1990, was already present in the 1955 statements
64 Ibid. on Brutalism as published in Architectural Design. Then, the
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couple addressed the issue rather ambiguously by referring to
a ‘particular handling of materials’, close to ‘craft’, but according
to the Smithsons not to be confused with craft. It is at this point,
that many differences between Banham and Smithson come to the
fore. Banham was not speaking about the making process as key to
the Brutalist sensibility, let alone craft. Of course, Banham would
recognize the importance of structure and materials as such, but
only insofar they mattered to end results such as ‘image quality’.
In the 1955 statements the Smithsons referred to two kinds of craft:

craft in the sense of Japanese architecture as well as ‘peasant’
building. Of the eight points of their New Brutalism statements
four made mention of Japanese architecture. That Japanese
architecture might be understood here as close to and overlapping
with ‘peasant’ as well, was evidenced from the later published
Without Rhetoric (1973) where the Smithsons more explicitly
referred to ‘Japanese traditional peasant building’.65 According
to the Smithsons the ‘generation of Garnier and Behrens’ found
‘form’ through Japanese architecture. They also wrote that the
‘seduction’ of Japanese architecture ‘produced’ in Frank Lloyd
Wright ‘the open plan and an odd sort of constructed decoration’,
in Le Corbusier ‘the purist aesthetic – the sliding screens,
continuous space, the power of white and earth colours’, and in
Mies ‘the structure and the screen as absolutes’.66
These remarks about Japanese architecture and its apparently

crucial role as the Smithsons saw it, remained unexplained. They
are quite surprising since it was not before 1960 that the Smithsons
would visit the East Asian country. This wisdom had come to the
couple mostly through 1930s books,67 and a now rather obscure
movie called ‘Gate of Hell’ which brought Japanese architecture
Without Rhetoric, 1973, p. 6, in colour to the Smithsons for the first time.68 Yet, what seems
note 5. Illustrations of the Kyoto
Imperial Palace, the Katsuga decisive here, is that the Smithsons recognized in Japanese
Shrine and the Ise Shrine are
inserted here, even though these architecture a ‘reverence for materials – a realization of the
buildings can hardly be described affinity which can be established between building and man’,
as ‘peasant’ though.
66 All quotes are from: Alison and this affinity was ‘at the root of the so-called New Brutalism’.
and Peter Smithson, ‘The New
Brutalism’, editorial statements
The reverence for materials was further explained by linking it
in: Architectural Design, January to the idea of craft as a ‘particular handling of Materials’, and
1955.
67 Obrist, Smithson Time, 2004, the architecture of ‘peasant dwellings’. However – and this
p. 18; Peter Smithson also men- complicates the statements on New Brutalism – the Smithsons
tioned here that Alison collected
Japanese prints when she was were not after craft in the sense of a past architectural style, or
still in school.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s decorative reworkings of the idea, but in the
‘The New Brutalism’, January sense of ‘intellectual appraisal’. Only through the proper ‘handling
1955; in a footnote to the state-
ments. of materials’ analogous to the peasant way was it possible to
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reach the ultimate conclusion, the key Brutalist slogan of 1955:
‘We see architecture as the direct result of a way of life.’ 69
In an unpublished, preliminary manuscript of the statements,

which is slightly more extensive, Alison Smithson explained
that to her ‘the doing is the craft. The doing must not be confused
with the built form – the ensemble.’ 70 Again, it might be noted,
this is very much in the spirit of Lethaby, who would also sing the
praise of for instance old farm-houses and cottages as ‘things
themselves’, and at the same time warned against their imitation.71
In peasant building then, the ‘doing’ of the architecture, the

handling of materials and the making process are regarded as
directly linked to a way of life, and hence they are considered
exemplary, unlike Wright’s architecture for instance, which
decorative elaborations were artificially crafted from the Brutalist
point of view. Thus, the idea of ‘doing’, finding form in the handling
of materials and in the making process is the second measurement
of the Brutalist ethic, next to and closely linked to the first one
already mentioned, the correspondence between appearance and
actual material construction.
Among the various retrospective reflections of the 1980s and later,

one also finds quite substantial confirmation of the centrality of
material qualities of Brutalist architecture, or good architecture
in general for that matter. There is an unpublished sheet dated
1986, titled ‘“The ‘Fifties” – The Materials Sacred to Brutalism’.
It simply reads:
‘Concrete blocks – laid and pointed like ashlar masonry.
Reinforced concrete – off smooth shutters.
Stainless steel – sheets, tubes, pressings, fixings.
Timber – in framing and detailing, left natural finish.
Common plywood and blockboard – left natural finish.
Enamelled metals – vitreous, stoved, (and powder-polyester,
1970’s-80’s).
Polysulphide pointing – to absorb movement.
69 Ibid.
70 Alison Smithson, untitled ma-
Galvanised mild steel – sheets, tubes, pressings; left natural finish.’ 72
nuscript, dated October 2, 1954.
71 W.R. Lethaby, Form in Civiliza-
tion. Collected Papers on Art and And then there is another statement also trying to capture the
Labour, Oxford University Press, architecture of the 1950s, which is published in the Smithson book
London, first published 1922,
second edition 1957, p. 76. The 1930’s:
72 One page typoscript from the
Smithson archive: Peter Smith-
‘What signals the end of the architecture of the period of the bicycle?
son, ‘“The Fifties”. The Materials (the ‘twenties)
Sacred to Brutalism’, dated 30
July 1986. The arrival of the grey and the brown. (the ‘thirties)
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What signals the end of the grey and the brown?
The arrival of the raw ..... (the ‘fifties)
raw brick
raw block
raw steel
raw paint
raw marble
raw gold
raw laquer.’ 73
And in the Smithsons’ As Found statement from 1990 we read

that they ‘were concerned with the seeing of materials for what they
were: the woodness of wood; the sandiness of sand.’ 74
And perhaps finally, a remark by Peter Smithson during his

interview with Obrist:
‘Brutalism simply means – I am repeating some of what I said
earlier about Soane’s vaults: the quality of a plaster ceiling is entirely
different from a concrete ceiling, in every way. And Brutalism is not
concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of the
material: what can it do? And by analogy: there is a way of handling
gold in Brutalist manner and it does not mean rough and cheap,
it means: what is its raw quality?’
And in response to a question regarding the Smithsons’ relation

with Japanese architecture:
‘Brutalism is certainly related to the ethos of Japanese building
construction. To be corny, the Japanese ask: What is the quality of
running water? And that is Brutalist thought.’ 75
So here, in 2000, the wheel has come round again, Brutalism is a

certain ‘raw’ aesthetic, perhaps a warehouse aesthetic as in the
Soho House, with references to the domestic environment of a
house-museum (Soane’s), in which we know the most elaborate
collection is accommodated, and an exoticist appropriation
73 From the Smithson archive; an
annotated, one page typoscript of Japanese purity. Town building and the social imperative,
written by Peter Smithson, dated:
‘date unknown, probably ’60’s.’;
which had become the essence of Brutalist thinking at the end
it is integrated into: Alison and of the 1950s during the heyday of Team 10, seems gone. For all
Peter Smithson, 1930s, TECTA
Möbel, Lauenförde / Alexander the many interpretations which focus on the images in the work
Verlag, Berlin, 1985, p. 78; the
reference to the 1950s is left out of the Smithsons and the Brutalist discourse, once again, the
here.
Banham notion of ‘Image’ is fully absent here, while in other
son, ‘The “As Found” and the statements – most notably the ones explaining the concept
“Found”, in: Robbins, 1990, p. 201.
of Conglomerate Ordering developed during the 1980s as a
75 Obrist (ed.), Smithson Time,
2004, p. 17-18. continuation of the Brutalist idea – we even find that the search
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is for an architecture that offers ‘pleasures beyond those of
the eyes’.76
To further grasp the idea of finding processes then, we might

look again at the locus classicus of the New Brutalism: the
exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ of 1953. The exhibition serves
as the perfect example of both the outcome of a process and
the staging of one. Here we find that the Brutalist discourse is
neither an ethic nor an aesthetic – how could such a simplification
ever have been proposed? Next to the reworking of modernist
sources, it also comprises the development of a discursive model,
a ‘common working aesthetic’ as Nigel Henderson called it.
‘Picking up, Turning over and Putting with...’
Considered a formative moment in the Independent Group history

the Parallel of Life and Art show is by now folded into numerous
historiograpical accounts trying to capture the ambition and
achievements of its authors, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi
and Alison and Peter Smithson, how it embodied a new (anti-)
aesthetic in response to the Zeitgeist of post-war England, and
Italian Thoughts, Royal Academy how it would be the foreboding of things to come, in particular
of Fine Arts, Stockholm, 1993,
p. 62. the New Brutalism and the As Found. At the same time, it was a
77 Graham Whitham’s chrono- rather modest intervention: a one room installation at the ICA
logy in Robbins (1990) contains
a short overview of the steps premises in Dover Street, on show for five weeks only, from
leading to the exhibition; just as
his description including an ad- Friday 11 September until Sunday 18 October 1953. Apparently,
dendum with notes by Alison and
Peter Smithson documenting the
at first it was hard to convince the ICA to accept the exhibition
development of ideas, pp. 124-129. proposal, just as it wasn’t easy to bring together the little money
78 Alison Smithson in an inter-
view with Graham Whitham, his necessary to produce the installation.77 Eventually, Ronald
1986 dissertation. The fold-out Jenkins, friend of the Smithsons and engineer of the Hunstanton
catalogue also mentions Denys
Lasdun next to ‘Scaffolding school, joined the foursome and chipped in to make it all possible
(Great Britain)’ and ‘Mr. E.C.
Gregory, & Messrs. Entwistle as suggested by Alison Smithson in a retrospective interview.78
Thorpe, who have helped to make
the exhibition possible’. Other Still, one may wonder whether the contribution by Jenkins
archival documents show that was not more substantial, since he was credited as co-editor in
Henderson was not involved at
first, but another artist-friend most documents, just as there were meetings held at his office
of the Smithsons and Paolozzi,
namely Victor Pasmore. The at Ove Arup.79 At any rate, Jenkins should be credited as the
invitation mentions the ‘editors’
of the exhibition in the following engineer of the New Brutalism; because of his involvement in the
order: Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Hunstanton school as well as the Smithson competition entry
Henderson, Alison and Peter
Smithson, Ronald Jenkins. for the Coventry Cathedral, and of course for the 1952 re-design
79 In The Charged Void: Architec-
ture, p. 118, he is also credited by
of Jenkins’ own office room by the Smithsons together with
the Smithsons themselves as col- Paolozzi, including a modest John McHale drinks cabinet and
laborator, albeit after Henderson
and Paolozzi. slide projector box.
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The title of the whole endeavour changed from Sources to
Documents ’53, to eventually Parallel of Life and Art. Technically,
the organizers struggled to arrive at a satisfactory result. The
black-and-white photographs that made up the exhibition were
mounted on boards and hung with wire and hooks from the ceiling
and on walls. Henderson remembered how they ‘were probably
hanging the material for about two or three days, and were trying to
get it into a kind of spider’s web above the heads of people, because
the room had to be used for lectures during the exhibition; by the
time we’d strung up an awful lot of wire and hooks and got out of
line and back into line and so on, we’d built up a pretty good nervous
tension which continued right up to the point when we decided that
this was all we could do and we had to face the comments.’ 80
Despite the obvious limitations – such as the apparent need for

the desk in the room that we see in the pictures of the show –
the installation aspired to realize a total environment, immersing
the visitor in a cloud of images without any apparent hierarchical
order. The collection comprised a hundred and twenty two images.
Subjects depicted stemmed from widely diverse fields, including
biology, sports, aerial photography, archaeology, geology, earlier
cultures, as well as non-western ones, and modern art by Dubuffet
and Jackson Pollock, among others. The images were hung, with
little explanation, in the front room of the ICA, where they filled
the entire space from floor to ceiling. One critic joked visitors
needed to bring stilts to properly see the images most of which
were displayed above head level due to the demand the space
be free for lectures.81
It should be noted at this point that – despite Banham’s

identification of the exhibition as the locus classicus of the
Brutalist sensibility – the foursome responsible for the installation
never explicitly conceived of the exhibition as a manifestation of
the New Brutalism as such. None of the typoscripts in the archives
nor the catalogue allude to anything in that direction. The foursome
was however anxious to make some impact in true avant-gardist
spirit, even though there was no such thing as a ‘banner’ or a
‘movement’ as yet. In an early, preparatory text, which explains
80 Quoted in Victoria Walsh,
Nigel Henderson. Parallel of the goals and format of the whole endeavour, the Smithsons
Life and Art, Thames & Hudson,
London, 2001, pp. 97-98. stated with unrestrained bravado that they aimed for an event,
81 As quoted by Graham Whit- which would ‘present the opening phase of the movement of our
ham in: ‘Parallel of Life and Art’,
in: Robbins, 1990, p. 124. time and record as we see it now, as did the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion
82 Notes by Alison and Peter for 1925.’ 82
Smithson, undated, published in:
Robbins, 1990, p. 129.
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‘Recording’ surely was one of the key techniques to understand
the exhibition, since all ‘found’ images were reproduced and
enlarged by way of black-and-white photography. This was
also the special aspect that was highlighted by Banham in his
original review of the exhibition for the Architectural Review
of October 1953.83 In this review Banham too, didn’t make
mention of the New Brutalism; the New Brutalism wasn’t a
public affair as yet, let alone a generally accepted reference.
As said, the first appearance of the ‘New Brutalism’ in print was
in Architectural Design in December 1953.84 Banham’s review
was all about photography and images, and surprisingly perhaps,
of a rather critical tone stating that the ones who overstate the
value of ‘photographic experience’ may be culturally poorer than
the ones like Sir John Soane, who had measured the stones
of the Classical orders of the Colliseum and could quote the
intercoluminations even in old age.85
Although the visual (in its latency Banham’s proposition of

‘Image’ is already there) is key indeed, when we follow the various
statements of the protagonists, we find that Parallel of Life and Art
was constructed, quite emphatically, as a process, a situation
for undergoing and (re-)constructing individual and collective
experience. To understand how the installation is both the staging
and the outcome of a process, or a ‘common working aesthetic’,
the studies of Victoria Walsh and Irénée Scalbert are the most
illuminating. Also with regard to understanding the revisiting
of modernist sources of the prewar avant-garde and the further
development of the avant-garde discourse during the 1940s and
1950s, they offer an insightful overview. In fact in Walsh and
Scalbert’s studies it appears that the avant-gardist discourse is
actually quite continuous, and much less interrupted as suggested
by such phrasings as those of historic avant-garde and neo-avant-
garde. But then of course, to think of the avant-garde discourse as
something evolving rather than as a series of ruptures, is perhaps
83 Reyner Banham, ‘Parallel of too much of an oxymoron in itself to be acceptable for modern
Life and Art’, in: The Architectural
Review, October 1953, pp. 259-261. historiography.
84 ‘House in Soho, London.
Alison and Peter Smithson’, in:
Architectural Design, December In addition to the interpretations of Walsh and Scalbert,
1953, p. 342.
85 Ibid., p. 261. which focus on the artistic procedures behind the Parallel of
86 As already demonstrated in Life and Art installation, I’d like to propose that for a ‘correct’
my essay ‘Picking up, Turning
over and Putting with ...’, in Dirk understanding of the Brutalist discourse there should be a shift
van den Heuvel and Max Ris-
selada (eds.), Alison and Peter
in interpretation from the singular notion of image to that of the
Smithson – from the House of collection, the image system, that what brings and holds the
the Future to a house of today,
010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004. images together.86 Apart from principles of ordering, this also
dvdh10PRINT.indd 182 21-04-13 16:56

concerns the structure of the discourse itself. This is also how
the Smithsons looked at contemporary arts. In their Uppercase
publication of 1960 they stated that:
‘It was necessary in the early ‘50’s to look to the works of painter
Pollock and sculptor Paolozzi for a complete image system, for an
order with a structure and a certain tension, where every piece was
correspondingly new in a new system of relationship.’ 87
So, what system, or various systems, are at work between the

foursome and their installation Parallel of Life and Art? In her
biography of Nigel Henderson, Victoria Walsh is the one historian
who most extensively analysed and retraced the composition
method of the exhibition. She points out the various (possible)
origins for the specific hanging of the installation and the specific
use of photograph, in particular Herbert Bayer’s work and two
of his diagrams from the 1930s to which the Smithson exhibition
design for Parallel of Life and Art bears strong similarities, and
one of which is included in their Heroic Period,88 and an exhibit
by Ernesto Rogers for the Milan Triennale of 1951, of which
87 Upper Case, nr. 3, 1960; Ali-
son and Peter Smithson, Urban the Smithsons held a tear sheet in their archive.89 Walsh also
Structuring, 1967, p. 34.
mentions a couple of installations by Duchamp, most notably
88 The Smithsons’ caption to the
diagram reads: ‘Herbert Bayer, the Sixteen Miles of String, of 1942 and done in collaboration with
Scheme for a photograph display,
page from the catalogue for the André Breton, and the Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended
Werkbund Exhibition, Paris, 1930’ from the Ceiling over a Stove of 1938. Finally, she includes in her
The Heroic Period of Modern analysis the notion of ‘multi-evocative sign’ as a key reference, an
Architecture, 1981 re-edition
with Rizzoli New York, 1981, p. 63; interpretation of Paul Klee’s work by the critic David Sylvester and
original edition: special issue of
Architectural Design, December, friend of Henderson and Paolozzi, as well as the idea of Le Musée
1965. Imaginaire by André Malraux, the French critic and politician.90
89 Walsh hasn’t established
the source of the French tear
sheet, it is from l’Architecture
d’Aujourd’hui, nr. 36, August 1951, With regard to discourse and the organisational structure of
p. VII, with a special overview of the collections of images, the latter reference may be the more
the Triennal; the same issue holds
items on the Festival of Britain important one. Malraux’s publication was a common reference
(by Ernö Goldfinger), on the
CIAM conference in Hoddesdon within Independent Group circles, and at least to Henderson quite
(by Pierre Vago) and one on the
modulor by Le Corbusier. an important one, given the fact that initially Malraux was asked
90 Walsh, 2001, pp. 89-107; an ex- to open the exhibition.91 In Banham’s review of the show we also
tra reference identified by Robin
Middleton is the Richard Paul find a reference to Malraux’s musée imaginaire, and in May 1954,
Lohse book Neue Ausstellungsge-
staltung, Nouvelles conceptions
as part of the Independent Group programme there is a discussion
de l’exposition, New Design in of Malraux’s voluminous The Voices of Silence, which also includes
Exhibitions of 1953, Praeger,
Zürich, however an early drawing the original musée imaginaire essay, with Henderson as one of
of the exhibition is dated as early
as 1952. the speakers.92
91 Walsh, 2001, p. 95; also
mentioned by Graham Whitham,
‘Exhibitions’, in: Robbins, 1990, In his 1947 publication of ‘Le Musée Imaginaire’, Malraux described
pp. 123-161, p. 125.
how museums and the development of reproduction techniques
92 Graham Whitham, ‘Chrono-
logy’, in: Robbins, 1990, p. 27. inevitably brought about a metamorphosis of the work of art.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 183 21-04-13 16:56

Removed from their original context, in which most works of
art had a significance other than that of the modern meaning of
an object of art, and displayed in museums, these objects were
provided with a new context and thus with new functions and
meanings. Reproduction techniques – gravure, as well as black-
and-white and colour photography – carried an even greater
implication: isolated works of art travel around the world as
images. As a result, artists and students assembled an individual
collections of pictures, which – together with memories of visits
to museums, churches and cities renowned for their art and culture
– constituted a new type of ‘museum’, an imaginary one without
walls, and in which the arts and art pieces took on an entirely
new significance.93
Henderson extensively referred to Malraux’s ideas and the

‘imaginary museum’ in his introduction to the exhibition at the
event of its opening. He explained how Parallel of Life and Art
resulted from juxtaposing the personal ‘musées imaginaires’ of
Paolozzi, the Smithsons and himself. In addition, he explained how
the interest of the four transcended the world of art as presented
by Malraux. Here, the latest developments in contemporary avant-
garde circles and the natural sciences come in, among others
the already noted examples of Moholy Nagy’s Vision in Motion,
Kepes’ ‘New Landscape’ and Dorner’s Way Beyond of Art. Following
avant-garde example, technological innovations such as aerial
photography, microscopy and X-ray photography, were of interest
to the foursome for the new ways in which they rendered visible
the natural order behind the outer appearance of things.
In her Henderson biography Walsh cites at some length

Henderson’s opening remarks for the exhibition. These quotations
clarify how the foursome went to work and developed in
Henderson’s words ‘a common working aesthetic’:
‘We had for some time been interested in exchanging images from
our own private “imaginary museums.” You will remember that
this is the way in which André Malraux discusses the assemblage
of photographic material in printed form, gathered together from
many points scattered in space and time, and representing the
creative work of artists of all ages and civilizations. In our own
93 André Malraux, Le Musée case, however, the contents of these museums extended beyond
Imaginaire, Paris, 1947; English
translation: ‘Museum without the normal terms of art, to include photographs produced for
Walls’, in: André Malraux, The
Voices of Silence: Man and his Art,
technical purposes … We often found that this exchange resulted in
New York, 1978, pp. 13-127. Also confirmation of our beliefs that we had happened upon something
see Walsh, 2001, pp. 92-95; and
Scalbert, 2000, p. 56. significant, that others too responded in the same way to the visual
dvdh10PRINT.indd 184 21-04-13 16:56

impact of a particular image. Up to a point, that is, we found that
we had a common working aesthetic, although we could none of
us formulate a verbal basis for it. Eventually, we decided to pool
the material we already had and to continue to collect more in an
attempt to elucidate what we had in common and the nature of
the material moving us. At this point certain groupings began to
declare themselves … these terms … then began to play back on our
selection and condition the choice of further images’.94
This very much describes the Smithsons’ idea of the As Found as

a process of ‘picking up, turning over and putting with’, including
the testing of responses to images and image combinations.95
All sorts of Surrealist notions abound here of course, from the
cadavre equis-like game that is set up between the four to the idea
that some sort of order will emerge from this game. Surrealist
procedure is also behind the applied reproduction techniques:
the enlargements and the collage-ing of apparent incompatibilities
into new totalities. The whole endeavour seemed to be mostly
concerned with the enabling of the triggering of cross-references
and analogies, setting up a game of associations. Alison and Peter
Smithson’s notes made in preparation for the exhibition explain
the unusual arrangement of the installation in exactly those terms:
‘The method used will be to juxtapose photo-enlargement … these
images cannot so be arranged as to form a consecutive statement.
Instead they will establish the intricate series of cross relationships
between different fields of art and technics. Touching off a wide range
of association and offering fruitful analogies.’ 96
At other occasions the Smithsons spoke of ‘contrapuntal games’

and ‘cross references’.97 The various, incongruent categories of the
catalogue of the collection of images were in keeping with those
94 Manuscript from the Hen-
ideas; they read in not quite alphabetical order:
derson collection, Tate Archive, ‘Anatomy, Architecture, Art, Calligraphy, Date 1901, Landscape,
quoted in: Victoria Walsh, Nigel
Henderson, Parallel of Life and Art, Movement, Nature, Primitive, Scale of Man, Stress, Stress Structure,
London, 2001, p. 92.
Football, Science Fiction, Medicine, Geology, Metal and Ceramic.’ 98
95 Alison and Peter Smithon,
1990, p. 201-202.
96 Notes by Alison and Peter
Smithson, undated, published in:
The incomparable categories made clear, in advance, that the event
Robbins, 1990, p. 129. had nothing to do with a closed system or a scientific classification.
97 Respectively Alison and Peter
Smithson, The Shift, 1982, p. 14,
and Alison and Peter Smithson, It is not just in Parallel of Life and Art we find the contrapuntal games
in: Robbins, 1990, pp. 201-202.
98 A copy of the exhibition – they are part and parcel of the Smithsons’ work and writings,
catalogue has been corrected
by Peter Smithson: the category
as they are of Paolozzi and Henderson’s. They are also key to
‘1901’ should be ‘1910’, and the understand at least the Brutalist tendencies within the Independent
category ‘Stress Structure’
should be ‘Structure’. Group exchanges, the kind of ‘rough poetry’ one was after. One
dvdh10PRINT.indd 185 21-04-13 16:56

could think of that odd reference to ‘English precedent’ in the case
of the Hunstanton school, the coupling of the Victorian Butterfield
church and Smythson’s Hardwick Hall, but also – and classically so
– to the way advertising techniques were both de- and reconstructed
by the Independent Group and how the Smithsons claim that:
‘to understand the advertisements which appear in the New Yorker
or Gentry one must have taken a course in Dublin literature, read
a Time popularizing article on cybernetics and to have majored
in Higher Chinese Philosophy and Cosmetics.’ 99
Another Henderson quotation in Walsh’s biography states even

more precisely how the ‘as found’ process of ‘picking up, turning
over and putting with’ which constitutes the ‘imaginary museum’,
actually works. At the same time, it once again indicates the
Surrealist origins of the ‘as found’ method of working. Quoting
from Henderson’s personal notes, Walsh writes in relation to
his photographic work:
‘The chance of being in the right place at the right time to trap
on film these moments in time and out of time, Henderson
specifically articulated through the philosophy and vocabulary
of Surrealism:
“’Accident’ – Let’s have it in inverted commas, please. Accident
the subtle prompter in the wings of unconscious – no friend to the
BRASH – the coarsely confident or possibly? The VISUAL ENGINEER.
Accident the great humbler . . . What we call SELECTIVE ACCIDENT
to be good must function like the objet trouvé – a chance set of
“found” phenomena bringing about an order which you might
ideally wished/invented to create from scratch. It is a question of
RECOGNITION.”’ 100
‘Found’ – a concept linked to ‘selection’ and ‘recognition’ –

is thus aimed at creating ‘order ideally created from scratch’.
In the Smithsons’ notes made in preparation of the exhibition we

also find such reference to the discovery of an order. The Smithsons
refer to James Joyce and his idea of ‘epiphany’, the sudden insight
into ‘“a reality behind the appearance.”’, thus tapping in the stream
99 Alison and Peter Smithson, of consciousness methodology, one other, English tradition of
‘But Today We Collect Ads’, 1956.
100 Walsh, 2001, p. 53. associative thinking.101 Another of their quotes refers to ‘the reality
101 Robbins, 1990, p. 129; the beneath the appearance’:
Smithsons’ interest in the
stream-of-consciousness way of ‘The material for the exhibition will be drawn from life – nature –
writing is also clear from the title
of the novel written by Alison:
industry – building – the arts – and is being selected to show not
A Portrait of the Female Mind as so much the appearance as the principle – the reality beneath the
a Young Girl (1966), reference to
Joyce’s famous novel of course. appearance – that is, those images which sum up the significant
dvdh10PRINT.indd 186 21-04-13 16:56

development in each field since 1925 and contain within them
the seeds of the future.’ 102
To explain this idea of the epiphany, and the discovery of a

reality behind or beneath the appearance the exhibition is then
thought of as a:
‘key – a kind of Rosetta Stone – by which the discoveries of the
sciences and the arts can be seen as aspects of the same whole,
related phenomenon, parts of that New Landscape which experimental
science has revealed and artists and theorists created.’ 103
To provoke such a moment of epiphany, discovery or recognition,

the ‘image system’ that is Parallel of Life and Art, and the ‘as found’
concept of ‘picking up, turning over and putting with’ entailed
a third important aspect: the relationship between the works
displayed and those viewing, reading or using such works.
The compositional technique that was devised by Henderson,
Paolozzi and the Smithsons had to extend their own private
exchanges.
Walsh explores this aspect extensively in her reading of the

installation, as does Scalbert. Following Reyner Banham’s review,
Scalbert uses one particular photograph from the Parallel of Life
and Art show to arrive at an insightful interpretation of the ICA
exhibition.104 It is a photo of a typewriter, or at least of its separate
parts. Banham linked the image to issues of classification and
language. Scalbert notes that the picture of this collection of
separate parts yields a transformation. The collection itself can
no longer be read as a typewriter, as an entity. Scalbert says:
‘It was no longer the signification of the whole which mattered,
but that of the parts. These now lost to the manufacturer, drifted in
a semantic field of their own, open to the musings of the observer.
. . . Parts became pictograms of a language shorn of its syntax,
whose grammar was not so much forgotten as it was waiting to be
spontaneously invented by the observer.’ 105
As Scalbert points out, the collection of Parallel of Life and Art

‘reads’ as fragments of a language, an order, that can be
discovered only through the visitor’s personal involvement, quite
in line with the Smithsons’ comparison to a Rosetta Stone or
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
Henderson’s idea of an order created out of scratch. In fact,
104 Irénée Scalbert, ‘Parallel of because any information regarding the images or the actual
Life and Art’, in: Daidalos, No. 75,
‘The Everyday’, 2000, pp. 53-65. selection process was absent, the visitor had no choice but to
105 Ibid. enter the game of associations as presented to him. Regarding
dvdh10PRINT.indd 187 21-04-13 16:56

the intended provocation of visitors, Walsh recounts Henderson’s
words at the opening:
‘We should like to bring about a situation in which people felt like
undergoing a strong visual experience, without too much reliance
on intellectual handrails for their support. And we value the fact that
their experience will necessarily differ from our own, being ground
in a different soil. It might be truer of this exhibition than of many to
say that you can get out of it exactly what you put into it.’ 106
The inclusion of the image of Jackson Pollock hard at work on his

‘action painting’ in Parallel of Life and Art is a key illustration to
this. In Pollock’s action painting the foursome recognized a way of
working which made use of ‘selective accident’ to produce ‘order
106 Introduction speech of Nigel from scratch’. As the Smithsons put it, Pollock had produced a
Henderson, cited in: Walsh, 2001. ‘process’ through which he would discover or recognized the image
son, ‘The “As Found”and the he was looking for.107 In the final instance then, the visitor finds
“Found”’, in: Robbins, 1990,
pp. 201-202.
himself creating his own process of ‘picking up, turning over and
108 Christine Boyer has linked putting with’; the visitor himself becomes rather like the included
this working method of associa-
tive thinking to a discussion on image of Jackson Pollock, busily occupied in an effort to draw
cognitive models for processing from the apparent chaos a new idea of order.108
information and imagining the
workings of human memory.
In this context the work of the
foursome Henderson, Paolozzi
and the Smithsons, and more
generally the Independent Group
discourse, can be described as Transpositions
the further development of as-
sociative grammars. It displays
parallels and similarities to
network models, interconnective, It can be argued that the regenerative model of the Parallel of Life
overlapping, non-linear and multi-
nodal, and is open ended with and Art installation was transposed to the realms of the house and
loops and a recursive reflexivity. the city by the Smithsons during the 1950s. The clearest example of
As such it is not only a cognitive
model we’re looking at, but also the former would be the Patio & Pavilion installation of 1956 which
a discursive one aimed at a
consistent regeneration of the was once again a collaboration with Henderson and Paolozzi, the
exchanges and a further evolving
of the game of associations. See latter would be exemplified by the 1953 Urban Re-identification
also: M. Christine Boyer, ‘An grid, which the Smithsons presented at the CIAM congress at
Encounter with History: the Post-
war Debate between the English Aix, with Henderson’s pictures of children playing in the street
Journals of Architectural Review
and Architectural Design (1945- inserted into the prescribed grid-format of presentation.
1960)’, in: Max Risselada, Dirk van
den Heuvel, D’Laine Camp, Gijs
de Waal (eds.), Team 10. Between Realized three years after Parallel of Life and Art, Patio & Pavilion
Modernity and the Everyday,
conference proceedings, Faculty marked the end of the collaborations between the Smithsons,
of Architecture, TU Delft, 2003,
pp. 135-163; Dirk van den Heuvel, Henderson and Paolozzi.109 The installation was part of the
‘Magic – The Installations of Ni-
gel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi larger This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery
and Alison and Peter Smithson’, which aimed to demonstrate the collaborations and cross-overs
in: Architecture + Art. New Visi-
ons, New Strategies, Alvar Aalto between the various disciplines of the visual arts, most notably
Academy, Helsinki, 2005, pp. 46-
51, proceedings to the conference painting, sculpture, and architecture. The collaboration between
of 12-14 August 2005.
the foursome took on a quite different format to the one for
109 Both Henderson and Paolozzi
moved out of London. Parallel of Life and Art. At the same time, here again, the design of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 188 21-04-13 16:56

the installation structured the collaboration itself, the ‘working
together technique’. As the Smithsons kept remarking in their
writings, after building the Patio & Pavilion they left for Dubrovnik
to attend the tenth CIAM congress which they co-organised with
their Team 10 colleagues. Thus, in their absence, Henderson and
Paolozzi appropriated the empty structure filling it with their art
pieces. As a piece of architecture, Patio & Pavilion follows the
same strategy as the Hunstanton school: a frame accommodating
inhabitation. Indeed, inhabitation was from the very beginning the
focus of the installation, unlike any of the other contributions to
This is Tomorrow. In the catalogue we read:
‘Patio & Pavilion represents the fundamental necessities of the
human habitat in a series of symbols. The first necessity is for
a piece of the world, the patio. The second necessity is for an
enclosed space, the pavilion. These two spaces are furnished with
symbols for all human needs.’
And notes scattered over a double spread:

‘The head – for man himself – his brain & his machines
The tree image – for nature
The rocks & natural objects – for stability & the decoration of
man made space
The wheel & aeroplane – for locomotion & the machine
The light box – for the hearth & family
Artifacts & pin-ups – for his irrational urges
The frog & the dog – for the other animals.’ 110
Peter Smithson described the installation as:

‘a kind of symbolic habitat in which are found responses, in some
form or other, to the basic human needs – a view of the sky, a piece of
ground, privacy, the presence of nature and of animals when we need
them – to the basic human urges – to extend and control, to move.
The actual form is very simple, a “patio”, or enclosed space, in which
sits a “pavilion”. The patio and pavilion are furnished with objects
110 ‘This Is Tomorrow’ catalogue,
Whitechapel Gallery, London, which are symbols for the things we need: for example, a wheel
1956, unpaginated; 2010 reprint. image for movement and for machines.’ 111
London, 1994, p. 109; a similar
text we find in the catalogue of
The structure the Smithsons had designed was as simple as
the exhibition: ‘Patio & Pavilion effective: a fenced-in timber shed with a translucent roof of
represents the fundamental
necessities of the human habitat corrugated polyester sheets. The fence, which quite effectively
in a series of symbols. The first
necessity is for a piece of the separated the whole installation from the other exhibits, was
world, the patio. The second ne-
cessity is for an enclosed space,
clad with reflective sheets. Looking back at the collaboration,
the pavilion. These two spaces the process and the role of the visitor thirty four years later,
are furnished with symbols for
all human needs.’ the Smithsons wrote:
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‘Our Patio and Pavilion answered a “programme” of our own
making, offering a definitive statement of another attitude to
“collaboration”: the “dressing” of a building, its place, by the “art
of inhabitation”. We were taking position in the acquisitive society
as it began its run, by offering in a gîte a reminder of other values,
other pleasures. With the transparent roof of the pavilion made to
display Nigel’s arrangement of the “as found”, the sand surface of
the patio (ultimately) chosen to receive Nigel and Eduardo’s tile and
object arrangement, the reflective compounding walls to include
every visitor as an inhabitant, the “art of the as found” was made
manifest. The complete trust in our collaboration was proved by our
Patio and Pavilion being built to our drawings and “inhabited” by
Nigel and Eduardo in our absence, as we were camping on our way
to CIAM at Dubrovnik.’ 112
The ‘architecture’ of Patio & Pavilion was conceived with the

idea in mind that it could be ‘dressed’ in the ‘art of inhabitation’.
Henderson and Paolozzi then ‘inhabited’ the installation with
their art objects – again a demonstration of a ‘working together
technique’. The responses to Patio & Pavilion were mixed,
for Banham it was too regressive, too parochial as a reference
to working class backyards, unlike for instance the other famous
installation of the T.I.T.-show, the one by Hamilton, McHale
and Voelcker, which he preferred and which was in hindsight
nothing less but the announcement of Pop art aesthetics.113
For Kenneth Frampton though, Patio & Pavilion still embodied
Brutalist ‘resistance’ to a rising consumer culture, unlike the
House of the Future of the same year.114
There were no special comments on the exhibition technique or

how Patio & Pavilion also represented a model for collaboration
and presentation. Only Frampton casually referred to the classical
notions present in the design when comparing the installation to
a temenos, the sacred territory surrounding a temple; because this
112 Alison and Peter Smith- was also part of the design (just as in Hunstanton): the pavilion
“Found”’, in: Robbins, 1990, is a neo-Classical device (note the symmetry of the architecture,
pp. 201-202.
including the planks) just as the path winding around the pavilion
113 Reyner Banham’s review of
This is Tomorrw in: The Archi- is a Picturesque one taking the visitor along the collected objects.
tectural Review, September 1956,
pp. 186-188. More importantly, these ordering devices work together in creating
114 Kenneth Frampton, ‘New once again a total environment in an attempt to provoke a game of
Brutalism and the Architecture
of the Welfare State: England: associations in the visitor’s mind.
1949-1959’, chapter to his Modern
Thames & Hudson, London, 1980, Thus, Patio & Pavilion redefined the modernist art of inhabitation
revised and extended edition
1985, pp. 262-268. as a game of associations, not a machine poetics, nor scientific
dvdh10PRINT.indd 190 21-04-13 16:56

Existenzminimum. Indeed, to the Smithsons dwelling was
probably the game of making associations par excellence;
dwelling as a changing web of relations and interactions between
the architecture of the house, the objects contained and the
inhabitants. To begin with, Henderson and Paolozzi ‘inhabited’
the installation with their artworks – often fragmentary but highly
suggestive images and objects. Rather than an ‘architecture
trouvé’, the result was a collection of fragments, traces of a
‘process’. And reflected on the mirrored panels of the fence,
the visitor was then transformed into an ‘inhabitant’ himself,
challenged to get involved and forge a reconstruction by a game
of associations and analogies not unlike the way this happened
in the Parallel of Life and Art show. Seen as such, Patio & Pavilion
had a sense of ambiguity as well: both installations made an
effort to illustrate principles of universality, while simultaneously
drawing the subjectivity of the visitor into the game.
Hanging in the ‘pavilion’ of the Patio & Pavilion installation was

a life-size portrait by Henderson: ‘Head of a Man’. A close look
at the portrait revealed that it was actually a (photo of a) collage.
Referring to this collage, Victoria Walsh said the following
about Henderson’s intentions:
‘[It] tenaciously resists any single reading, while simultaneously
cajoling the spectator to find one. The clue to this lies in Henderson’s
conscious manipulation of his viewer, his audience, in his tireless
desire to tease and please, conceal and reveal.’ 115
It is also this game of associations that the Smithsons would

bring to CIAM and Team 10. The Smithsons’ noting of their
departure for Dubrovnik is not just an explanation of the different
roles of everyone involved in the design of the installation, it also
marks how the Brutalist games of Independent Group exhanges
come to a conclusion and how the Smithsons’ attention shifted
to Team 10 exchanges instead, partly continuing the Brutalist
programme while now expanding it to town building. Just as the
modern house was to be regenerated by Henderson games, so
the street was to be revitalised too, with the photos of children’s
play as an indication for the kind of new patterns the Smithsons
were looking for. This game of associations might better be kept
in mind when trying to grasp the notions of ‘human association’
and ‘patterns of association’ used by the Smithsons to explain
their urbanist concepts as developed within the CIAM and
Team 10 discourse. Here too, the search was for new principles
115 Walsh, 2001, p. 135. of ordering, for ways to (re)connect and (re)create identities.
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However, as noted, the expansion of the New Brutalist discourse
to the realm of town building, which the Smithsons themselves
identified with the period of 1953-63 and Team 10, if we follow
their comments in their 1966 review of Banham’s Brutalism book,
seems rather stretched with regard to both the early and later
statements on the New Brutalism, particularly with regard to
the Brutalist essence being in the handling of materials and the
quality of materials. Conventionally, the assumedly Brutalist
project for a new urbanism is considered to be part of the larger
Team 10 discourse, not the other way around. Only Robin Middleton
seems to come up with a credible expansion of the Brutalist
impulse to the realm of city planning. Middleton went back to the
1955 Banham essay and his concepts of topology in relation to
movement and routing as in the case of the designs for Golden
Lane and Sheffield University, in order to rethink the Smithson
design agenda and their interest in organising the urban by way of
routes, pavilions and events.116 In the pages of Zodiac we find the
second clearest attempt to refocus the New Brutalism project. First
in the so-called ‘Conversation on Brutalism’ of 1959, when Peter
stated that Brutalist ethic actually resided in town building, and
second in Zodiac, nr. 18, entirely devoted to British architecture
with a very large portion to the New Brutalism including a selection
of texts on Brutalism translated into Italian. Francesco Tentori
recaptured the New Brutalism by fusing it with the CIAM debates
from which Team 10 emerged.117 Interestingly enough, none of
the Smithson built projects were documented in this publication,
but their texts on the city and town planning were.
The third attempt to expand Brutalism to town building was by

Banham, not in his 1955 essay, but in his 1966 book, in his subchapter
‘The end of an old urbanism’.118 He claimed that the ethic of the New
Brutalism had involved two facets: one was aesthetic in the vein of
‘l’art brut’, and the other was ‘social’ and had purportedly led to the
reform of CIAM urbanism. The chapter ‘The end of an old urbanism’
was dedicated to this urbanistic aspect of the New Brutalism,
and went as far as to attempt to subsume the complete Team 10
discourse under the heading of the New Brutalism. For several
reasons Banham’s argument remains an unsatisfying one. The
reduction of the Team 10 discourse to the Smithson contribution is
116 Robin Middleton, ‘The New
Brutalism, or a Clean, Well- disturbing – their whole essay ‘Cluster City’ of 1957 is, for instance,
lighted Place’, in: Architectural
Design, January 1967, pp. 7-8.
fully integrated into Banham’s own text. Also the reduction of the
117 Francesco Tentori, ‘Phoenix Smithsons’ ideas on town planning to their 1958 Haupstadt Berlin
Brutalism’, in: Zodiac, nr. 18, 1968.
project is problematic. Without comment, no other urban scheme
118 Banham, The New Brutalism,
1966, pp. 70-75. other than the Haupstadt Berlin project was included in the extensive
dvdh10PRINT.indd 192 21-04-13 16:56

documentation of the 1966 book – nothing of the 1960s schemes
by Candilis Josic Woods, or those of Van den Broek and Bakema.
After 1966 the whole Brutalist programme unwinds, though many

buildings are still planned in the Brutalist fashion. By the mid-
1970s, after finally having built Robin Hood Gardens, their version
of a Brutalist handling of concrete, and after having published
Without Rhetoric, in which they explained their idea of a language
of modern architecture, the Smithsons seemed to face a profound
crisis of creativity. It wouldn’t be until the invention of their idea of
a Conglomerate Ordering that they took up once again some of the
lines of thought of the early years.119 The visual made way here for
an architectural order that ‘harnesses all the senses’, capable of
offering ‘pleasures beyond those of the eyes’, in particular.120
Paradoxically, perhaps, it was only then that they reached a truly

urbanist definition of the New Brutalism, totally beyond any
functionalist notion, with buildings understood as being intrinsically
part of the larger fabric of cities and territories. The Smithsons
return then to an early statement, almost a promise, from their
introduction to The Heroic Period: that one should not record
‘buildings’ any more, but should refocus onto ‘built-places’.121
The search for a ‘complete image system’ is abandoned, an all-
sensory experience, a collection of different ‘systems’ all working
together, almost beyond any notion of design but still very much
a game of associations, is now foregrounded in their writings:
‘an art of urbanism which operates at very deep levels in our being;
through the senses we hardly know we possess. Those of us from
the north of Europe who make our first conctact with the world of
the Mediterranean during hot summers months are particularly
aware that our experiences are not only taken-in through our eyes …
the physical change we feel when we first tilt down to the southern
119 A first essay explaining sea is as a lizard must feel as it sheds its skin; the air feels different;
this notion was published in
the ILA&UD Year Book 1986-87, the vegetation is scented; even dust rises, settles in a wholly
1987; reprinted in Alison and different way … in consequence, in an unexpected moment, a stray
Peter Smithson, Italian Thoughts,
Royal Academy of Fine Arts, smell can bring back the jeep rides from Aix-en Provence to the sea;
Stockholm, 1993, pp. 58-61.
120 Ibid., p. 60.
sounds over the water, the first approach to a Greek island; a smell
121 Architectural Design, of coal smoke simultaneously a northern childhood and the first
December, 1965, special issue
‘The Heroic Period’, guest edited vaporetto taken.’ 122
by Alison and Peter Smithson,
reprinted in 1981; as quoted by
the Smithsons themselves in
their essay ‘Territory’, in: Italian
Thoughts, 1993, p. 38.
‘Territory’, in: Italian Thoughts,
1993, p. 32.
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dvdh10PRINT.indd 194 21-04-13 16:56

5 ANOTHER SENSIBILITY
The Discovery of Context and the Idea of Conglomerate Ordering
Extensions of the As Found
Perusing the writings of Alison and Peter Smithson one

detects a consistent and growing attention for the issue of
context in architecture and town planning. The first time the
issue was explicitly addressed, though, was as late as 1972
in Peter Smithson’s lecture ‘Architecture As Town Building’,
at Cornell University.1 Smithson would antedate his interest
in ‘context thinking’ to the late 1950s, and his teachings at
the AA School. And later in the 1990s, Smithson noted how
the Doorn manifesto of Team 10 of 1954 already contained the
1 Peter Smithson, ‘Architec-
ture as Townbuilding – The Slow seeds for a contextual approach in architecture and planning.2
Growth of Another Sensibility’,
typoscript in Smithson archive, In retrospective statements the Smithsons consistently
largely integrated into Alison
and Peter Smithson, Without emphasized the importance they attached to context, speaking
Rhetoric, 1973. of ‘specificity-to-place’, or ‘the building’s first duty is to the fabric
Retrospect’, manuscript, dated of which it forms part’.3 They particularly did so throughout the
1 October, 1993, revised March
1994, October 1995, April 1999
exchanges with Giancarlo De Carlo during the years 1976-2000 that
and May 2001, 10 pages. were part of the annual summer school organized by De Carlo:
Italian Thoughts, 1993, p. 66. the International Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Design
4 The contribution by the (ILA&UD or ILAUD). The summer school visits, the assignments
Smithsons to the ILAUD summer
schools, most notably by Peter, and theoretical topics discussed as well as the designs proposed,
who would attend each year,
embody a fantastic register of the
they all resulted in a continued reflection by the Smithsons
Smithson thinking during those on their ideas regarding context.4 Eventually, these would be
years; various contributions,
either in the form of lectures, ap- reconceptualized and synthesized into what the Smithsons
horisms, and reflections, but also
design proposals and interventi- called Conglomerate Ordering, which might also be regarded as
ons were published in the journal
Spazio e Società, which was run
a reformulation of the abandoned project for a New Brutalism
by De Carlo and the ILA&UD Year as described in the previous chapter.
Book series. Most of these con-
tributions were then republished
as: Alison and Peter Smithson,
Italian Thoughts, Stockholm, 1993; To the Smithsons context awareness meant a sensibility to
and the two German volumes
Italienische Gedanken. Beobacht-
‘qualities of place’, not to be confused with the kind of typo-
ungen und Reflexionen zur Archi- morphological orthodoxy that we know from the French and
tektur, Vieweg, Braunschweig/
Wiesbaden,1996, and Italieni- Italian discourse on the existing, historical city. The discovery or
sche Gedanken, weitergedacht,
Birkhäuser, Basel and Bertels- recognition of context as something constitutive of, or at least
mann Fachzeitschriften, Berlin,
2001, the former was edited and
directive within the overall design process implied a different
translated by Hermann Koch and understanding of these qualities and of the notion of place.
Karl Unglaub, the latter by Karl
Unglaub. To the Smithsons, it also comprised processes over time, and
dvdh10PRINT.indd 195 21-04-13 16:56

a shift from an object-oriented approach to an environmental
approach, from ‘buildings’ to ‘built-places’ as they put it in their
introduction to The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture. It
also implied an understanding of the city as something ‘multi-
layered’, a ‘fabric’, or ‘tissue’. The central issue then became how
to integrate the new, and how to revitalize the old, a matter of
‘continuation and regeneration’ as they put it. To the Smithsons,
context was about reconnecting and re-identification, between the
new and the old, pre-existing; not just new and old architecture,
but also new and old technologies and new and old ways of living,
specific to a place and a community.
With regard to the Smithsons’ awareness of context one usually

refers to the project for the Economist Building and how it fits
neatly into its surroundings. Yet, one could also point to the very
first projects as a testimony of the Smithsons’ sensitivity to place
and site-specificity. Looking back Alison and Peter Smithson
would say that their ‘language of connective landscape forms’
had already begun in Hunstanton.5 Since the Smithsons’ work is
imbued with Picturesque techniques and notions this is hardly
surprising:
‘We have a vocabulary of connective forms that knit the building
in with the “roundabout” (Cobbett’s term for the sensed territory,
adopted from the description of the Farnham/Alton Vale by Arthur
Young, first secretary to the newly established Board of Agriculture,
1793); the ha-ha and indented slopes; the moat; clean-cut areas of
hard surface or grass; graded foreslopes that stitch podium to site;
small versions of bigger buildings as out-riders (“the microcosm of
the macrocosm”); walls and screens (parts of the substance of the
building); dense strip-thickets.’ 6
Commonly, the wider context debate, its origins and how it was
aimed to correct and ultimately replace modernist planning are not
set within post-war England but the Italian discourse of the 1950s
and 60s. However, the British discourse arguably holds an equally
important position, here, due to the reactions to the massive
The Shift, Academy Editions,
modernization programmes as undertaken by the government,
London, 1982, p. 40. among others the buildings campaigns for the New Towns,
6 Ibid.
housing and schools, just as the reconstruction of the bombed or
7 When discussing the debates
on context and modern architec- dilapidated town centres of the country.7 Both the Architectural
ture Adrian Forty refers to the
Italian debate as the main source Review and MARS intervened in the debates surrounding these
and overlooks the British dis-
course; Adrian Forty Words and
building campaigns and aimed to redirect government and council
Buildings. A Vocabulary of Modern policies while raising awareness of the qualities of existing
Architecture, Thames & Hudson,
London, 2000, p. 132 and further. landscapes and cities. The Review did so famously with their
dvdh10PRINT.indd 196 21-04-13 16:56

Townscape campaign, just as they did by consistently promoting
ideas for the reconstruction of the immediate surroundings of
St Paul’s during the late 1940s and 50s. The MARS group organized
the 1951 CIAM VIII conference around the theme of the ‘Heart of
the City’, which might be viewed from this perspective as well.
Their lesser-known ‘Turn Again’ exhibition of 1953 critically
questioned the renewal of the City of London city centre.
Partly overlapping with the Review editors’ Townscape campaign,

interest in the subject of regionalism was widely shared, also
among the younger Brutalists. For instance, James Stirling in the
late 1950s would write on the topic.8 A late, but still influential
outcome of the post-war English debate was perhaps the way
Kenneth Frampton proposed a Critical Regionalism in the 1980s.9
Thus, the Smithsons were part of a much broader trend of thought
that was most characteristic of the English situation and in which
notions of context, regional identity and modern architecture
were interconnected.
The Smithsons’ As Found idea functions as quite a versatile

notion here. Although originally a strict avant-garde term
from the New Brutalist discourse, conceptually speaking,
it also connects the Picturesque idea of consulting the ‘spirit
of the place’, Pope’s idea of a Genius Loci, with developments
within the historical and post-war avant-gardes as well as the
seminal modernist notions of structural integrity and unadorned
construction. Its initial, Brutalist meaning was defined by
Banham in his 1955 essay as ‘valuation of materials for their
inherent qualities “as found”’, and hence the overall ambition
to arrive at a language with the building ‘structure exposed
entirely’ and ‘without interior finishes wherever practicable’ as
the Smithsons proposed for their Soho House of 1952. This notion
8 James Stirling, ‘Regionalism
and Modern Architecture’, in:
of the As Found was expanded by the Smithsons to the walks
Trevor Dannatt (ed.), Architects’ with Nigel Henderson around Bethnal Green and his photographs
Year Book 8, 1957, Elek Books,
London, pp. 62-68. of the bombed neighbourhood. At this point, the Smithsons
9 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Prospects proposed to consider their idea of context as an extension of the
for a Critical Regionalism’, in:
Perspecta, nr. 20, 1983, pp. 147- As Found idea. As late as 1990 they reformulated the idea of
162 (reprinted in Kate Nesbitt
(ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda the As Found as follows:
for Architecture, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York, ‘Setting ourselves the task of rethinking architecture in the early
1996, pp. 468-482), and Kenneth 1950s we meant by the “as found” not only adjacent buildings but
Frampton, Modern Architecture,
A Critical History, Thames & all those marks that constitute remembrancers in a place and that
Hudson, London, enlarged edition
of 1985. are to be read through finding out how the existing built fabric of
10 Alison and Peter Smithson, the place had come to be as it was.’ 10
‘the Found and the “As Found”’,
in: Robbins, 1990, pp. 201-202.
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In general, walking, visiting, moving through cities, sites,
landscapes, territories – almost as a kind of intuitive form of
survey – they are all at the basis of the development of the kind
of context awareness the Smithsons were after. And as such,
as might be noted once again, they stood in a profound English
tradition: Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence, William Cobbett’s Rural
Rides, the walks by Geddes through London, the walks by Pevsner
as described in his monumental guide series of the ‘Buildings
of England’ for Penguin editions, and so forth.11 Peter Smithson
produced his own variant of the genre with his walking guide to
the city of Bath: ‘Walks within the Walls. A Study of Bath as a
Built-form Taken over by Other Uses’ published in Architectural
Design. After its initial publication in 1969 a reprint followed in
1971, as well as another walking guide for Oxford and Cambridge
in 1976.12 Alison Smithson’s AS in DS. An Eye on the Road of 1982,
in which she impressionistically described the journeys between
London and the Smithson weekend home in Tisbury, also fits this
tradition being a ‘sensibility primer’, describing and explaining the
new kind of landscape emerging from the new movement patterns
made possible by the car. Self-consciously she included extensive
references and passages from Cobbett’s seminal Rides at the end
of the book.13
From the As Found perspective, the English landscape then

emerges as a ‘situation’ in the sense of the Parallel of Life and
Art show; at first sight, perhaps too far fetched a conclusion,
but this is exactly how the Smithsons would write about the
11 A comparison with the Situati- landscape and their own sensibilities, most explicitly from the
onist dérive might be appropriate
as well, but one wonders whether 1970s onward in such texts as AS in DS, but also ‘In Pursuit of
the Smithsons were aware of
this in the early 1950s; perhaps Lyrical Appropriateness’ written and published mid-1970s.14 To the
Henderson was, since he was fa-
miliar with the French Surrealist Smithsons, the English landscape ‘bears many marks’, As Found
discourse. ‘remembrancers’ one might say, of an ‘overlaid tracery of patterns
12 Peter Smithson, Bath: Walks
within the Walls, Adams & Dart, of work and movement’, as far back as ‘1900 BC – supposed start
Bath, 1971, originally published as
‘Walks within the Walls. A Study of the Stonehenge – to the present time.’ The ‘trick’ is to find new
of Bath as a Built Form Taken over appropriate ‘patterns supportive of life’, with this vast inventory of
by Other Uses’, in Architectural
Design, October 1969; ‘Oxford & acts of invention in the back of one’s mind and not unlike the event
Cambridge Walks’, in: Architectu-
ral Design, June 1976. of the Picturesque:
13 Alison Smithson, AS in DS. ‘with those paintings by Claude or Poussin brought back by the
An Eye on the Road, Delft Univer-
sity Press, 1982. English from the Grand Tour (…); the paintings becoming enabling
14 Alison Smithson, ‘In pursuit images in the development of the English Landscape Garden (…), and
of lyrical appropriateness’,
manuscript 1975-1976; published extended from the garden into all aspects of life (…), finally buildings
in Spazio e Società, Autumn 1976;
and in: AA Quarterly, vol. 9, nrs. as landscape: a whole sensibility neatly and palatably communicated
2-3, 1977, pp. 3-23, as ‘The City
Centre Full of Holes’. in the writings of Jane Austen...’ 15
15 Ibid.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 198 21-04-13 16:56

As discussed in previous chapters, the whole thinking and
arguing is here overflowing with select notions of ‘englishness’,
a profound awareness of cultural specificity and how it might
inform architectural practice and concepts:
‘for, apart from the land, the other internal communication of
conviction is for the English through literature: the English being
fairly unmoved by form; but if something can be walked on, or read,
it can be accepted as worthwhile.’ 16
To understand the landscape as a ‘tracery of patterns’ – as

walked on since prehistoric times, as read about in Jane Austen
novels, and as seen from the road – might also be viewed as an
approach based on survey and archaelogy as suggested by the
As Found itself and its ultimate manifestation in Patio & Pavilion
(e.g. the included Pompei image). Certainly, it was also related
to the Smithsons’ interest in aerial photography, and how aerial
photography was a main element of Parallel of Life and Art, how it
filled the pages of Architectural Design, most notably in the articles
by the German emigré architect and publicist Erwin Gutkind.17
The understanding of landscape as traces of patterns was also
related to the way the Smithsons linked aerial photography to the
experience of the First World War, the first great war with fighter
planes and aerial reconaissance, as evidenced by the unpublished
manuscript of ‘1916 A.S.O.’, in which Alison Smithson attempted to
connect those war time experiences to the specific sensibilities of
the historic avant-garde and the architects of the Heroic Period.18
In the last instance though, it should probably be viewed as an act
of ‘synchronisation’ as argued for by Mark Wigley when discussing
the Independent Group discourse and the work of John McHale,
in particular.19 The full temporal field from the Stonehenge era up
16 Ibid. to the present was as it were considered to be a potential field for
17 The Smithsons used at
least two of Gutkind’s images acts of actualisation aimed at the regeneration of the landscape
published in his Our World from
the Air. An International Survey of
and society. The ‘marks of the land’ as As Found ‘remembrancers’
Man and his Environment, Chatto make up a whole environment of traces of systems and languages,
& Windus, London, 1952: image
nr. 53 of Chinese Honan, which expression of an accumulation of past experience, including the
the Smithsons published in Ordi-
nariness and Light, 1970, p. 42, and ‘enabling images’ waiting to be rediscovered to help bring about
image 252 of Isfahan re-appears
as an analytic drawing also in
and accommodate new patterns of society – not a matter of revival,
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 41; eclecticism or mannerism as historicists would probably have it,
as late as 1991 they use an image
of NY freeways in ‘The Recovery but as acts of ‘continuity and regeneration’ as the Smithsons put it.
of Parts of the Gothic Mind’, in:
ILA&UD Year Book 1990-1991, p. 50.
18 Unpublished manuscript by Poetic examples of this, though at the periphery of the Smithson
Alison Smithson, Smithson
Family Archive. better-known production is a series of landscape design proposals
19 Mark Wigley, ‘The Architectu- from the 1970s to regenerate old industrial sites in the north,
ral Cult of Synchronization’, in:
October, nr. 94, 2000 pp. 31-62. the Smithsons’ native region, by way of a couple of modest
dvdh10PRINT.indd 199 21-04-13 16:56

interventions in the landscape of their youth. They are part of the
Landscape into Art series and include among others: the Tees
Pudding of Middlesborough, the Slaggie Eleven of the Spenymoor
Slag Heaps, or the Skateboard Junction, Stockton on Tees. 20 It’s
all about re-using the ‘as found’ again, such as the slag from the
mines and the sleepers from the abandoned railway yards. Slag
mounds and railway sleepers are the ‘remembrancers’ from a
by-gone era and in the Smithson design proposals they are the
building materials for the new landscape events that transform and
revitalize the polluted wasteland of the old mine industries, then at
the end of the 1970s about to be foreclosed. The Tees Pudding for
instance, provided a spiralling path to the top of the heightened
slag heap from which ‘there would be a considerable view as the
terrain is flat: the wonders of Teesside, the Transporter Bridge, as
well as Roseberry Topping and Captain Cook’s Monument.’ 21 The
Skateboard Junction (as early as 1977) – a proposal to reconnect
routes and thus revitalize the territory – is another example of how
movement and play, new lifestyles and sensibilities were deployed
by the Smithsons: the then new fashion for skateboarding among
the youth was coupled with the ‘antique rolling stock’ of the former
pride of the north, which was to be parked as ‘pavilion-sculptures’
in the landscape.22
Conventionally, within the historiography of modern architecture,

the idea of context is discussed as part of the revision of modernist
practices, and deployed against modern architecture, Fuctionalism
and the idea of the Functional City. The Smithsons, however,
viewed the notion of context as a natural expansion of the modern
tradition. Because of this, it is necessary to have a closer look
at the origins of the term, how it was already introduced within
the CIAM discourse on urbanism and how it was subsequently
used to formulate a critique of orthodox modernist planning and
architecture, also by Alison and Peter Smithson themselves as
modern architects of the third generation. Yet, it needs to be noted
too, that the term context in the early years did not mean quite the
same as it did when it re-appeared in the writings of the Smithsons
in the early 1970s. In the 1950s the idea of context was connected
to the biological idea of ‘environment’, and to an idea of ‘ecological
urbanism’. By the 1970s context had come to mean historical
20 See for an overview The
Charged Void: Architecture, 2001, context in the first place. It was linked to the new issue of urban
pp. 410-416.
renewal that grew to dominate the agenda of politicians, architects
The Charged Void: Architecture, and town planners, and it was appropriated and refashioned by
2001, p. 414; also published in
The Shift, 1982, pp. 50-51. anti-modernists who would advocate Postmodernism from the
22 Ibid., p. 416. mid-1970s onward. Therefore, in the following paragraphs we
dvdh10PRINT.indd 200 21-04-13 16:56

will move back and forth between the various moments in which
meaning and usage of the term shift, from CIAM to Team 10
debates, to New Town criticism, to the rise of postmodernism,
summers spent in Italy at the ILAUD summer school, and quite
a few other places as well. We start with Peter’s visit to Cornell
in 1972.
The Slow Growth of Another Sensibility
In 1972 Peter Smithson visited Cornell University at the invitation

of Team 10 colleague Oswald Mathias Ungers.23 Smithson’s lecture
23 Ungers was then Chair of was titled: ‘Architecture as Townbuilding. The Slow Growth of
the School of Architecture, and Another Sensibility’,24 addressing issues of historical continuity
during the winter and spring of
the academic year 1971-1972, and renewal and the way technology transforms cities and their
he organized a very extensive
Team 10 seminar. Ungers invited communities, and hence the premises for city planning. One of
twelve of the Team 10 members
to assist with the fourth-year and the key notions he used was that of ‘context’, which had become
fifth-year student programmes quite a fashionable topic by the 1970s; until then, the Smithsons
on a kind of relay-race basis.
Bakema attended for no less than hadn’t used the term as explicitly as on this particular occasion.
six weeks, Polónyi for four and
Pietilä for three. Others spent Yet, Smithson claimed:
one or two weeks at Cornell. The
scheme was organized so that ‘When I was teaching in a school of architecture in the mid-fifties
there were always at least two the school’s syllabus was reorganised in a very simple way to induce
Team 10 members in residence.
In general, ideology formed one what I then called “context thinking” – that a new thing is to be
of the main topics of the seminar
at Ungers’ specific request. The thought through in the context of the existing patterns. In the context
lectures delivered in the seminar
therefore touched on major
of the patterns of human association, patterns of use, patterns of
social issues of the time such as movement, patterns of stillness, quiet, noise and so on, patterns
the Vietnam War, the Cold War
and environmental pollution. of form, in so far as we can uncover them; and it was taught that a
The Team 10 visitors also gave
several presentations on the design for a building, or building group, could not be evolved outside
tradition of Modern Architecture
in relation to their own design
of context.’ 25
practice. The main emphasis was
however on interaction with the
students in the design studio. Smithson’s claim is substantiated by a one page statement
See also Risselada, Van den
Heuvel, 2005, pp. 180-181. written by himself and published in the Architectural Association
24 Peter Smithson, ‘Architecture Journal of January 1961. It is titled ‘Education for Town Building’
as Townbuilding’, 1972; two notes
attached to the original text in and describes assignments for ‘“context of building” studies’.26
the archive read: ‘Also in “A
Continuing Experiment” (A.A.) From there onward, the 1972 lecture, the Smithsons kept
A press 1975. “Architecture as
townbuilding” most of this essay
emphasizing the importance they attached to the issue of context,
published in W.R. Oct. ’73’; and speaking of ‘specificity-to-place’, and ‘the building’s first duty
note 2: ‘(Based on a talk given
in the A.A. tropical department is to its context.’ Eventually, they would date this concern for
in 1969, and subsequent lectures
based on that talk given at Texas context as early as the beginnings of Team 10. In retrospective
A.&M., Rice, and Cornell in 1972)’.
notes on Team 10 and the Doorn manifesto of 1954, notes which
25 Ibid., p. 3.
26 Peter Smithson, ‘Educa-
Peter Smithson kept revising between the years 1993 and 2001,
tion for Town Building’ in: The we find his characterization of this other sensibility:
Architectural Association Journal,
January 1961, p. 191. ‘A long-after-afterthought on this Manifesto reveals what I now
dvdh10PRINT.indd 201 21-04-13 16:56

believe to be the main direction of Team X’s effort, in a word, towards
particularity. The Doorn Manifesto – which, seen retrospectively, is
the founding statement of Team X – shifts the emphasis away from
the “four-functions” of C.I.A.M. onto “human associations”. In its
second paragraph the Manifesto says “To comprehend these human
associations we must consider every community as a particular total
complex.” The word underlined in the manuscript was total, but it
was the particular that was to be critical to Team X thought.’ 27
This attempt to revise the history of Team 10 – one wonders for

instance to what extent the proposition would be accepted by
the Dutch and French members who did share an interest in the
universalist aspirations of the modern tradition – gives a succinct
indication of the trajectory travelled by the Smithsons with
regard to the relation between architecture and urban planning
as developed by them over the years. Among other things this
trajectory meant a continuously moving back and forth between
both the quality of the whole and the specific, and leaving behind
the totalizing and unifying concepts of CIAM and the generation
of modern architects of the heroic period.
Context may seem a neutral term referring to reality as it is,

but upon closer inspection of the discourse, it is nothing of the
kind. Ákos Moravánszky has stated that the context debate in
architecture is paradoxically preoccupied with the forging of
identities and fictional narratives, and not with an empirical
investigation of the actual reality in which architects are
operating.28 Furthermore, context as a term immediately brings
into play a few concomitant analogies that whilst being deployed
in the debates on the future of modern architecture and planning
redirected those debates effectively. The textile connotation – the
Latin ‘texere’ meaning to weave – brings the notions of the city
as fabric or tissue into play, whereas the textual one reframes
the city and architecture with notions from the field of linguistics
and semantics. With each participant in the context debate one
sees these analogies at work. The Smithsons, too, would speak of
the city as ‘fabric’ and its various ‘layers’; just as the city became
a ‘net of communication’ that had to be ‘comprehensible’ and
Retrospect’, manuscript, dated ‘legible’ to its citizens. ‘Texture’ is a term that was also used,
1 October, 1993, revised March in particular by Colin Rowe. However, Rowe’s ‘contextualism’
1994, October 1995, April 1999 and
May 2001, 10 pages. Underlining would paradoxically (not contradictorily) bring an exclusive focus
and italics are as in original.
28 In a lecture at the Faculty of
on the city as an autonomous architectural construct, quite in
Architecture, TU Delft, as part of line with Aldo Rossi’s publication l’Architettura della Città of
a series on the theme of context,
20 September 2007. 1966, and not as ‘process’ or Summerson’s ‘fragment of a social
dvdh10PRINT.indd 202 21-04-13 16:56

pattern’ but as form. Here, context was positioned against the
positivist approach of modernist urban planning, and as such
context was deployed as one of the ultimate arguments against
modern architecture and CIAM doctrine. A characteristic example
is the article ‘Contextualism’ of 1976 by Graham Shane, a former
student of Rowe who polemicized against Team 10 by claiming that
contextualist concerns were still traceable even within the CIAM
discourse until the ninth congress.29 At CIAM VIII at Hoddesdon,
the interest in historical urban spaces, such as the forum, agora
and piazza, had regained new momentum under influence of
the theme of the ‘core’, or the heart of the city. Even a proposal
as radical as Le Corbusier’s scheme for the reconstruction of
St Dié displayed such concerns, according to Shane, but when
Team 10 emerged, this momentum was lost and ‘architects erased
from their memory a language for discussing the urban context’.30
Shane’s text is one example of how the issue of context and a

specific definition of the term was used to create opposition
in order to try to break away from the tradition of modern
architecture, and how the revisionist ideas of Team 10, including
those of Alison and Peter Smithson, were rejected while
supporting a postmodernism on the rise.31 The ambiguity of
intention and meaning surrounding the term context and its
particular usage is already touched upon by Adrian Forty in
his Words and Buildings. A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture.32
Forty included context as one of the entries in his ‘vocabulary’,
partly as an element of the ‘first substantial critique of modernist
practice’, for which it also might be classed as a ‘postmodernist
term’, and partly ‘as belonging to the period of late modernism’,
being ‘wholly directed towards the discourse of modernism’.33
29 Graham Shane, ‘Contextu-

Generally speaking (and beyond the specifics of the architecture
alism’, in: Architectural Design, discourse), the term context refers to the setting of a phenomenon,
nr. 11, 1976, pp. 676-679.
30 Ibid., p. 676. object or word, from which its specific meaning may be derived,
31 See for instance: Stuart evidenced, and clarified. From such a point of view, one can
Cohen, ‘Physical Context /
Cultural Context: Including justifiably state that the concern for context was always part and
it All’, in: Oppositions, nr. 2,
January 1974, reprinted in: K.
parcel of modernist principles of urban planning to the extent
Michael Hays (ed.), Oppositions that the architectural and urban project was always considered
Reader, Princeton Architectural
Press, New York, 1988, pp. 65-103; as being part of a larger whole; context consciousness is not
William Ellis, ‘Type and Context
in Urbanism: Colin Rowe’s Con- necessarily alien to modernist principles as was (and still is)
textualism’, in Oppositions, nr. 18,
Fall 1979, reprinted in: Hays, 1988,
propounded after the postmodernist shift in architectural thinking.
pp. 227-251. At first sight, this might be a surprising observation, since today
32 Forty, Words and Buildings,
2000. modern urban planning is conventionally held responsible for a
33 Ibid., pp. 132-135. tabula rasa approach with no eye for ‘context’.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 203 21-04-13 16:56

There are different definitions of the term being deployed, just as
one might observe a very different ways of appreciating context as
the very field in which architects and planners operate. Context
is never a neutral term. For instance, some regard context as
something fixed and related to the pre-existing and historical,
while others view context as the actual situation that is always in
transition. Rereading the 1933 Statements of the Athens congress
of CIAM, one of the key texts that documented the assumedly
destructive intentions of the modernists, it becomes obvious that
the conceptualization of the city as part of a larger ‘economic,
social and political whole’ as well as the propagating of survey
and mapping techniques of existing cities and regions were
already there, containing the seeds for the contextual approach
as developed in later years. Regionalism, although very different
from the term’s later usage in the late twentieth century, was also
already present in the modern architecture discourse, and all key
players from Le Corbusier, Sert to Ludwig Hilberseimer devoted
their attention to the subject.
The 1933 Statements, which were largely formulated in a most

general kind of phrasings, open with the following points of
departure:
‘The city is part of an economic, social and political whole. It
must also create the favourable conditions for the physical and
psychological prerequisites of life of the individuals and the
community. Significant for its development are:
the geographical situation (topography, state of the ground, waters,
transport situation, climate);
the economic situation (within an economic system), raw materials,
sources of energy;
the political situation (within a system of government).’ 34
With regard to context and situation, it can be said that these

points weren’t particularly revolutionary in themselves; they still
34 ‘Statements of the Athens
congress, 1933’ in: Auke van der complied with the ancient Vitruvian paradigm. Dutch historian
Woud, CIAM. Housing Town Plan- Auke van der Woud already critically commented on the history of
ning, Delft University Press, Delft
/ Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, the Statements, how they were (mis)used for publicity purposes
Otterlo, 1983, pp. 163-164; in his
history of the CIAM discourse by Sert and Le Corbusier, and how their originality was too
Auke van der Woud has already
extensively commented on the often overstated; yet, within the architecture discourse they
generalities of the Athens State- have remained a touchstone for both the critics and defenders
ments, the various published
versions by Sert and Le Corbusier of modern architecture, despite all the misreadings, distortions
and their assumed efficacy and
overstated influence on planning and manipulations by key players.35 Until the tenth congress of
practice.
Dubrovnik in 1956, the CIAM discourse would still remain within
35 Ibid., in particular the conclu-
ding chapter ‘Town Planning’. the frame of the Athens Statements, despite the shift in attention
dvdh10PRINT.indd 204 21-04-13 16:56

toward the new theme of Habitat and the wish to substitute the
Athens Charter with a Charter of Habitat.36
But even in the case of this shift, away from the four functions
toward a more integral approach of architecture and town planning
as ‘habitat’, the issue of context – as the larger whole of which
the city and architecture are the smaller parts – firmly remained
in place. Among the preparatory documents for the tenth CIAM
congress in 1956, one finds a sheet with definitions of ‘habitat’ as
an answer to the question ‘what is habitat?’ The various definitions
summed up are botanical, biological and ecological. A letter of
Le Corbusier to Emery is approvingly quoted:
‘“L’Habitat” représente les conditions de vie dans le milieu total
(implique par conséquent les grandes modifications qui s’annoncent
sur l’occupation du territoire par le travail de l’homme de la
civilisation machiniste. C’est l’état de confusion et de déchirement
actuel).’ 37
And the piece ends by stating:

‘All these “definitions” are concerned with an atmosphere
prosperous to “grow and live”. To create this atmosphere for the
human being is the principle aim of CIAM.’ 38
‘Le milieu total’ and ‘an atmosphere prosperous to grow and

live’ once again indicate the all-inclusive aspiration of modernist
planning. The real issue at stake in the context debate doesn’t
seem to have been the issue of context itself, but rather the
evaluation and role of the existing built structures in relation to
their condition and the condition of the city, and society at large
as a favourable ‘atmosphere for the human being’. CIAM claimed
to develop a positivist outlook at this particular point, embracing
science, survey and technological progress as the basis for a new
rationalism. Next to the formulation of general principles, the
Athens Statements contained a fundamental critique of existing
conditions and built structures. The authors of the Statements
36 Eric Mumford identified the
congress at Bergamo as the mo- asserted that:
ment when the issue of a Charter
of Habitat was introduced by ‘the machine and industrial production have brought a particularly
Le Corbusier himself, Mumford,
2000, p. 187. rapid development of the cities. (...) This rapid, uncontrolled
37 From the CIAM document, development has in most cases led to a chaotic situation in the
‘Prolegomena pour une Charte
d’habitat’, Zürich, July 1956, structure of the city. Thus the elementary functions of a city are now
Roger Aujame archive; I thank
Catherine Blain for bringing this
carried out in a disorderly fashion.’ 39
document to my attention.
38 Ibid., underling is according
original text. This diagnosis was met by CIAM with the familiar programme of

39 Van der Woud, 1983, p. 164. reconstruction, slum clearance and amelioration through the proper
dvdh10PRINT.indd 205 21-04-13 16:56

development of the four functions of dwelling, recreation, work and
transportation. But, it must be emphasized, this programme too,
was stated in humanist terms, rather than bureaucratic or techno-
rationalists ones. For instance, any ‘material’ demand or basis, was
consistently paired with its ‘spiritual’ or ‘psychological’ counterpart,
and ‘all the measures and planning that lie behind the functional city
must be based on the human scale and human needs’. It was also
stated that each city needed a town planning scheme ‘supported by
a thorough study by experts of the actual situation; it comprises the
development of the city in space and time and is in agreement with
the natural, topographical, economic and sociological facts’.40
Only a modest paragraph was dedicated to the ‘Historic parts of

the city’, among others stating that ‘an aesthetic adaptation of
new parts of the city to the historic area has a catastrophic effect
on the development of a city and is in no way to be desired’.41
The only way to retain some historic monuments according to the
CIAM Statements, was by way of demolishing the ‘slum dwellings’
surrounding them, creating green areas in order to improve
hygienic conditions. It would be incorrect, however, to suggest that
the conflict between the old and the new was exclusively a matter
of ‘aesthetic adaptation’. The document also briefly summed
up the ‘requirements’ thought necessary to realize a healthy
residential environment with plenty of sun, light and air, including
‘concentrated high-rise building’ in combination with ‘extensive
green areas’, and the banning of ‘strings of houses built along main
roads’.42 The resulting building configurations were diametrically
opposed to the patterns of overcrowded streets and perimeter
blocks of the industrial metropolis, the squares and boulevards of
the Baroque, or the ideal geometries of the Renaissance.
Nine years before, in his book Urbanisme of 1924, Le Corbusier

had made even bolder statements on the future of the historic
structures, especially the congested city centres, which
demonstrated the full scope of the revolutionary agenda of modern
architecture for the old cities to deal with the problems at hand in
the most radical of ways. Le Corbusier claimed that ‘the great city
of today is destroying itself’. Linking the problems of traffic with
the requirements of urban economics, he observed that ‘business
demands the greatest possible speed in regard to traffic’:
‘Statistics show us that business is conducted in the centre. This
means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our
40 Ibid., pp. 166-167.
41 Ibid., p. 166. towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself,
42 Ibid., pp. 164-165. every great city must rebuild its centre.’
dvdh10PRINT.indd 206 21-04-13 16:56

And:
‘Where do all these motors go? To the centre. But there is no proper
superficial area available for traffic in the centre. It will have to be
created. The existing centres must come down.’ 43
Leaving aside the intricate web of ideological and populist

rhetoric we find in Le Corbusier’s writings, it was such radical and
iconoclastic antagonism toward the existing combined with the
two aspects of the refusal to aesthetically adapt the new to the
old, and the introduction of newly invented building configurations
at the cost of the existing structures, which would become the
main targets for the fierce criticism of modern architecture as
ventilated from the late 1950s, mid-1960s onwards. The whole
issue of context, its emergence and the various elaborations are,
of course, too extensive to fully discuss here. It should be pointed
out, perhaps superfluously, that its manifold origins are rather
like a cloud of condensation points, and not so much the outcome
of a clearcut discourse – for instance from Robert Venturi’s
Complexity and Contradiction which may be mentioned in addition
and his idea that ‘main street is almost perfect’,44 to the many
heritage wars that would start in the 1960s when the demolition
of historical buildings and city districts gained momentum with
a booming economy in most of the western world.45
In his Words and Buildings Adrian Forty identifies the Italian

magazine Casabella Continuità and its editorials by Ernesto
Rogers of the mid-1950s as the main source of origin for the
debate on context in architecture circles, even though Rogers
preferred the term ‘ambiente’ (environment), rather than
‘contesto’ (context).46 Looking at the context debate the terms
context and environment were used as if interchangeable,
sometimes with confusing effects.47 Arguably, the post-war
Italian debate was probably the foremost crucible in which the
43 Le Corbusier, The City of
Tomorrow, pp. 116-117, 1971; reconceptualization of context was developed as a criticism of
reprint 1977, facsimile edition
of 1929, original French edition modern architecture and Functionalist urban planning based
Urbanisme, 1924, Paris, Editions on the Athens Charter. Forty also mentions two protégés of
Crés.
44 Karin Theunissen has pointed Ernesto Rogers, Vittorio Gregotti and his publication Il Territorio
out in her research that Venturi as
early as 1951, in his final thesis, dell’Architettura, and Aldo Rossi and his L’Architettura della Città,
included the issue of ‘context’. both from 1966. With respect to the major Italian contribution
45 With regard to the British
context, the achievements of the and its particular practice of urban studies, one must also
Victorian Society must be menti-
oned here of course.
make mention of Saverio Muratori and Carlo Aymonino, or with
46 Forty, 2000, p. 132. reference to the Smithsons and the Team 10 discourse, the patient
47 Forty points to the American work of Giancarlo De Carlo, who was also a Rogers’ protégé,
translation of Aldo Rossi’s The
Architecture of the City of 1982. just like Rossi and Gregotti.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 207 21-04-13 16:56

The shift from ‘environment’ (or sometimes ‘surroundings’)
to ‘context’, upon which Forty touched, is characteristic of the
formation of the context debate. ‘Environment’ immediately
exposes the biological, and ecological origins of the context
debate, and its positivist inclinations.48 Yet, at the same time,
one cannot limit the term to this particular interpretation, with the
Italians using ‘ambiente’ instead of ‘contesto’, as a clear example.
48 In particular the work of the The usage of context too, was far from unequivocal. Christopher
Scottish biologist and social re-
former Patrick Geddes should be Alexander, who according to Forty was the very first author to
mentioned as a major influence,
also with regard to the CIAM structure his argument by operationalizing the term in his Notes
discourse; see also Volker M.
Welter, Biopolis. Patrick Geddes on the Synthesis of Form of 1964, would use it in a most radically
and the City of Life, MIT Press, positivist and unifying way, quite unlike its subsequent usage
Cambridge MA, 2002; and Volker
M. Welter, ‘In-between Space and in the 1960s and 1970s. Speaking of ‘good fit’ and ‘adaptedness’,
Society. On Some British Roots
of Team 10’s Urban Thought in Alexander formulated the whole issue of context in unambigious
the 1950s’, in: Risselada, Van den
Heuvel, 2005, pp. 258-263.. neo-Darwinian terms:
49 Christopher Alexander, Notes ‘The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the
on the Synthesis of Form, 1964,
pp. 15-16; Forty (2000, p. 134) also problem. In other words, when we speak of design, the real object of
refers to the following quote of
Alexander: ‘every design problem discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the
begins with an effort to achieve form and its context. Good fit is a desired property of this ensemble
fitness between two entities: the
form in question, and its context. which relates to some particular division of the ensemble into form
The form is the solution to the
problem; the context defines and context. There is a wide variety of ensembles which we can
the problem.’, p. 15 in Alexander.
Interestingly, Alexander brought talk about like this. The biological ensemble made up of a natural
his research work to the Team 10 organism and its physical environment is the most familiar: in this
meeting of 1962 in Royaumont,
see: Alison Smithson, Team 10 case we are used to describing the fit between the two as well-
Meetings, Rizzoli, New York, 1990,
pp. 68-69. adaptedness.’ 49
50 See also Colin Rowe, As
I was Saying. Recollections and
Miscellaneous Essays, edited A final source mentioned by Forty concerns the teachings of
by Alexander Caragonne, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, Colin Rowe. Rowe ran the so-called Urban Design studio at
Volume III, ‘Urbanistics’.
Cornell University from 1963 until 1988. The work of the studio
51 Forty, 2000, pp. 134-135
52 ‘Gestalt’ as a key notion but
was an example of early investigations into ‘contextualism’
also always rather imprecisely and ‘contextualist’ design practice.50 According to Forty, Rowe
used, returns in almost any theo-
retical argument of the post-war had mainly a ‘formal’ interest in the issue of context, and the
period, evidence of the enormous
impact of Bauhaus teachings and relationships between objects and spaces, whereas Rogers
Josef Albers, even when most
critically absorbed; the classic
would identify context with the ‘dialectical processes of history’
essay that tries to elaborate the as ‘manifested through architecture’.51
Gestalt idea is of course the
one by Colin Rowe and Robert
Slutzky, ‘Transparency: Literal
and Phenomenal’, in: Perspecta, One of Rowe’s favourite references for founding his argument for a
nr. 8, 1963, also reprinted in Colin
Rowe, The Mathematics of the
contextual design practice was Gestalt theory. Rowe would refer to
Ideal Villa and Other Essays, MIT this theory in relation to the so-called figure-ground phenomenon,
Press, Cambridge MA, 1982,
pp. 159 and further. For a critique which he developed in order to read and analyse city maps and
of Rowe and Slotzky and their use
of Gestalt theory see Detlef Mer- the reciprocal configurations of open spaces and built volumes.52
tins, ‘Transparency: Autonomy
and Relationality’, in: Detlef
With other positions, too, we find the reference to Gestalt theory.
Mertins, Modernity Unbound, Ar- With Alexander again, but most notably with Kevin Lynch.
chitectural Association, London
2011, pp. 70-87. Lynch would write the most clearcut albeit also reductive thesis
dvdh10PRINT.indd 208 21-04-13 16:56

on visual perception of the city with his famous The Image of the
City of 1960. Lynch’s book is fully dedicated to understand the
way people perceive the built environment visually. Throughout
the book he distinguished five elements for analyzing built
environments and their ‘image’: paths, edges, districts, nodes and
landmarks. Using empirical research techniques, mainly interview
techniques, he sought to demonstrate that humans construct an
‘environmental image’ of the city. Lynch thought of this image as
being constituted by, as well as reciprocally constituting identity,
structure and meaning.
These categories of identity, structure and meaning, including the

reciprocal issues of reading and ‘legibility’ as brought up by Lynch,
foreshadow the structuralist doctrines that will dominate the
architecture discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, context was
derived from, or at least connected with concepts from linguistics
and semiology. As such its growing usage in architectural
discourse in the 1960s was part of the critique on orthodox modern
architecture and its International Style aesthetics as being too
abstract and devoid of meaning. This then would be a point of
departure for Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction
of 1966, and Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture of 1977.53 It is at this point that we have, once again,
arrived at Forty’s unresolved predicament, when he stated that
‘context’ could be classified either as a final modernist term, or a
first postmodernist one. One could solve the antithesis, as exists
between the postmodernist and modern positions, by focusing on
the apparent continuities and similarities. Yet, at the same time,
this would seem incompatible with the mutual, scathing criticisms
from both sides, and the very different elaborations of the idea of
a language of architecture.
Rowe versus Smithson
With regard to this unresolved predicament a comparison between

the positions of Rowe and Smithson is rather illustrative, also
with regard to the specifics of the British discourse, and what we
called the English crucible. At this particular point of context a
53 For an earlier example one profound difference of opinion between the British contemporaries
might also point to the anthology
Meaning in Architecture, edited
can be noted. Following Forty’s suggestion to view the term as a
by Charles Jencks and George hinge point between modernist and postmodernist concepts, Rowe
Baird, George Braziller, New York,
1969. might then stand for ‘context’ as belonging to the first substantial
dvdh10PRINT.indd 209 21-04-13 16:56

postmodernist critique, whereas Smithson belongs to the late
modernist position.
Half jocular, half seriously, Peter Smithson once stated that Rowe
was ‘in a way, my enemy’ and that he had ‘never read any of his
writings’.54 The Smithson couple and the critic seem to occupy
the far ends of the context debate: the Smithsons saw the issue
of context and ‘context thinking’ as the natural extension of the
tradition of modern architecture, whereas Rowe deployed the idea
of contextualism for his devastating attacks on that very same
tradition. The difference is even more striking, since looking from
the outside the three seemed to have shared a multitude of similar
interests and attitudes: among others a first, and fierce criticism of
modern architecture combined with a lifelong admiration and love
for the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, as well as a
passionate interest in the history of architecture, especially that of
ancient architecture and Renaissance ideals, the reconceptualizing
of avant-garde composition techniques as collage and the trouvé,
and a critical absorption of the achievements of Scandinavian
modern architecture and how it evolved from a neo-classical
tradition.
One of those curious moments of simultaneous overlapping and

contradiction concerns – how appropriate for a Brutalist history –
an image: namely a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the famous
‘Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion’ of 1648, and interestingly
enough one of those constituent images of the British tradition
of the Picturesque. The Smithsons used a fragment of it in
1957, as the opening image of one of their seminal short essays
54 Catherine Spellman and Karl ‘Cluster City’. And we find it again with Rowe, now as one of
Conversations with Students. the two final images of his treatise for a Collage City, with the
A Space for Our Generation,
Princeton Architectural Press, second image being a Poussin painting as well: ‘Christ Healing
New York, 2005, p. 19.
the Blind’ – perhaps a reference to Le Corbusier’s famous
‘Cluster City’, in: The Architec- ‘eyes that don’t see’.55
tural Review, 1957, pp. 333-336;
and Colin Rowe and Fred Koet-
ter, Collage City, MIT Press, The Smithsons had this to say about the Poussin image:
Cambridge MA, 1978, pp. 180-181;
Rowe and Koetter’s essay was ‘Poussin’s vision of the classical city is an image of a consistent
first published in August 1975 in
The Architectural Review, August hierarchy of building forms, that runs from the high temple of
1975.
the hill to the local temple and the profane buildings around it.
‘Cluster City’, in: The Architec- Can modern architects create an equally convincing image of the
tural Review, 1957; caption to the
opening image. When the text is city, without being caught in some similar closed hierarchy?’ 56
republished in their Ordinariness
and Light (1970) the Poussin
image is left out, perhaps in It is in this sense they thought of the painting as belonging to
response to Banham’s comments
in his 1966 book. that collection of what they called ‘enabling images’. Rowe too,
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thinks of the Poussin vision as an inspiring imaginary landscape.
In his argument the Poussin painting functions as the final
chord of the last chapter of Collage City, the ‘Excursus’ intended
as an ‘abridged list of stimulants, a-temporal, and necessarily
transcultural, as possible objets trouvés in the urbanistic collage’,
as Rowe put it himself.57
It is not just the recurring of the Picturesque that attracts

attention, and which would draw stinging remarks from Banham
in both cases. Quite in line with Raymond William’s lessons we
might remember that when we’re looking at Poussin’s pastoral
landscape we’re not just looking at some innocent, idyllic scenery.
On the contrary, it is also a painting about loss, mourning and
corruption for anyone who is familiar with the story of Phocion.
To briefly recapture: Poussin reframed the story of Phocion, the
morally sound and superior Athens general, who was put to death
after false accusation by his adversaries. Plutarch’s history tells
us that to further humiliate the hero, his body was denied to be
buried. And here, in the painting we see the moment when the
widow is collecting the ashes of Phocion’s body. It is at this point
that we start to see the painting as a proper allegory, and we
can start to read the manifold meanings of the various elements
as originally construed by Poussin himself, or as ascribed to by
critics and interpreters. A quite different history from the one
of revitalization of the modern architecture discourse would
unfold, involving the web connecting art production, and its trade,
cultural institutions and media, and how the painting travelled to
England, and how during the 1950s the study of Poussin paintings
57 Rowe and Koetter, 1978, had become a major and prestigious research project under
pp. 151-181.
58 Such unpacking and recombi-
Anthony Blunt and Rudolf Wittkower at the Courtauld. One could
ning is of course not uncommon retrace the formation of cultural concepts and values, of discourse
since Manfredo Tafuri’s critique of
operative historiography, see his in the making, and it is with this in mind that we should return to
introduction to his monumental
The Sphere and the Labyrinth. the way the Smithsons and Rowe deployed the Picturesque idyll.58
Avant-Gardes and Architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s, MIT
In the vein of Malraux’s musée imaginaire and the inherent acts
Press, Cambridge MA, 1987; of displacement, we see that the image is decontextualised
original Italian edition, 1980.
Yet, even though Tafuri speaks while being integrated into a completely different discourse and
of deconstruction of naturalized
totalities, and of the ‘breaking cultural system.
of the magic circle of langu-
age etc.’ (p. 15), because of his
neo-Marxist frame he cannot but The Smithsons used it to criticize old school CIAM and the
speculate on the reconstruction
of an immanent larger whole and generic, ‘functional mechanic’ way, in which the New Towns
its laws, from which the events of
architecture are produced; with were realized with no eye for specific, local qualities. The French
Tafuri history is still an almost
metaphysical ‘puzzle’ to be
classicist painting functioned here to incite the creation of new
solved, implying the revalation images ‘equally convincing’ as the Poussin one. Twenty years later,
/ resurrection of this total im-
manence. Rowe deployed the image against the craze of a ruthless modernist
dvdh10PRINT.indd 211 21-04-13 16:56

practice levelling differences and erasing specificity. But at
the same time, Rowe would also point out the Palladio designs
accurately depicted in the landscape, and how in Poussin’s
‘imaginary cities everything becomes classically condensed’.
The neo-Palladian maniera is key to him, especially with regard
to the idea that context is, in the first place, about formal patterns,
just as Rowe would like to have it.
As said, Rowe developed his argument for contextualism through

among others his teachings at Cornell University. The publication
of Collage City, first in the Architectural Review in 1975, later as
a book in 1978, can be regarded as the outcome and summary of
the ideas as developed within the Urban Design studio. Rowe’s
Collage City, with Fred Koetter as co-author, starts of with a frontal
attack on the idea of utopia as a programme for actual social
reform as proclaimed and supported by modern architects, as well
as on the idea of architecture being subjected to Zeitgeist and
historical telos. The second chapter paints a succinct overview
of positions of the post-war decades. Then, in the third chapter,
tellingly called ‘Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture’, the
authors launched their attack on modern architecture for being
responsible for the ‘disintegration of the street and of all highly
organized public space’, partly due to the ‘rationalized form of
housing and the new dictates of vehicular activity’, and partly due
to the ‘fixation’ of modern architecture on the ideal of a building as
a free standing object without any impact on the continuum of free
flowing, open space that was characteristic of the modern city.59
They reproached modern architects, with Le Corbusier as the
most prominent one, and their vision for an ‘absolute detachment,
symbolic and physical, from any aspects of existing context which
has been, typically, envisaged as a contaminant, as something both
morally and hygienically leprous’.60
Thereupon Rowe and Koetter founded their argument for a Collage

City on a combination of two elements. First, as mentioned, they
appropriated the ‘figure-ground phenomenon’ from Gestalt theory.
It resulted in the now famous, black-and-white analyses of urban
space that quite simply consisted of reducing the complexity of
the city to the opposition of ‘solid and void’. The strong rhetorical
power of the diagrams served to demonstrate how traditional
cities provided a rich and versatile ‘supporting texture or ground’,
unlike the modern city, which was diagrammed by way of black
59 Rowe and Koetter, 1978
pp. 56-58. spots of free-standing ‘solids’ drifting in a white sea of ‘void’
60 Ibid, p. 51. designating undifferentiated ‘space’. Le Corbusier’s plan for
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St Dié (1945) was strategically placed opposite of the inner city
of Parma, and a double spread of the modern master’s Plan Voisin
(1925) communicated at a single glance the disaster that would
have hit Paris if the plan had ever been executed.61
The second element of Rowe and Koetter’s argument related to

the nature of the ‘texture’ that constituted the city, the city’s built
substance so to speak. Referring to the examples of imperial
and papal Rome, London squares and terraces, and the Munich
of Leo von Klenze, this texture, or ground, was defined by Rowe
and Koetter as a multitude of fragments of almost exclusively
(neo-)classicist architectural models. This texture was the
outcome of ‘cross-breeding, assimilation, distortion, challenge,
response, imposition, superimposition, conciliation’,62 in the
words of Rowe and Koetter a process of ‘bricolage’ in the vein of
Lévi-Strauss, mediating and negotiating between the platonic
ideal, technological progress and the pragmatic situation at hand.63
Looking back in his 1995 introduction to the documentation of

the work of the Urban Design studio, Rowe described the studio
atmosphere as follows:
‘If not conservative, its general tone was radical middle of the road.
It believed in dialectic, in a dialectic between the present and the
past, between the empirical and the ideal, between the contingent
and the abstract. (...) Its ideal was a mediation between the city of
Modern architecture - a void with objects – and the historical city –
a solid with voids.’ 64
However, rereading Collage City, as well as considering other

writings by Rowe of the 1970s, such as his introduction to the
English translation of Rob Krier’s book Stadtraum into Urban
Space in 1979, this oxymoronic proposition for a ‘radical middle of
the road’ that may have been prevalent in the studio itself, seems
hardly valid to be extended to Rowe’s own position – it simply
61 Ibid., pp. 62-63, and 74-75. reeks too much of Pevsnerian ‘compromise’, and of which he
62 Ibid., p. 83. himself may have been all too aware, hence the epithet ‘radical’
63 Ibid., p.102-103.
64 Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying,
probably. Besides, Rowe was too much rigorous in his critique
1996, Vol. III, p. 2. of modern architecture to come even close to such a middle
65 Studio work is generously
covered in Colin Rowe, As I class notion as the one of a ‘middle of the road’.65 Collage City
Was Saying, 1996, Vol. III; to me it concluded with a collection of poetic and inspiring examples, the
doesn’t quite look as a ‘middle
of the road’ position, but with a already mentioned ‘list of stimulants, a-temporal and necessarily
clear preference for the closed
urban configurations of the 19th transcultural’ according to the authors.66 Yet, this ‘Excursus’
century city or before, although
perhaps not exclusively so. actually reads as quite a homogeneous collection with a rather
66 Rowe and Koetter, 1978, p. 151. clear, cultural bias, namely a desire to resurrect the finest of
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Western humanist tradition, which also becomes evident from
the positioning of Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio as
the final image to the Collage City argument, and opening the
collection of selected examples. Modern architecture apparently
does not belong to this tradition at all. Of the fifty-five included
projects there is only one that can be classified as modern, namely
Van Eesteren’s design for Berlin’s Unter den Linden, under the
category of ‘Memorable streets’.67 There are no examples of the
modern city included, no ‘void with objects’ one could learn from.
Moreover, going through the collection of architectural

‘stimulants’, the ‘objets trouvés’ ready to be used for a practice of
‘urbanistic collage’, Rowe and Koetter’s preference for the neo-
classical is all too obvious. It seems fair to say that Rowe’s pursuit
of neo-classicism is also dominant in the Collage City argument,
rather than the ‘radical middle of the road’.
This assumption is supported by the (re)publication of Rowe’s

seminal double essay on ‘Neo-“Classicism” and Modern
Architecture’ in 1973, in the first issue of Oppositions, a text
already written in 1956-1957.68 Here, Rowe’s second main
contribution to the revision of the discourse of modern architecture
must be stipulated, namely the concept of autonomy of the
architectural discipline, a concept which was already prepared
for by Emile Kaufmann in his history of modern architecture.69
Both the uncovering and revisiting of neo-classicist principles
67 Ibid., 1978, p.154. of ordering by Colin Rowe served the forging of what he called
68 Also included in the anthology the ‘architectural equivalent of the rule of law’, an autonomous
of Colin Rowe essays: The Mathe-
matics of the Ideal Villa and Other authority transcending the modernist claims that architecture was
Essays, 1982.
to be subordinated to the imperatives of Zeitgeist, programme
69 Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux
bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung und and technology.70 To elucidate his case, Rowe strategically used
Entwicklung der autonomen
Architektur, Passer, Vienna, 1933; the development and shifting position of Mies van der Rohe.
later publications Three Revo-
lutionary Architects, American
Here, Rowe reached a superb level of analytic and rhetorical
Philosophical Society, Phila- genius, taking a modern master and the development of his ideas
delphia, 1952, and Architecture in
the Age of Reason. Baroque and over the years all in order to dismantle some of the central tenets
Post-Baroque in England, Italy,
France, Harvard University Press, on which the modern tradition was founded. Considering Rowe’s
Cambridge MA, 1955.
writings of those years, the 1970s, it becomes evident that he
70 Rowe’s phrase ‘architectural
equivalent of the rule of law’ co- succeeded in firmly establishing the concept for an autonomy of
mes from The Mathematics of the
Ideal Villa and Other Essays, p. 132. architecture by building his argument on internal developments
71 The origins of the autonomy within modern architecture itself and on the idea of urban
debate in the 1960s and 70s are
of a plural character though; contextualism.71
next to Rowe’s contribution both
Rossi and Eisenman should be
mentioned, just as the concept of Yet, it is also here, both at the issue of architectural autonomy and
Neo-Rationalism as propounded
by Ungers. neo-classicist idealism, and at the reconstruction of the tradition
dvdh10PRINT.indd 214 21-04-13 16:56

of modern architecture, that Alison and Peter Smithson took a
principally different position with regard to context and town
building, or urban design. It is here that we start to understand the
profound differences between the British contemporaries.
In the 1972 lecture ‘Architecture as Townbuilding’, after having

stated that ‘a design for a building or building group could not
be evolved outside of context’, Smithson explained why this idea
would be such a major distinction that one could speak of ‘another
sensibility’, he said:
‘This sounded easy. But it cut against all inherited post-Renaissance
tradition. A tradition of “ideas”, a tradition of “abstraction”, a
tradition of buildings as simple mechanisms, and it cuts against the
simple force of fashion.’ 72
Unlike Rowe Smithson understood ‘context thinking’ as

fundamentally opposed to the classicist tradition as a tradition
of hand books and any attempt at its resurrection. To him the
classicist tradition was not unlike the International Style, a
detached tradition disseminated by way of pattern books and
forms to be imitated without consideration of local specificity.
To the Smithsons, ‘context thinking’ was part and parcel of an
architecture which was the ‘result of a way of life’, the ‘rough
poetry’ dragged out of those ‘confused and powerful forces
which are at work,’ something the Smithsons had started to
understand as the unfolding of long-term processes, of what they
called the ‘slow growth of another sensibility.’ It is also in this
sense that the Smithsons’ position and New Brutalism must be
understood as an attempt to regenerate the idea of Functionalism,
of design as a ‘finding process’, and an ethical imperative to move
beyond predetermined, formal categories. Form partakes in the
design process, it does not stand outside of it. Partaking in the
process, form redirects the whole process, just as ‘context’ does
one might add.
So, at the time, in 1972, when Peter Smithson came to Cornell

to deliver his lecture ‘Architecture as Townplanning’, and re-
appropriated the issue of context as he thought fit, his proposition
might be considered a provocation. Context and contextualism
had been re-discovered as a ‘new’ topic then, as demonstrated
by the publication of another of Rowe’s students, Thomas
Schumacher, in Casabella, only one year earlier. Under the heading
of ‘Contextualism: Urban Ideals + Deformations’ the essay
72 Peter Smithson, ‘Architecture
as Townbuilding’,1972, pp. 3-4. discussed many of the ideas that would later be fully elaborated
dvdh10PRINT.indd 215 21-04-13 16:56

by Rowe himself in Collage City.73 On the other hand, there is no
record of any proper debate surrounding Smithson’s visit and
his ideas on context – may be because the profound difference
in approach was not immediately recognised as such, perhaps
also because the postmodernist polemic hadn’t fully started yet.
Or perhaps the ‘enmity’ between the parties as identified by
Peter Smithson simply translated in a mutual ignoring of the other;
for instance, apart from one image the Smithsons contribution is
completely absent from Collage City.74
In any case, Smithson illustrated his idea of ‘context thinking’

by relating it to his and Alison’s own design practice:
‘In our own design work – the “context” is a main centre of effort.
It is not exactly a question of “fitting-in”, but of re-materialising,
re-focusing – the words are difficult. The context may demand a
totally invisible building or no building, a “counter-geometry” or
a “continuation geometry”. In a way like decorating, re-arranging
and “preparing” a room, for a real homemaker, a real restaurateur
or inn-keeper it is more than a question of taste: it is an act of
both continuity and re-generation.’ 75
To Smithson this combination of continuity and regeneration

is key for a context-responsive architecture. For the machine-
served society the difficult task for architects would lie in the
bringing together of the ‘qualities of continuity and newness’.
Peter Smithson mentioned the Economist Building (1959-1964) as
an example for the ‘struggling with the idea of continuation and
re-generation’. He also showed the projects for St Hilda’s college
in Oxford (1967-1970) and their weekend home, the Upper Lawn
pavilion (1959-1962).
Quite remarkably, Smithson also included the American projects

73 Tom Schumacher, ‘Contextu-
alism: Urban Ideals + Deforma- of Mies van der Rohe in his argument for a context-responsive
tions’, in: Casabella, nr. 359-360,
1971, pp. 79-86. architecture, calling the New York Seagram building ‘a clear, simple
74 According to footnotes in and easily read context-conscious urban form’.76 This ‘context-
Collage City Rowe (or Koetter?)
attended the lectures by Bakema consciousness’ would be a ‘question of sensibility’, Smithson:
and De Carlo: p. 182, notes 4 and
5, chapter ‘After the Millenium’.
‘... it is not a question of continuing Mies’ space and meanings
75 Peter Smithson, ‘Architecture that I am talking about – it is being aware of his space and meanings
as Townbuilding’,1972, p. 4.
when making further buildings and spaces. A question of sensibility.
76 Remarkable, since we have
come to understand the Seagram As Mies was sensible not only of the Racquet Club, but of the
as the apotheosis of the ideas of
negation, absence and autonomy flanking buildings, the “net” of New York, the nature of Park Avenue
after the Italian and American
poststructuralist readings of
as an urban chasm – all as parts of his decision on how to build in
Mies’s work, in particular by that particular place. Mies’s architecture at its marvellous best – for
Francesco Dal Co and K. Michael
Hays. example at Lake Shore Drive or the early buildings on the IIT campus,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 216 21-04-13 16:56

to use American examples of his work, is itself a sign of the growth
of a sensibility about cities.
As I have said elsewhere there has been, in this Century, a slow-
growing sensibility of the machine-served city. A seeing that its very
existence and continued and continuous maintenance is a miracle,
and that how delicate is its fabric.’ 77
To recapture: for the Smithsons the ‘newness’ of the ‘machine-

served society’ – the technology and market driven consumer
society, the allegedly resulting loss of sense of place and
community – was a central and constitutive part of the problem
of a context-responsive architecture. This was quite unlike Colin
Rowe’s proposition, even though Rowe would start from an
observation similar to that of the Smithsons that modernization,
modern planning and modernist ideology exercised a ‘disregard
for context, distrust of social continuum’, used ‘symbolic
utopian models for literal purposes’, and held ‘the assumption
that the existing city will be made to go away.’ 78 Rowe aimed to
solve the problem with what Aldo Rossi called the ‘technology’
of architecture, an autonomous apparatus containing formal
strategies of typology, composition and transformation to be
deployed in a ‘bricolage’ way in order to revitalize the existing city
fabric. A ‘contextualist’ architecture as proposed by Rowe didn’t
seem to consider technology or other aspects of modernization
to have a particular relevancy to architectural discourse and the
development of any architectural language or tectonics. On the
contrary, the two references to contemporary technology that were
included in the ‘Excursus’, the selection of inspiring examples
for Collage City architects, were quite ironically positioned under
the heading of ‘Nostalgia-producing instruments’.79
Habitat and Ecology: between the Particular and Total
As noted Peter Smithson claimed that ‘context thinking’ went as

far back as the mid-1950s, and that context was a ‘main centre of
effort’ in their work. However, retracing the Smithsons’ writings
77 Ibid. p. 6; the ‘elsewhere’ the term context is not among the obvious ones deployed; most
Smithson refers to may be the
lectures he and Alison gave at certainly it was not developed as a concept that structured their
TU Berlin, 1965 and 1968, also at
the invitation of Ungers.
critique of modern architecture. So, what was Smithson actually
78 Rowe and Koetter, 1978, p. 38. referring to, when he made this claim? And what do we find
79 Cape Canaveral, and an when we look back at the writing and design production from the
unidentified oil rig, in: Rowe and
Koetter, 1978, pp. 172-173. perspective of ‘context thinking’?
dvdh10PRINT.indd 217 21-04-13 16:56

In the Smithsons’ writings the word context itself can be found
as early as the mid-1950s, and the early Team 10 discourse. There
is one brief statement that was part of the so-called Dubrovnik
Scroll, one of the two presentations Alison and Peter Smithson
brought to the CIAM 10 conference of 1956. The quote reads:
‘Scale of Association was intended to induce a study of particular
problems in a real context (ecology).’ 80
The Dubrovnik Scroll was – as the name suggests – a paper scroll

onto which the Smithsons had glued a compilation of their key
ideas on the central issue of the CIAM discourse of those years,
the one of ‘habitat’. Again, since we are retracing the origins of
‘context thinking’, it should be noted that context was not among
the presented key ideas presented, but ‘identity’, ‘association’,
‘cluster’ and ‘mobility’ were. The topic of habitat had already been
introduced at CIAM VII, in Bergamo in 1949, when Le Corbusier
himself had announced that it was necessary to replace the
Charter of Athens with a Charter of Habitat, in order to address
more adequately the urgent problem of global urbanization and
housing.81 The call for a new Charter of Habitat resurfaced in 1952,
after the Hoddesdon CIAM conference, which had been dedicated
to the topic of the ‘Heart of the City’, the ‘fifth’ function of the
Functional City, due to the wishes of the organising British MARS
group. In 1952, at the Sigtuna conference organised by younger
CIAM members, it was decided that the issueing of a Habitat
Charter should be the main effort for the ninth CIAM conference
in 1953, held in Aix-en-Provence.82 However, this ninth conference,
with a few thousand in attendance, the biggest CIAM conference
ever held, would not reach any agreement on the proposed charter.
Confusion around the definition of the term habitat, that had
already started at the Sigtuna meeting, continued and could not
be overcome. From then on, the demise of the CIAM organisation
set in, by now a familiar history.83
At the time the Smithsons would propound their ideas on habitat,

modern architecture and the city at many occasions in slightly
different versions. This included the Doorn Manifesto of 1954
that they co-authored (including the correspondence leading up
to its formulation), the already noted Dubrovnik Scroll, and its
counterpart the Valley Section grid of 1955-1956, demonstrating
80 Reprinted in Newman, 1961,
p. 69. five prototypes for urbanization patterns responsive to local
81 See Mumford, 2000, p. 187. characteristics and differences, various articles published in
82 Ibid., p. 215 and further.
Architectural Design and Architectural Review, in the Architect’s
83 Mumford, 2000 and Risselada,
Van den Heuvel, 2005. Year Book, edited by Trevord Dannatt and Jane Drew, the Oscar
dvdh10PRINT.indd 218 21-04-13 16:56

Newman publication on the last CIAM conference in Otterlo in
1959, and the various editions of the Team 10 Primer as compiled by
Alison Smithson.
As indicated in the quote from the Dubrovnik Scroll of 1956, in

those years Alison and Peter Smithson took the idea of ‘context’
from ecological theory, equaling context with ecology. The ideas
of the Scottish biologist and social reformer Patrick Geddes were
probably most influential here – something that becomes clear
from the inclusion of the so-called Valley Section diagram of
Geddes by the Smithsons in the Doorn manifesto. The diagram
was devised by Geddes to conceptualize human settlement
and its development. It was re-used for the definition of the
theme of the tenth CIAM conference, for which the Smithsons
prepared their Valley Section grid as a test and example to other
contributors.84 Another influence must have been Erwin Gutkind’s
publications such as The Expanding Environment and Community
and Environment. A Discourse on Social Ecology both of 1953,
and Revolution of Environment of 1944, in which the terms of
environment and ecology were discussed with reference to the
issues of housing, town planning and human association. 85
Other statements by the Smithsons of those years also speak of

84 Volker M. Welter, ‘In-between this ecological analogy. In one of the drafts for the working method
Space and Society’, in: Ris-
selada, Van den Heuvel, 2005, for CIAM X, Alison and Peter Smithson put:
pp. 258-263.
85 Gutkind also published ex- ‘It was decided (...) to try to formulate some way of thinking
tensively in Architectural Design which would consider each problem of Urbanism as an entity, as
in 1953. Between January and
July he published six articles a unique form of Human Association at a particular time and in
on vernacular architecture from
China, Japan, Africa and North a particular place.
Africa, North America, the
Pacific. Various authors (Tom This might be termed the ecological concept of Urbanism,
Avermaete, Christine Boyer a concept of obvious value when we are dealing with the
and Steve Parnell) suggested
possible influences; see note 17 problem of “Habitat”.’ 86
for images the Smithsons took
from Gutkind publications; Jos
Bosman might have been the first
though, in his ‘CIAM After the
To the documentation of the last CIAM conference the Smithsons
War: a Balance of the Modern contributed a compilation of statements taken from the Dubrovnik
Movement’, in: Rassegna, nr. 52,
December 1992, p. 17. On the side Scroll and the Valley Section grid under the heading of ‘The whole
it might be noted that Gutkind
was also a MARS member. problem of environment’.87 In a slightly different way they restated:
86 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘To comprehend the pattern of human associations we must
‘Draft Framework 4, CIAM X, In-
structions to Groups’, typoscript consider every community in its particular total complexity, in its
published in: Alison Smithson
(ed.), The Emergence of Team 10 particular environment. (The ecology of the situation).’ 88
out of C.I.A.M., The Architectu-
ral Association, London, 1982,
p. 38; also reprinted in Risselada, Some things should be noted here. First, in those early years
Van den Heuvel, 2005, p. 48.
87 Newman, 1961, pp. 68-79. the Smithsons took a positivist outlook on the ‘whole problem
88 Ibid., p. 69. of environment’, although they would also made statements
dvdh10PRINT.indd 219 21-04-13 16:56

rejecting universalist objectives and propounding cultural
ones instead.89 There can be no doubt about this, despite Peter
Smithson’s later claim, that Team 10 thinking, as well as their
own efforts, were aimed at the ‘particular’ rather than the ‘total’
complexity of community. At the same time, one can trace a first
‘sensibility’ for the ‘particular’. Yet, this sensibility was only to be
prominently foregrounded in their writings after the completion
of the Economist Building and St Hilda’s college. With regard to
the discourse of the mid-1950s there are two other clues denoting
this sensibility. First, there is the consistent, although critical
referencing to Geddes’ theory of urban planning. Geddes’ theory
underpinned the need for, as well as the superiority of planning
interventions based on an awareness of local specificities rather
than modernist blueprint planning and slum clearance.90 And
secondly, there is the Smithsons’ polemic against the New Towns
in Britain. In criticizing the planning of New Towns as too generic
with no relation to local distinctions the Smithsons betrayed
their culturalist inclination, almost taking on a plain regionalist
approach to architecture and town planning.
In one of their first essays on town planning, ‘An Alternative

to the Garden City Idea’ published in Architectural Design in
1956, the Smithsons listed three principles of town development
as they saw fit to the task of architects in those years of post-
war reconstruction and New Town planning.91 According to the
Smithsons the British New Towns and their buildings failed in
producing any concept of identity or community, or as they called
89 In their draft statements
on habitat: Alison and Peter it ‘human association’. The three principles of town development
Smithson, three page manuscript
‘Habitat – Every culture produces they listed describe a ‘contextual’ approach to planning and
type objects, (...)’, dated 1954,
published in: Alison Smithson, architecture. The Smithsons mentioned three principles:
The Emergence of Team 10 out ‘The first principle of town development should be:
of C.I.A.M., 1982, pp. 14-16; the
notions culture and culturalism in Continuous objective analysis of the human structure and its
the work of the Smithsons were
discussed in Chapter 2. change.’
90 A fine introduction into the ‘The second principle of town development should be:
ideas of Geddes and an example
of the impact of his work in Establishing a positive relationship with the climate and the site.’
Britain is provided by: Jaqueline
Tyrwhitt (ed.), Patrick Geddes in ‘The third principle of town development:
India, Humphries, London, 1947;
see also the already referenced
Extending and renewing the existing built complexes.’ 92
Welter, 2002.
91 Published in: Alison and Peter
Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, The last principle is further explained:
1970, pp. 123-127; according to the ‘Any new development exists in a complex of old ones. It must
Smithsons the text ‘originated:
1954. Completed: 25.3.56. Finally revalidate, by modifying them, the forms of old communities.
revised: 30.3.56.’ (p. 123) Originally
published in Architectural Design, The architect is no longer the social reformer but a technician in
July 1956.
the field of form, who cannot rely on community centres, communal
92 Ibid., p. 123, p. 125 and p. 126;
underlining by author. laundries, community rooms, etc., to camouflage the fact that the
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settlement as a whole is incomprehensible. Form is generated,
in part by response to existing form, and in part by response to
the Zeitgeist, which cannot be pre-planned. Every addition to a
community, every change of circumstance, will generate a new
response.’ 93
Thus the Smithsons proposed to abolish the masterplan. Whether

this was a realistic proposition regarding the project for an ever
more complex, bureaucratic welfare state redistribution economy
is not to the point, but the kind of procedure they suggested is
instead, namely that:
‘the procedure for developers would be, first a thorough briefing
as to the existing facts and the principles deduced from them.
Secondly, the individuals would assess the briefing and the form-
demands of the existing built situation, and then get on with it.
There should be no further controls.’ 94
In the final paragraph a reference to Patrick Geddes is made,

as a pioneer of ‘survey techniques’, and as an ‘observer of
organisms’ in order to improve existing sanitary conditions,
followed by the statement that ‘today different compulsions
are at work within us, our analysis has to be creative and not
ameliorative. The end-product must be principles to guide a
constructive urge, the principles of town building’.95
What do we see here? The first two principles are still in line with
the Athens Charter, but the third one is a significant amendment
in relation to existing structures and neighbourhoods, in
particular the subsequent explanation which states that ‘any new
development exists in a complex of old ones’. Also the remark
that ‘form’ is in part a ‘response’ to ‘existing form’, and in part to
‘Zeitgeist’, this is a profound shift away from the Athens Charter
that stated that no ‘aesthetic adaptation’ of the new to the old
should be made.
But acknowledging the ‘form-demands of the existing built

situation’ didn’t imply that the Smithsons were taking a historicist
position, quite the contrary. They continued the modernist and
avant-gardist proposition that new forms were needed to suit
contemporary society. Concerning the desired forms for the house,
street and district, they also stated:
93 Ibid., p. 126; underlining by ‘It is important to realize that the terms used, street, district,
author.
94 Ibid., pp. 126-127. etc. are not to be taken as the reality but as the idea, and that it is
95 Ibid., p. 127. our task to find new equivalents for these forms of association for our
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new non-demonstrative society.
The problem of re-identifying man with his environment cannot
be achieved by using historical forms of house-groupings, streets,
squares, greens, etc. as the social reality they represent no longer
exists.’ 96
One of the clearest statements of this orthodox modernist

approach to town planning by the Smithsons is probably their
London Roads Study of 1959, originally an entry for the private
competition New Ways for London: a London Traffic Competition; 97
other examples being the competition entries for Golden Lane and
Sheffield University, where the Smithsons too, refused to subject
the new programme to the geometries of the old and projected a
new pattern onto the older ones. The London Roads Study displays
a profound Corbusian outlook to the restructuring of London and
its congested centre. Perfectly in line with Le Corbusier’s call to
drive wide avenues through the towns the Smithsons proposed a
vast web of new motorways for London to redistribute the economic
pressures and to control intensity of use. The web served to create
a new polycentric, ‘cluster’-like urban form to fit the new patterns
of use and community as triggered by mass car ownership and
the new physical and social mobility brought about by the welfare
state. Although less known, and certainly much less celebrated
than the Berlin Hauptstadt scheme of 1958, which was also based
on patterns of movement, the London Roads Studies was much
more radical, in the sense that it uses the vast urban territory of the
British capital as one gigantic As Found landscape, with the new
motorways winding in generous curves from one historical ‘fix’ to
another, from ‘interchange’ to ‘node’, ultimately bringing about a
completely new urban perception and aesthetic they imagined to be
in line with mid-twentieth century living. The web of the new road
system projected onto the existing fabric of London appeared as if
the result of Jackson Pollock action painting planning, perhaps the
most ‘Brutal’ example of urban design ever by the Smithsons.
Alison and Peter Smithson presented the London Roads Study at

96 Newman, 1961, p. 68.
the CIAM conference at Otterlo. Most notably, it received fierce
97 A brochure of which is in the
Alison and Peter Smithson ar- criticism from Ernesto Rogers, just as the Smithsons would in
chive, Frances Loeb Library at the
GSD, Harvard University, BB025. reverse criticize Rogers’ project for the Torre Velasca in Milan at
98 See for instance: Alison the same conference, an argument that went down in history as
Smithson, ‘The Otterlo Incident’,
in: Città Studi, Quaderni del the Otterlo incident.98 At stake was the issue of context and how to
Dipartimento di Progettazione
dell’ Architettura del Politecnica
deal with existing conditions. Rogers reproached the Smithsons
di Milano, nr. 15, special issue on for ‘destroying history completely’, to which Peter Smithson
Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Septem-
ber 1993. replied that:
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‘Soho is an area of great dereliction, everything is in decay.
So we have grown a bigger sort of Soho but with the same sort
of function. But we did not consider it necessary to respect the
present architectural character of Soho.’ 99
The London Roads Studies is probably the most iconoclastic of

schemes as produced by the Smithsons even though it took the
existing London as a point of departure. It remains unclear to
what extent the Smithsons saw it as a sheer theoretical exercise
to provoke debate on new ways of connecting in a mobile society,
or a real proposition. The assumption that it largely concerned a
conceptual proposition is sustained by the many other projects
within London that demonstrate a much more sensitive awareness
of the London fabric, not just the Economist, but also as modest
a project as their Soho house, which after all was completely
based on the small scale, almost as an hommage to the humbler
kind of brick structures of the West End. The Soho house held the
premise of rebuilding war-damaged London by way of a bottom-up
approach, very different of course from the welfare state policies
then being put into place by the post-war governments, and very
different from American-styled highway construction of the period.
The discussion on the Torre Velasca by Rogers’ office BBPR

focused on its architectural language, not so much on its site
planning. Rogers claimed the specific shape of the building –
the cantelevering block of apartments on top of the office block,
together with the pitched roof and chimneys lend the whole
project a medieval flavour – resulted from the wish to:
‘give this building the intimate value of our culture - the essence of
history –, we were never given to imitating the shapes and forms
of the past, only understanding what has happened before us. This
building is a sky-scraper in the very centre of Milan, five hundred
metres from the Cathedral. It is at Milan’s very historical centre and
we found it necessary that our building breathe the atmosphere of
the place and even intensify it.’ 100
The Smithsons’ took a moral stance on Rogers’ tower. In a Loosian

way Peter Smithson criticized the aesthetics of the project for
being not ‘open’, but ‘closed’, an imposed style unable to absorb
the various other products of contemporary culture, Smithson:
99 Newman, 1961, presentation
‘my definition of a work of art (...) is that it is capable of living with
and discussion of London Roads other objects produced by the same culture (...). Now your building
Study on pp. 73-78.
100 Ibid., p. 93. I suggest does not live in the same world as the artifacts of our day
101 Ibid., p. 97. because the plastic language it speaks is of another time.’ 101
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Interestingly enough, the Otterlo incident happened just before
the Smithsons secured their most prestigious commission, the
Economist Building in the London district of St James’s, and as
such a highrise in a context determined by history as much as the
site of Torre Velasca.
The Smithsons’ Economist – three volumes sharing a raised plaza

between them and of an architectural language largely based on
American precedent, namely SOM and Mies’ skyscrapers – is
a much discussed and often praised project. In February 1965
the two leading British magazines, the Architectural Review and
Architectural Design, published major reviews of the finished
building group with plenty of drawings and photographs.
Ken Frampton wrote an essay for Architectural Design in which
he compared the group to the earlier Berlin Hauptstadt scheme
of 1958 and how the building group represented a fragment
of a possible larger approach to city planning. He praised the
classicism that he recognised in ‘its simple geometric order’
but deplored the ‘mannerism’ of the smaller tower at the
back of the plaza, which housed the dormitory of the adjacent
Boodle’s Club. By mannerism he meant the way in which the
façade and its modular language had been manipulated and
scaled down to suit the smaller tower on no apparent functional
ground. Such mannerism he also found in the way the balustrading
was treated, a simple echoing of the profiles and sizes of the
supportive façade columns, as well as in the ‘appliqué mullions’
to the plant rooms at the top of the buildings, and the timber bay
that was added to the Boodle’s Club to cover and make good use
of a former light well, and which was designed in the form language
of the new volumes.
Regarding the issue of context, Frampton made three points, one

regarding the continuity of the street and the Bank office block,
another regarding the space on the plaza and a third regarding
the language of the architecture. Context in itself, seems to be
understood by Frampton as an issue of creating continuities.
The first point is the clearest: Frampton had nothing but praise
for the way the division of the programme into three separate
volumes – the newspaper headquarters, the bank office and the
Boodle’s extension – was handled by the Smithsons, and how the
smaller volume of the bank had been used to create a continuous
street front, in terms of street alignment, heights as well as the
chosen cladding material, namely roach-bed Portland stone.
Also the introduction of the extra space of the plaza, offering an
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additional pedestrian connection between St James’s Street and
the back of the block (Bury street) was hailed by Frampton as an
innovative element that to him deserved to be followed. He was
more critical of the actual shape in relation to the ‘interplay of
scale’ between the volumes which creates a spatial dynamism
– he spoke of a trompe l’oeil – that in the final instance was not
awarded since the smaller residential tower would not sustain this
dynamism programmatically. Another effect he deplored was how
the detailing of the cladding system that protected the supportive
structure also created a ‘scenery façade’ of a ‘theatrical’ effect,
since at the plaza level the entrances to the tower were organised
by way of setbacks, and the cladding was not continued all around
the freestanding columns there, thus creating the effect of a front
and back as if the facades constituted some sort of set design.
The third issue concerned the issue of language and technology,
according to Frampton the Economist emphasized:
‘once again the present crisis in architecture; the problem as to
the legitimate process through which we should create form and
enclose space at this time both for the society of the present and the
immediate future.’ 102
The Economist succeeded here in creating continuity in the sense

that it, according to Frampton:
‘incorporates succesfully industrialized products and processes, and
conversely that it legitimately looks to the past in the classicism of
its simple geometric order.’ 103
It remains interesting to read how Frampton talked of the

classicism of the Economist and how its form solution was
dependent on ‘the “acropoli” of the ancient past’ next to the ‘direct
line of modern development that leads from Sullivan to Mies’,
whereas Reyner Banham would accuse the Smithsons of giving
in to Picturesque sentimentalities. In his 1966 book of the New
Brutalism Banham still made a prudent judgment:
‘It may offer a vision of a new community structure, but it does
so upon the basis of an ancient Greek acropolis plan, and in
maintaining the scale and governing lines of tradition-bound
St James’s Street, on which it stands, it handles the “street idea”
very tenderly indeed.’ 104
102 Kenneth Frampton, ‘The

Economist and the Hauptstadt’,
In Banham’s ‘Revenge of the Picturesque’ of 1968 the gloves come
in: Architectural Design, February off, and the young friends of the earlier ICA meetings, and not
1965, pp. 61-62.
103 Ibid. just exclusively the Smithsons, had shown to be ‘adepts’ of the
104 Banham, 1966, p. 134. Review policies, after all, following Pope’s command to ‘consult the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 225 21-04-13 16:56

genius of the place in all’, much to Banham’s regret. And just as in
the 1966 book the Smithsons’ Economist and Stirling’s Leicester
Engineering Laboratories were the key buildings that marked the
end of the Brutalist cause for une architecture autre, with these
building projects the former ‘angry young men’ had now matured
and demonstrated the total triumph of ‘the unacknowledged
Picturesqueness of the Picturesque’s avowed enemies’. 105
Banham’s feeling of betrayal must have been triggered most, one
assumes, by Cullen’s depiction and analysis of the Economist in
characteristic Townscape fashion. According to Banham, Cullen’s
1965 review was preceded by the Smithsons hiring Cullen as early
as 1962 to prepare the perspectives of the Economist project.106
Cullen’s ten-page discussion of the Economist was all about how

the buildings formed a group or ‘family’, and as such how there
were basically two games being played, one internal between the
family members so to speak, and one between the group and the
outer world. Cullen’s review has been largely overlooked, perhaps
because of its apparently straightforward interpretation, the lack
of conceptual rigour – a structural flaw of Townscape perhaps –,
or perhaps because of the still unlikely overlappings between the
Townscape campaign of the Architectural Review editors and the
Brutalist image the Smithsons had cultivated, and which Banham
had succesfully cast as profoundly anti-Picturesque. And here, the
two parties suddenly met and seemed in perfect agreement with
each other. Cullen – just as Frampton – admired the way the new
bank, while being ‘new and white’, was also ‘perfectly adjusted
street architecture’. He was also positive about the ‘variations in
scale and temperament, not a rigid application of the pattern’ with
regard to the different façade treatments of the building group:
‘If the tower building is taken as the norm or father figure, then
the residential tower is a more delicate copy to half scale, the bank
105 Reyner Banham, ‘Revenge
building has tall windows on the piano nobile facing St James’s Street
of the Picturesque: English Ar- whilst the windows of the projecting bay are domestic and elegant in
chitectural Polemics, 1945-1965’,
in: John Summerson (ed.), Con- proportion.’ 107
cerning Architecture. Essays on
Architectural Writers and Writing,
Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
London,1968, p. 273; Banham
Whereas Frampton exercised a puritan severity with regard to
mentioned two other buildings: the perceived mannerism, Cullen noted in a gentle tone:
Harvey Court in Cambridge by
Leslie Martin and Colin St John ‘I would have been glad to see even more variation in detail and finish.’
Wilson and the Times buildings
by Llewelyn-Davies and John
Weeks.
Commenting on the way the Smithsons broke the programme into
106 Ibid., p. 75.
107 Gordon Cullen, ‘The “Eco-
three pieces Cullen carefully observed how the new ensemble and
nomist” Buildings, St James’s’, its composition brought about both continuity and separation:
in: The Architectural Review,
February 1965, pp. 115-124. ‘This process of taking to pieces and assembling with skill and
dvdh10PRINT.indd 226 21-04-13 16:56

insight is at the root of creative planning. Serial vision itself is not a
continuity, but the repeated juxtaposition of two things: the existing
and the revealed view. The only way we can humanize the environment
is to discover how it falls apart so that we can get inside the
synthesis. The art of site assessment lies in finding the lines of
cleavage.’ 108
Ultimately, the bank building holds the key to the success of the
project. With the tower ‘just hidden behind the roof-line of the
street’, the bank ensures that the streetscape remains intact only
giving away the reality of the project when coming closer, the bank
acts like some sort of bait:
‘Rather like setting a sprat to catch a mackerel, this modest and well
adjusted piece of street architecture is quickly revealed to be part
of a much greater complex. It is at this point that the change from
traditional street-by-street planning to a pedestrian precinct-group
complex occurs. All is revealed: the dominant tower, the echoing but
delicate residential block, the bay window and the steps leading up to
the raised piazza where the relationships of all membres exist in calm
communication.’ 109
With the ‘piazza’ and the views through the blocks a whole new
game starts: ‘the piazza never appears as an enclosure of itself but
as a space in relation to the outer space’. A ‘possessed landscape’
or a ‘charged’ atmosphere results, both between the buildings
on the podium that works as a ‘carved enclave’ and between the
enclave and the cityspace outside. The one view that sums it all
up according to Cullen is the view from the podium back into
St James’s Street and its eighteenth century architecture, in his
words: ‘the interplay between the central complex and the netting
of the outside world’.
So, how to view this Townscape appropriation, also in view of

Banham’s identification of Picturesque planning here, whereas
Frampton spoke of the classicist geometry? The Smithsons would
maintain their own opinion naturally, redeveloping their Brutalist
game of associations into a plea for an architecture ‘without
rhetoric’, based on their experience of building the Economist.
Once again, what becomes clear is that the Smithsons succeeded

in absorbing and integrating the various ordering techniques while
elaborating modernist principle into a new coherent ‘system’ one
108 Ibid. might say, tailored to the situation. It is in that sense too, that the
109 Ibid. Economist succeeds in refuting Rowe’s proposal for a Collage
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City; the Economist is still a project for a comprehensive language
rather than a bricolage of a multitude of possibilities. It also
succeeds in refuting Rowe’s claims that the assumed modernist
ideal of a free-standing building (as if Bramante’s Tempietto or
Palladio’s Villa Rotonda are suddenly precluded from classicism)
cannot be integrated into a historical fabric. Thus, to once again
grasp the tension between the two positions, one should set
the ‘geometries’ of the Economist plaza and how it succeeds in
bringing into play the geometries of the surroundings as well, as
shown by Cullen, against Rowe’s proposition of the Campidoglio
and its geometry as the ideal image of city space, also for the late
twentieth century.
Interventions and Fragments
Looking at the Smithon designs such as the Economist one cannot

but notice how they often concern fragments, and that they are
interventions in damaged or ruinous and impoverished contexts.
The early competition schemes for Golden Lane and Coventry
Cathedral of course, but also the Robin Hood Gardens housing
estate, which is set in the London Docklands, could actually be
characterized as a rather early urban renewal project. Since it is
one of the few built projects, it is conventionally considered to be
the main representative of the Smithsons’ ideas for large scale
housing. Yet, as built, Robin Hood Gardens is nothing of the kind.
It is an enclave, not a superstructure like the one proposed in their
UR-grid of 1953 at Aix. The site, the outcome of piecemeal decision
by the local council and political struggle with local citizens
complaining about their poor housing conditions, was set between
abandoned docks and warehouses, dilapidated, war damaged
lower class housing and large scale traffic thoroughfare such
as of the nearby East India Dock Road and the Blackwall tunnel
approach bordering the site.
The site planning might be considered the result of an expanded

As Found approach, a careful observing of existing patterns,
connecting routes, the few remaining neighbourhood shops, and
responding to the special features of the site such as the East
India Dock basin, the church of All Saints, views to the Thames
river, the tunnel ventilation shafts and the old power plant on the
south bank. The As Found idea of ‘picking up, turning over and
putting with…’ literally returned in the way the Smithsons re-used
dvdh10PRINT.indd 228 21-04-13 16:56

the rubble of the demolished structure for the creation of two
mounds in the central green space of the estate, thus creating a
land art-like intervention reminiscent of the English countryside.
Re-using the old, the leftovers, revitalising the existing and

abandoned – it runs like a thread through the Smithsons’
work and thinking. It is polemically there in the various early
competition schemes for Golden Lane, Coventry Cathedral and
Sheffield University; with the projects for the Economist, their
country escape in Upper Lawn and slightly later the dormitory
building for St Hilda’s a much more conscious approach seems
to have set in, working with ambiguities and reciprocities of the
existing and the new rather than one of clearcut opposition in a
purist, modernist way.
Eventually, this aspect can be detected in all sorts of projects

from the Smithsons design production ranging from the urban to
the smallest of domestic arrangements, the fitting-in of cabinets,
as in the case of the Anthony Caro house, but also the houses
the Smithsons lived and worked in themselves. In the case of the
houses designed for the film maker Joseph Losey and the writer
Wayland Young existing trees and even complete cottages were
fully integrated. There is a series of projects for the ageing cities
in Europe and the Mediterranean, in particular Berlin, from the
redesign of the bombed city centre crossing former east-west
sectors to the insertion of new pathways by re-using the vast
abandoned railyards of the German capital, but also the Paris
Parc de la Villette scheme or the Damascus Gate proposal for
Jerusalem up to the siting of the Acropolis museum in Athens.
There is the set of interventions done at the 1960s Bath University
campus, and two series in Germany for Axel Bruchhäuser, his
own house and the Tecta factory; and ultimately, the whole range
of sketches and design thoughts made in the context of the
ILAUD summer schools and published in the ILAUD Year Books.
Especially the latter series, for Tecta and ILAUD, show an

approach in which the search for complete image systems of the
early 1950s made way for a revelling in devising interventions of
the most modest yet poetic kind: suggestions for special bollards
and benches to accommodate visitors to the Siena Piazza del
Duomo, proposals for porches and gates marking new, informal
connections in the city or landscape, tree huts and bay windows
in case of the German Hexenhaus. Mostly, these proposals
concern fragments that are aimed to either restore, repair or
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reconnect, while at the same time framing views and spatial
experience.
The development of the Smithsons writing and designs suggests

this is nothing but the natural outcome of an approach grounded in
‘context thinking’. Mid-1960s, 20 September 1965, at the invitation
of Oswald Matthias Ungers, Peter Smithson delivered a lecture at
the TU Berlin, with its now well-known title of ‘Without Rhetoric’.
Smithson concluded his lecture by stating that:
‘As architects, we have opted for the ‘model mode of operation’,
– of seeing each building as a unique fragment, but a fragment
which contains within itself the formal and organisation
seeds which could lead to a freely-arrived-at group-form.’ 110
And instead of modernist, welfare state master planning the way

to proceed was:
‘A mode analogous to the town-building of the middle-age.’ 111
Similar trends of thought shimmer through in various other texts,

such as the short ‘A Fragmentary Utopia’, of 1966, and much more
pessimistic in ‘The Violent Consumer’ of 1974, and here very much
related to the demise of the welfare state project.112 As early as
1960 they spoke of ‘the whole concept of a mobile, fragmented,
community’ connecting the affluence of the post-war consumer
society to a breaking up of that very same community.113
110 Peter Smithson, ‘Without In the 1980s we find that the idea of a ‘fragment of an enclave’
Rhetoric. Some Thoughts for
Berlin’, published in the series appears as a key idea in various texts and lectures on
Veröffentichungen zur Architek-
tur, Heft nr. 2, February 1966, TU
inhabitation.114 And perhaps ultimately, in the mid-1980s we
Berlin, Lehrstuhl für Entwerfen find a recapture of ‘Some Lines of Inheritance’ in the booklet
und Gebäudelehre.
111 Ibid. The 1930’s, produced for Bruchhäuser and Tecta, the following
112 Both in Architectural Design, statements by Peter Smithson:
the former by Peter Smithson, the
latter by Alison. ‘The Modern Movement is not a legacy in the sense of a sum
113 Alison and Peter Smithson, of money to be spent or speculated with … it is a genetic stance,
Upper Case, nr. 3, 1960, unpagina-
ted; reprinted as: Alison and Pe- a responsibility … something to live up to. To what have the
ter Smithson, Urban Structuring,
1967, p. 50. four generations so far addressed themselves?’ 115
114 Largely collected in Alison
and Peter Smithson, Changing
the Art of Inhabitation, 1994; the Smithson then distinguished four generations listing their
next Chapter 6 will extensively
discuss this notion of the frag- ‘intention’ and key ‘image’:
ment of an enclave. ‘1st generation, ’20’s: To announce l’Esprit Nouveau.
The 1930’s, Alexander Verlag, The polychromatic object.
Berlin and TECTA Möbel, Lau-
enförde, 1985, p. 13; reprinted as
part of ‘Staging the Possible’, in: 2nd generation, ’30’s: To embrace the machine for the common good.
Italian Thoughts, 1993, p. 23, and
ILA&UD Year Book 1981, 1982. Cool social equipment.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 230 21-04-13 16:56

3rd generation, ’50’s: To make new fragments which engage
with the existing urban fabric.
The net and the lattice.
4th generation, ’80’s: To signal the changes of use

within the existing fabric.
Devices and decorations.’ 116
The thinking in terms of generations becomes much more fluid

than in the case of the ‘Three Generations’ essay. The generations
are not necessary authors, but buildings and changing design
attitudes; both Rietveld and Le Corbusier would embody the first
two generations, while the Smithsons and Team 10 stood for the
latter two. Also the time lapses suggest a free interpretation
in order to demonstrate the development as Smithson saw it:
from the object to equipment to net and lattice and ultimately
to decoration, and from a spiritual-socialist idea to a practice of
interventions within and transformations of the existing.
Mid-1980s is also the moment the Smithsons came up with a

new overall concept that summarized their intentions and idea
of order, namely that of Conglomerate Order, or Conglomerate
Ordering. The concept is completely developed through various
lectures for De Carlo’s ILAUD summer school programme.
The Smithsons themselves mentioned two different moments
of origin: in The Charged Void: Architecture they state that
‘conglomerate ordering’ was the ‘phrase invented in 1983 to
describe formulations that were coming into being in our work’,117
while in Italian Thoughts, which also holds the essays explaining
the new concept, they state:
‘The words “Conglomerate Order’ came from A.S. in Spring 1984:
as a formulation it lies at the centre of this period; a formulation
116 Ibid.
that expands, gets further definition with every year.’ 118
2001, p. 541.
118 Alison and Peter Smithson, After the dissolution of Team 10 the exchange between the
Italian Thoughts, 1993, p. 103, Smithsons and De Carlo was continued through the ILAUD
note 4.
119 International Laboratory for summer schools, founded and continued by De Carlo from 1976
Architecture and Urban Design,
founded in 1974, first summer
until as late as 2002.119 Peter Smithson attended each year, and
school 1976, last 2002; see also both Alison and Peter wrote essays, or smaller statements for
Mirko Zardini, ‘ILAUD 1974-
2004. Giancarlo De Carlo and De Carlo’s two publication series, the magazine Spazio e Società
the Interntaional Laboratory of
Architecture and Urban Design’, and the ILAUD year books. It was through these contributions
in: Risselada, Van den Heuvel,
2005, pp. 216-217; see also Mirko
that the Smithsons would clarify and further develop their idea
Zardini, ‘From Team X to Team x’, of Conglomerate Ordering.
in: Lotus International, nr. 95, 1997,
pp. 76-97.
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‘Conglomerate Order’ was both a revision and summary of the
Smithsons’ early ideas on building as a ‘place oriented’ practice,
insstead of an ‘object oriented’ approach. The aspect of continuity
and regeneration of existing structures would be reconsidered,
just as the relation between the whole and the specific or in
other words, how the architectural project could be an act of
both unifying and differentiation. Key terms would now be
territory, fabric, density, rather than patterns, mobility or growth
and change. And instead of designing complete city centres an
approach of interventions was proposed, making connections,
creating pathways, and marking edges or boundaries.
Within the Team 10 discourse one can already trace the

responses to the issue of context and the various ways it has
been reconceptualized. At Team 10 meetings there were some
occasions when the issues of context and the regeneration of the
existing urban fabric were addressed. In hindsight key projects
would be Oswald Matthias Ungers’ competition entry for Grünzug
Süd, Cologne (1962-1965), and Aldo van Eyck’s design for the
Deventer town hall (1966), both presented at the 1966 meeting in
Urbino.120 Another interesting, and relatively early example would
be Christopher Alexander’s contribution; he gave a presentation
at the meeting in Royaumont in 1962. Alexander would speak of
‘environment’, ‘existing structure’ and ‘existing pattern of the
village’, not of ‘context’ as he would do in his 1964 Notes on the
Synthesis of Form. But undoubtedly, the foremost contribution to
the subject was made by Giancarlo De Carlo, especially through his
patient research of the town of Urbino and the realization of various
complexes and interventions for the town and for the University
of Urbino, such as Il Magistero (1968-1976), or the sophisticated
Operazione Mercatale (1970-1983).121 De Carlo carried out his
meticulous survey of Urbino between 1958 and 1964. The survey also
included the devising of a masterplan for future development of the
small, historic university town. It was published in 1966 – the same
year as Rossi’s and Gregotti’s celebrated books –, and translated
into English in 1970. It displays a spirit very much akin to the one
120 See for a documentation
of the Smithsons with regard to the question of ‘continuity and
Risselada, Van den Heuvel, 2005, regeneration’. In the chapter ‘Shaping the Form of the City Through
pp. 152-155.
121 Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino. Detailed Plans’ De Carlo posed the key question:
The History of a City and Plans ‘Two basic problems plague the preservation of all historic centers.
for Its Development, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1970, originally First, can an old form retain its significance when the activities
published in Italian: Urbino. La
Storia di una Città e il Piano della of the city itself have changed radically? And second, can a
sua Evoluzione Urbanistica, Mar-
silio Editori, 1966. modern architectural form be successfully woven into an older
122 De Carlo, 1970, p. 125. architectural fabric?’ 122
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From 1965 onward De Carlo’s input in Team 10 would gain in
importance. In 1965 he presented his student housing project for
Urbino at the first Berlin meeting. The following year De Carlo
invited Team 10 to gather at this very project, then just completed.
On that occasion he would present his masterplan for Urbino.
A second meeting of Team 10 organized by De Carlo was in 1976,
in Spoleto. Its general theme was twofold: ‘participation and the
meaning of the past’. The organisation of the Spoleto meeting
coincided with the first annual ILAUD summer school, which
brought both a widening of the Team 10 circle and a continuing of
the discourse with kindred spirits and students.123 As already noted,
Peter Smithson would attend each year. Since Alison and Peter
Smithson refused to attend the 1966 meeting in Urbino – among
other things they were discontented with the number of outsiders
invited – it seems fair to conclude that the exchange between
De Carlo and the Smithsons attained a much more intense and
special character from the 1976 Spoleto meeting onward.
In many ways the propounding of a Conglomerate Order can be

regarded as a retake, and reformulation of the New Brutalism
and the As Found approach. And just as context thinking was
understood by the Smithsons as a break with Renaissance
traditions – ‘a tradition of “ideas”, a tradition of “abstraction”,
a tradition of buildings as simple mechanisms, and (...) fashion’
as they had put it to their Cornell audience in 1972 –, so was
the now proposed Conglomerate Ordering taking cues from
among others what they called the Gothic and the Doric, the
pre-modern ‘others’ to the geometric control of neo-classicism
or Cartesian rationalism. Central to this new proposition was
a non-visual understanding of architecture and its experience.
The Smithsons listed as one of the characteristics of a building
of the Conglomerate Order that it:
‘is hard to retain in the mind… elusive except when one is actually
there; then it seems perfectly simple.’
Moreover, they would say that a ‘building of the

Conglomerate order’:
‘harnesses all the senses: it can accept a certain roughness,
it can operate at night; it can offer especially, pleasures beyond
those of the eyes: they are perhaps the pleasures of territory that
123 Zardini, ‘ILAUD 1974-2004’,
in: Risselada, Van den Heuvel, the other animals feel so strongly. [it] has spacial presence –
2005.
more awsome than object presence – something not remotely
‘The Canon of Conglomerate reducible to a simple geometric schema or communicable
p. 62. through two dimensional images.’ 124
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The couple clarified the new concept for Conglomerate Ordering
by way of drawing a canon of buildings of that order. Looking
at the buildings included one finds a few former Brutalist
ones, most notably four post-war masterpieces in béton brut
by Le Corbusier: the Shodhan House, Ahmedebad (1952),
the Mill Owners’ Association Building, Ahmedebad (1954),
La Tourette, near Lyon (1960) and the Carpenter Centre, Harvard
University (1964). From the Team 10 discourse we find the
Smithsons’ own building for the School of Architecture in Bath
(1982-1988), and from fellow Team 10 members also university
buildings: De Carlo’s Il Magistero, and Ralph Erskine’s library
for the Stockholm University (completed in 1983).125
As if still polemicizing with Banham and Townscape-ists

alike the visual is consistently denied importance, instead we
find that ‘roughness’, ‘lumpishness’ and ‘weight’ reappear as
characteristics, but not the conventional overdimensioning
of lintels and beams as criticized before by the Smithsons
which they would still find unacceptable. There is a whole list
of exact requirements. A building of the Conglomerate Order
is about ‘variable density plans and a variable density section’,
structural elements ‘diminish in thickness as their load or need
for mass diminishes’, there is ‘irregular column and wall spacing,
responding to use and natural placing’, it is ‘dominated by one
material … the conglomerate’s matrix’, and it seems ‘pulled down
to meet the ground (not the ground built-up to meet the building)’
and ‘has a capacity to absorb spontaneous additions, subtractions,
technical modifications without disturbing its sense of order,
indeed such changes enhance it’.126
Ultimately then:
‘we experience a fabric being ordered even when we do not
understand it or are “lost”. We may not be able to see where we are,
but can nevertheless navigate through our capacity to feel light and
warmth and wind on our skins; sense the density of surrounding
fabric; know that behind that wall are people; smell who has been
here, or where someone has gone.’ 127
Another Brutalist characteristic that recurs with the canon of

Conglomerate Ordering, is the concept of topology but completely
redefined, not so much as a new mathematical order but as
the geometry of the territory. At the end of Italian Thoughts,
125 Ibid., pp. 66-67.
126 Ibid., pp. 62-63. the Smithsons quote Banham approvingly from his 1966 book,
127 Ibid., pp. 62-63. at the same time it also seems a conscious misreading in an
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attempt to re-appropriate the New Brutalism discourse, since the
quote is also a reference to the Smithsons’ Sheffield University
competition entry – one of the key examples of une architecture
autre in Banham’s 1955 New Brutalism essay; the quote reads:
‘As the situation stood in 1954-55, however, this estimate involved a
complete misunderstanding of the Brutalist concept of order. That
concept was not classical, but topological: its implementation on
a site such as that of the Sheffield University project, would have
involved judging the case on its merits (or rather, dominant factors)
such as the land-form, the accommodation required and the finance
available, rather than in accordance with some pre-established
classical or picturesque “schema”.’ 128
Routes, pathways and patterns of movement re-appear once

again, with the Sheffield reference of course; routes, pathways
and patterns of movement as connecting and identifying devices,
‘experienced beyond the visual…’ as the Smithsons kept insisting.
Touching on the way architecture and town planning interlock they

arrive at the following statement:
‘“That a building’s first duty is to the fabric of which it forms
part” is, we believe, that understanding which separated the third
– Team 10’s – generation of the Modern Movement from the one
which preceded it – the generation of the nineteen ’thirties.’ 129
This topological or territorial aspect – Alison Smithson speaks

of ‘topographical sensitivity’ and ‘topographical languages’ 130
– just as the favouring of ‘spacial presence’ over object presence,
are concomitant to the Smithsons’ conviction that any building
should be regarded and designed as a part of a larger whole,
a fabric as they say themselves – both in space as in time.
This is a relatively new element, which was not an explicit
part of the early Brutalist moment between 1953-1955. After
the attempts to synthesize the Brutalist ‘handling of materials’
with an approach to town planning by the end of the 1950s,
this is ultimately achieved in the formulation of the canon of
a Conglomerate Order.
A city of the Conglomerate Order as envisaged by the Smithsons

128 Ibid., p. 103, footnote 3.
would be the outcome of forces that slowly, yet continually evolve
129 Ibid., p. 66.
130 Alison Smithson, ‘In pursuit over long term periods of time, and work with or against each
of lyrical appropriateness’, 1975-
1976; in Spazio e Società, 1976; and
other. The characteristics of the urban spaces of the Conglomerate
in: AA Quarterly, nrs. 2-3, 1977, Order are quite consistently described in a most fragmentary
pp. 3-23, as ‘The City Centre Full
of Holes’, p. 17. way and almost always unsystematically, yet always reflective
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as well as speculative. In the many published and unpublished
contributions to the ILAUD summer school we find their
definitions and genealogies. The titles and its key words give us
some clues of the directions the Smithsons were thinking:
‘To establish a territory’, ‘Tracks for the territory’,
‘Territorial density’, ‘Use and re-use’, ‘Devices and decorations’,
‘Some further layers’, ‘Staging the possible’, ‘Another way’,
‘Parallel inventions’, ‘Markers on the line’, ‘Markers on the land’,
and so forth and so on.131
Much of this was of course, a continuation and elaboration of

earlier writings. In particular one can point to such texts as
‘The Route and the Pavilion’ of 1965, and ‘Density, Interval and
Measure’ of 1967, or the series on Collective Design of the early
1970s.132 Next to place-consciousness, there is an awareness of
time, as well as the passing of time, and the manifold ways time is
experienced – by the way one traverses the territory (cf. density,
interval and measure), and by the way one ‘reads’ the layering of
time, and the continuing presence of the past in the here and now.
A final reference perhaps regarding the Smithsons’ sensibility

for site specificity and context, concerns their lifelong
investigation of the classical sites of the Mediterranean. The
Greek studies of the South African architect Rex Martienssen,
but also the ones by Vincent Scully and how he viewed the
interrelations between the architecture of the temples, their
position in the landscape in relation to ancient cosmology were
formative to the Smithsons.133 Walking routes and pathways are
key again, with a special role for the Acropolis and Parthenon
of course, following not only Le Corbusier’s footsteps, but also
Pikionis’ interventions in the Ancient landscape. Just as all
sorts of Picturesque references and elements are absorbed
by the Smithsons, so is the classical omnipresent, also in
131 See note 3; the Smithson their thoughts on the Conglomerate Order. It is present in
conversation with De Carlo
(and the other participants to the ‘Three Generations’ essay of course, most notably by the
the ILAUD Summer school pro-
gramme) is worthy of a separate inclusion of the work of Francesco di Giorgio in Urbino, but also
research project.
the town of Urbino itself, the main place of study for De Carlo’s
132 All published in Architectural
Design. summer schools, next to Sienna, San Marino, and Venice
133 Vincent Scully, The Earth, which also figure prominently in the Conglomerate projects
the Temple and the Gods. Greek
Sacred Architecture, Yale Univer- and writings of the Smithsons. Di Giorgio’s buildings are also
sity Press, New Haven, 1962; the
Smithsons wrote various essays firmly integrated in the Conglomerate canon, the fortresses,
on the classical most notably
Peter Smithson, ‘Theories Con-
two churches as well as two palazzi. The lessons taken from
cerning the Layout of Classical classicist precedent are manifold – one modest example may
Greek Buildings’, in: AA Journal,
February 1959, pp. 194-209. perhaps suffice to enlighten, the Ansty Plum garden path.
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Bought by Roger Rigby, a friend of the Smithsons, the 1950s
house, which is designed in a Brutalist fashion by the architect
David Leavitt, sits on a steep slope that is also its garden.
To make the whole site accesible and to re-activate the garden
so to speak, a garden path is introduced: a concrete track that
consists of a ramp and steps, and that zigzags from one side of
the site to the other, thus introducing a much gentler and slower
pace of climbing up to the house and its terraces. Owner and
designers compare the intervention half-jokingly, half seriously
to Ancient Greek architecture and the route up to the temple
of Delphi. The ‘events’ along this track leading up to the holy
place as well as the various vistas help to enliven the territory.
Thus, the track creates a new possibility for an unified experience,
an order ‘found’ in situ, that is key.
The Conglomerate
The issue of fragments, fragmentation and a practice of inter-

vention and transformation begs the question what principles
of ordering are still at work here, and how far have we travelled
from the cosmological classical as well as modernist objectivism.
‘Conglomerate’ it must be noted was a concept already used
by Paolozzi in his early work, even though the Smithsons
don’t seem to recall this.134 Hence, it seems fair to say that the
conglomerate is in more than one way a revisiting of the New
Brutalism; it is a continuation of the search for the possibility of
that ‘complete image system’, which the Smithsons were after in
134 Until recently there was the early 1950s and for which they looked at the work of Paolozzi
not much research available
regarding Eduardo Paolozzi and and Pollock.135
the New Brutalism. The possible
connections between the Smith-
sons’s idea for Conglomerate At the same time, it is a transformation; a complete system is
Ordering and Paolozzi’s definiti-
ons of ‘conglomeration’ remain possible only up to a point, apparently, a fragment of a complete
unresearched. See for more on
Paolozzi and ‘conglomeration’: set, as well as a set of fragments that works as a conglomerate,
Alex Potts, ‘New Brutalism and or a cluster, and not a collage. There is an idea that more systems
Pop’, in: Crinson, Zimmerman
(eds.), Neo-avant-garde and are at work at the same time, which have to work together, to get
Postmodern. Postwar Architecture
in Britain and Beyond, New Haven, things done so to speak. Especially, within the Team 10 discourse
2010, pp. 29-52; for more on the
New Brutalism and Paolozzi see this idea is developed as a critique of the megastructure concept,
the special October issue, nr. 136, and the Albertian idea as propounded by Van Eyck specifically,
Spring 2011, edited by Alex Kit-
nick and Hal Foster, esp. the that a city is like a big house, and a house like a small city.
essays by Ben Highmore, Alex
Kitnick and John-Paul Stonard. The conglomerate is then not a total system but a way to think
135 Alison and Peter Smithson, the plurality of systems together.
Urban Structuring, p. 34; and
Upper Case, nr. 3, 1960.
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Not by accident, the conglomerate is devised after the crisis of
the 1970s. It can be said that this development of the Smithsons’
ideas parallelled the more general, shifting condition of the
Western European welfare state: from an all-inclusive, centralist
and unifying project to its economic and ideological demise in the
1970s and the subsequent fragmentation of public space under the
new dominance of the consumer society, neo-liberal ideology and
further economic globalization.
This moment of crisis did not only concern the larger societal
issues, for the Smithsons it concurred with a new phase in their
career: having finished Robin Hood Gardens (1972) and published
Ordinariness and Light (1970) and Without Rhetoric (1973), when
Peter was just 50 and Alison 45, they seemed to have arrived at
a temporary moment of closure. With the economic crisis and no
jobs for the office, the new wind of postmodernism and the falling
apart of the welfare state as a guiding framework, it might be
argued that the Smithsons also faced a crisis of creativity. At any
rate, it brought a new moment in their intellectual development,
which forced them to find new directions in design, to reformulate
older ideas, which ultimately crystallized in what they called the
Conglomerate.
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6 THE GREAT SOCIETY
Between Welfare State Ideals and Consumer Drives
Affinities and Critique
It was Herman Hertzberger who rather bluntly stated that in

architecture Team 10 and CIAM were the equivalent of socialism,
while immediately adding that one is not supposed to say that.1
Alison Smithson put it slightly differently but in an equally
sweeping way when she said that the modern movement was
‘a parallel cultural phenomenon to the first brave successes
of socialist ideals.’ 2 Kenneth Frampton critically questioned
such postulates in his essay ‘Des vicissitudes de l’idéologie’
1 Clelia Tuscano, ‘I Am a Product published in the special issue of l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui of
of Team 10. Interview with Her- 1975 that was devoted to Team 10.3 Working under welfare state
man Hertzberger’, in: Risselada,
Van den Heuvel, 2005, pp. 332-333; conditions Team 10 seemed unable to escape the shadow of
he immediatley added that ‘you
are not supposed to say it.’ CIAM and modernist planning that was criticized by the youngers
2 Alison Smithson, ‘The Violent of Team 10. At the same time, neither CIAM nor Team 10 pursued
Consumer. Or Waiting for the
Goodies’, in: Architectural De- an explicit political agenda. Society, community and the collective
sign, nr. 5, 1974, pp. 274-279.
3 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Des
were usually addressed in the most general of terms. From the
vicissitudes de l’idéologie’, in: late 1960s onward, in the context of an ideologically radicalized
l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui,
pp. 62-65; edited and republis- and politically conscious academic culture this would render
hed as Chapter 3 of: Kenneth
Frampton, Modern Architecture. modernism and modern architecture most vulnerable to
A Critical History, Thames and
Hudson, London, 1980.
such devastating critiques as formulated by for instance
4 Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Manfredo Tafuri, or Charles Jencks.4
utopia: Architettura e sviluppo
capitalistico, Bari, Laterza, 1973;
American edition: Architecture Alison and Peter Smithson too, hardly ever explained their
and Utopia. Design and Capitalist
Development, MIT Press, Cam- position in terms of politics or ideology. Speaking of the role
bridge MA, 1976; Dutch edition:
Ontwerp en Utopie. Architektuur of the architect in society they preferred to take up a moral
en Ontwikkeling van het Kapi-
talisme, SUN, Nijmegen, 1978; stance, upholding ethics rather than aesthetics as their
Charles Jencks, The Language of Brutalist credo goes. Yet, in their writings we find their affinities,
Post-modern Architecture, Aca-
demy Editions, London, 1977. which unmistakenly were on the left, with what they called the
5 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Smithson
Time. Peter Smithson & Hans
‘socialist dream’ and the project of the welfare state in general.
Ulrich Obrist. A Dialogue, Verlag Still, the Smithsons’ relationship with the British Labour party
der Buchhandlung Walther
König, Cologne, 2004, pp. 24-25; was an ambiguous one, to say the least. Their prestigious job for
according to Kenneth Frampton
this marked a hinge point in the the British embassy in Brasilia (1964-1965) was aborted by the
Smithsons’s career with no other
projects under construction
Labour government of Harold Wilson without a follow-up job,
after the Economist, at various according to Peter Smithson because the government thought
occasions in Delft, and during
conversations. the project unaffordable.5
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The trajectory travelled by the Smithsons with regard to the
welfare state can be tracked by their Golden Lane competition
entry of 1952 and the realization of the Robin Hood Gardens
housing estate in 1972.6 Although the design projects show an
obvious continuity, the related writings and statements indicate
a change of heart, as well as growing discontent with the course
of the British welfare state project. One notes a clear split when
comparing the early texts on the Smithsons’ idea of human
associations and the retrospective essays such as ‘The Violent
Consumer’ of 1974; a split almost impossible to resolve, between
their loyalty to the larger whole as a moral obligation and their
6 For an appreciation of Robin deeply felt dissatisfaction with the actual form the welfare state
Hood Gardens in relation to the
British welfare state building
had taken. In Team 10 circles they criticized what they called
programme see Nicholas Bullock, the ‘Labour Union Society’, thus giving vent to their anger and
‘Building the Socialist Dream
or Housing the Socialist State? disappointment regarding the way the welfare state idea had
Design versus the Production of
Housing in the 1960s’, in: Mark been derailed as a consequence of the prevalent materialism
Crinson, Claire Zimmerman
(eds.), Neo-avant-garde and
and populist rhetoric in politics and the media. They did so,
Postmodern. Postwar Architecture for example, at the Team 10 meeting in Holland in 1974. Among
in Britain and Beyond, Studies
in British Art, nr. 21, The Yale others Bakema’s town hall for Terneuzen was visited then, just as
Center for British Art and The
Paul Mellon Centre of Studies Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer office building in Apeldoorn. To the
in British Art, New Haven, 2010,
pp. 321-342; see also Dirk van
Smithsons the latter was an exemplar of a consumerist approach,
den Heuvel, ‘Robin Hood 2001. an obsession with choice, whereas the former was a testimony
The Colonisation of the Modern’,
in: Oase, nr. 57, 2001, pp. 98-103; to an already ‘historic’ period when there was still a mutual trust
re-published as ‘Recolonising
the Modern: Robin Hood Gardens between a community and its local government.7
Today’, in: ‘Architecture is not
Made with the Brain’. The Labour
of Alison and Peter Smithson, Ar- Alison Smithson, in particular, would attack politicians for what
chitectural Association, London,
2005, pp. 31-37. she considered false promises and unfair redistribution that
7 A report of the so-called corrupted the organisation of everyday life; she would uphold the
Rotterdam meeting, which in
fact included many site visits idea of a ‘real’ socialist society based on individual responsibility
around the Dutch country, can
be found in: Alison Smithson and the reciprocal obligations between society and its citizens,
(ed.), Team 10 Meetings, Rizzoli,
New York, 1991; a short comment something she saw in 1930s Sweden in particular, but also 1950s
from Hertzberger can be found in Holland or 1970s Switzerland.8 One might question though, to what
the interview by Clelia Tuscano:
‘I Am a Product of Team 10. Inter- extent the Smithsons had a clear understanding of the political
view with Herman Hertzberger’,
in: Risselada, Van den Heuvel, systems of these countries, for they all succesfully deployed as a
2005, pp. 332-333.
key welfare state principle the Keynesian model of redistribution of
8 Alison Smithson, ‘Heritage:
Carré Bleu, Paris, May 1988’, wealth and supply, which the Smithsons seemed to have contested
and ‘A Comment, Long Lost and
Found Again, on Atelier 5 Con- almost as a matter of principle, as they believed too much state
versation. Can the Swiss Have
Their Apple and Shoot It?’, both
subsidy would undermine free, individual choice, while creating
published in: Spazio e Società, too much bureaucracy.
nr. 45, 1989, pp. 100-103 and p. 123;
I added Holland too, because of
footnote 4 in the ‘Heritage’ state-
ment with a reference to ‘Dutch Having said that, the idea of some sort of an egalitarian society
rational hopefulness’, but also
based on Smitson’s discussion
was central to the Smithsons’ thinking. In 1989, in a piece
of Bakema’s Townhall of Ter- entitled ‘Heritage’, which was written for De Carlo’s Spazio e
neuzen during the 1974 Team 10
meeting in Rotterdam. Società, Alison Smithson discussed the editorial policies of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 242 21-04-13 16:56

the French-Finnish magazine Le Carré Bleu founded and run by
André Schimmerling. In it, she unequivocally expressed her high
expectations with regard to the welfare state: ‘that dream of a
friendly society that now seems far-fetched’.9 Sweden was to her
the ultimate example, representing the:
‘Scandinavian invention of Social Democratic architecture, with
its clean blend of rational functionalism and of response to use,
related to climate worthiness that was rooted in a still rememberable
vernacular.’ 10
And:
‘(…) to my generation, the flags of Stockholm’s Exhibition of 1930
signalled a joyful promise of a friendly, trusting society that believed
socialism meant a togetherness of one extended family.’ 11
She further explained, and here, her own idea of the ‘dream’
becomes even more pronounced:
‘The remarkable thing about that Scandinavian equable dream –
where an architecture, made to serve social, educational, health
programmes, was given on a head-count allocation – was that
it this way overrode any previously acknowledged grouping (…),
to instead give services directly to people, whoever, wherever
they may be: this way it made redundant the term and concept of
provincialism. That escape from provincialism – so that people were
to all be wonderfully equal, equal, equal – was a remarkable concept;
it implied that somehow society could be self-organizing (in contrast
to the authoritarianism then current in Russia, Germany and Spain),
that individuals would take responsibility for input. Team 10 and Carré
Bleu inherited these attitudes of personal moral responsibility.’ 12
Although talking about social democracy and the socialist dream,

the equality Smithson was after was clearly not the socialist
kind. In the final instance, to be equal implied it was possible
to also accept difference and change, to have options and
choice, which the Smithsons considered to be absent from the
egalitarian levelling and erasing of difference through the New
Towns programme for instance, and of which as already noted, the
Smithsons were highly critical. But in the 1989 text, criticism of the
welfare state system is present only insofar as the initial dream,
its proclamation and creative energy had dried up as early as the
9 Alison Smithson, Spazio e 1950s according to Alison. It had exercised a major impact on their
Società, nr. 45, 1989, p. 101.
own work through such ‘other moderns’ as Asplund and Aalto, plus
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid. what she called ‘Danish draughtmanship’, and the ‘data files on
12 Ibid. the dimensions of gestures and objects in everyday use’ that they
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used in their own office, the language of both the temporary nature
of Scandinavian summer houses and the permanence of the ‘brick
solidity’ of the Stockholm town hall by Ragnar Oostberg, and all
13 Ibid.; the relationship between this ultimately ‘ending with Säynätsalo’, Aalto’s multifunctional
Aalto and Brutalism is an inte-
resting topic for further research. town hall complex, completed in 1951.13
In their criticism of Banham’s
1966 book Aalto’s work was used
as a key reference.
In an interview of 1978 between Peter Smithson and the Dutch
14 Hans van Dijk, ‘“Wat is er
nu helderder dan de taal van de critic Hans van Dijk, the issue of the welfare state and state
moderne architectuur”, interview
met Peter Smithson’, in: Wonen- patronage emerged as a major topic.14 Quite uncharacteristically,
TA/BK, nrs. 19-20, 1978, pp. 31-34.
Smithson made some extensive and candid statements regarding
15 Ibid., p. 31; the interview was
published in Dutch only, all fol- his and Alison’s largely a-political stance. Assessing the
lowing quotes are translations
by the author since the original immediate post-war period and the way new planning institutes
transcript does not survive; the
orginal Dutch reads: ‘Desge-
started to reorganize the building industry Smithson mentioned:
vraagd zou ik toen gezegd hebben ‘At the time I would have said I was a socialist as well. It simply
dat ik ook een socialist was. Het
leek nu eenmaal een goede zaak. seemed a good cause. I suppose everyone of my generation would
Ik veronderstel dat iedere genera-
tiegenoot van mij hetzelfde zegt. say the same thing. If you would ask Bakema the same question you
Als U Bakema dezelfde vraag zou
stellen zou U hetzelfde antwoord
would get a similar answer, because a generation felt it this way.
krijgen, omdat een generatie het One could say that from 1943 onward the war wasn’t only fought
zo voelde.
Je zou kunnen zeggen dat vanaf to beat the Germans, but also to establish a more free, egalitarian
1943 de oorlog niet slechts uitge-
vochten werd om de Duitsers te government, in the countries defeated as well as the victorious ones.
verslaan, maar om een meer vrije,
meer egalitaire regeringsvorm
It became a crusade to establish social democracy. This feeling lasted
te installeren in zowel de landen until 1955.’ 15
die overwonnen werden als in de
overwinnende landen. Het werd
een kruistocht om de sociaalde-
mocratie te vestigen. Dat gevoel About their own attempts to develop an alternative for New Town
hield aan tot 1955.’
planning, such as their idea of ‘cluster’, Smithson said:
16 Ibid.; original Dutch text:
‘het was een poging om een ‘(…) it was an attempt to complement that shared social idea with
vormconcept aan dat gezamenlij-
ke sociale concept toe te voegen. a form idea. In cities like Bath, Nancy, Karlsruhe or 18th century
In steden als Bath, Nancy, Karls- Berlin one cannot imagine the urban plan of the city without the
ruhe of 18e eeuws Berlijn kan je
het stadsplan niet voorstellen architecture, without a form language supporting it. (…) What
zonder architectuur, zonder een
formele taal die het ondersteunt. seemed missing in the immediate post-war period was an ideal image
(…) Wat in de directe naoorlogse
periode leek te ontbreken was of what a new city would look like. We tried to propose an image of
een ideëel beeld van hoe een what was latently present in social democratic planning.’ 16
nieuwe stad er uit zou zien. Wij
probeerden een beeld te geven
van wat latent aanwezig was in de
sociaaldemocratische planning.’ And distancing himself from the politics of egalitarianism:
17 Ibid.; original Dutch text: ‘I believe one should come back from the bureaucratic state to a
‘Ik geloof dat je moet terugkeren
van de bureaucratische staat situation in which the individual is given much more responsibility.
naar een situatie waarin het
individu veel meer verantwoor- Because post-war egalitarianism turned out to be deceptive. There
delijkheid gegeven wordt. Want
het bleek dat het naoorlogse
seemed to be a political freedom, that is, one could choose between
egalitarisme bedrieglijk was. different parties. But the parties were so similar, and they had
Er bestond een klaarblijkelijke
vrijheid op politiek terrein, dat structured the financial system in such a way, it hardly made any
wil zeggen, je kon kiezen tussen
verschillende partijen. Maar de difference.’ 17
partijen leken zo op elkaar en ze
hadden het financiële systeem
op zodanige wijze gestructureerd Just before the winter of discontent and its paralysing union
dat het nauwelijks enig verschil
maakte.’ strikes and sky-rocketing inflation rates in Britain, and one year
dvdh10PRINT.indd 244 21-04-13 16:56

before Margaret Thatcher would rise to power by crushing Labour
in 1979, Smithson formulated his idea of a working democracy,
which would hold much more room for the market:
‘If you want a truly working democracy, you should be offered
options at all levels. In a society with a fixed class structure, the
only change you should introduce is when someone has certain
capacities, he should be enabled to offer his talent, to enjoy it and
have others profit from it. But in all other aspects of society the 19th
century theory was better: instead of delegating all choices to the
central government, you’d better have the market anticipate the way
society develops.’ 18
Clearly, Smithson felt uncomfortable with the turn in the

conversation, feeling forced to disclose his affinities with a
18 Ibid., p. 32; original Dutch meritocratic kind of society rather than a socialist welfare state;
text: ‘Daarom, als je een echt he claimed his position was principally a-political:
werkende democratie wil heb-
ben, moet je op alle niveaus ‘You are asking me questions of a political character. In fact, we
keuzemogelijkheid geboden
worden. In een maatschappij met hardly discussed politics at the time. Only recently, it became
een starre klassestructuur is de
enige verandering die je aan moet important to be political while in a normal conversation. It depends
brengen dat, in het geval iemand on the circumstances in which one finds oneself. Only when
over capaciteiten beschikt, hij in
staat gesteld moet worden zijn something goes obviously wrong – when buildings are badly treated
talent aan te bieden, zich erin
te verheugen en anderen ervan or when patronage is completely state controlled or in the hands of
te laten profiteren. Maar op alle
andere punten van de maatschap- large banking institutions – one gets interested in other models of
pijstructuur was de 19e eeuwse organisation and the way to obtain them. But if everything goes fine,
theorie beter: je kunt beter de
markt laten inspelen op de ma- it doesn’t matter. Then your only concern is your own work.’ 19
nier waarop de maatschappij zich
ontwikkelt dan alle keuzen dele-
geren aan de centrale regering.’
It is not just the political disinterest that is striking, it is also the
19 Ibid.; original Dutch text: ‘U
stelt me vragen die een politieke change of tone when compared to the early 1950s, which at the time
inhoud hebben. In feite praatten
we toen heel zelden over politiek. was high spirited and optimistic. In their ‘Urban Re-identification’
Pas de laatste tijd is het belang-
rijk gebleken om in een normaal
manuscript of the early 1950s the Smithsons wrote, perhaps naïve
gesprek politiek te zijn. Het is and overconfident:
afhankelijk van de situatie waar
je in verkeert. Pas als het zonne- ‘We have to try to re-identify man with his environment – to arrive
klaar is dat er iets misgaat – als
er slecht met gebouwen wordt at an idea of city in which every building, every lamppost and street
omgegaan of het patronaat ge-
heel in handen van de staat of de
sign will seem part of a predestined harmony of which man is part.
grote bankinstellingen is – raak All else is futile.’ 20
je geïnteresseerd in mogelijke
andere organisatiemogelijkheden
en de manier om die te verkrijgen.
Maar als alles goed gaat doet het The all-encompassing ambition was for that ‘complete image
er niet toe. Dan bekommer je je
alleen om je eigen werk.’
system (...) where every piece was correspondingly new in a new
20 Alison and Peter Smithson, system of relationship’.21 This was the Smithsons’ heroic moment:
to search for a new, coherent formal language of a ‘random
21 Upper Case, nr. 3, 1960; Alison
and Peter Smithson, Urban aesthetic reaching-out to town-patterns not based on rectangular
Structuring, Studio Vista, London
/ Reinhold Publishing Company, geometries, but founded in another visual world’ appropriate
New York, 1967, p. 34.
to the new post-war situation.22 Cluster, scatter, patterns of
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 11. association, patterns of growth and change, patterns of mobility,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 245 21-04-13 16:56

houses riding the landscape, and so forth and so on, these were
all part of this quest. This was an ambition shared with their Team
10 friends and the discursive fights between them very much
focused on the new sort of language appropriate for the post-war
egalitarian society. Arguably though, the Continental colleagues
were much more engaged with this project than the Smithsons’
detached fellow-travelling as depicted by Peter, Jaap Bakema
and Georges Candilis, in particular, who ran large architectural
firms controlling the realisation of numerous projects that were
part of the various welfare state programmes. Bakema might
even be called the ultimate architect of the Dutch welfare state
having proposed such monumental schemes as the Amsterdam
Pampus plan of 1965. Ralph Erskine, working in Sweden, should be
23 There is quite some literature
on the topic of welfare state mentioned as well of course, who would, like Giancarlo De Carlo,
building policies available, the experiment with a participatory approach in planning and housing
already referenced books by John
Gold, and Nicholas Bullock for as early as the 1960s.
instance, but also: Andrew Saint,
Towards a Social Architecture:
The Role of School Building in
Post-war England, Yale University With regard to the British context, the post-war project of the
Press, New Haven, 1987, and welfare state set the larger framework for much, if not most of
Stefan Muthesius, Miles Glendin-
ning, Tower Block. Modern Public architectural practice during the post-war decades. Until the
Housing in England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland, Yale mid-1950s the building industry was completely state regulated
University Press, New Haven,
1993. as part of the reconstruction effort and rationing of building
24 I. Chippendale (pseudonym resources.23 Although by 1954 all sorts of measures concomitant
for Alison Smithson), ‘The LCC
was our Uncle’, in: Architectural to a war economy were largely lifted, national and local planning
Design, September 1965, p. 428.
policies still controlled developments until the end of the
25 The Architects Coop for
instance, also responsible for the 1970s, when Thatcher and her Tory party came to power and
Brynmawr Rubber Factory; an in-
teresting counter-example is Ri- abolished various welfare state institutions, among those the
chard Seiffert, architect of Centre Greater London Council, the successor to the London County
Point and many other commercial
projects in Britain, an until now Council, effectively bringing an end to an era of a unique kind
overlooked strand of modernist
architectural production of the of state patronage. It has often been noted that in the 1950s
post-war decades.
the LCC architect’s department was the largest architecture
26 See also I. Chippendale
(pseudonym for Alison Smith- firm ever in the western world. In a short statement written
son), ‘The LCC was our Uncle’,
1965; there is far too much under the pseudonym of I. Chippendale, Alison Smithson
innuendo to fully comprehend
Smithson’s text, but this passage
mentioned that 1600 designers were working at the LCC at the
may be characteristic: ‘The LCC time.24 British architects working in private practice too, were
was a home from home (...) for
the first job of the provincial in largely dependent on welfare state commissions, sometimes
London [i.c. the Smithsons them-
selves, DvdH] it gave short hours, exclusively so.25
no real burden, leaving time for
floodlit evenings, theatre queues,
competitions; for odd people – The Smithsons were no exception to this situation. They started
what a problem the well qualified
man out of Auschwitz – as one their career within welfare state institutes. They got their first
employer said, “I’ve got several
borderline cases, just normal employment as architects in the school building department of the
ones, one problem like that even
in the building would tip them
London County Council,26 and second, they got the opportunity
over.” But the LCC was big, 1600 to establish themselves as independent architects by obtaining a
“designers” alone. It could be,
and was, everyone’s Uncle.’ welfare state job by winning the competition for the Hunstanton
dvdh10PRINT.indd 246 21-04-13 16:56

Secondary School. This commission, as any commission for a
school in those years, was part of the much larger school building
programme in Britain that was an outcome of the new Education
Act of 1944. Hence, it can be argued that while the Smithsons’
career followed a rather idiosyncratic path with the office
deliberately kept small, at this particular point they fitted into
the general pattern of architects loyally serving the building up
of the post-war welfare state.
But there is more. It is striking to see how the Smithsons’ initial

leftist leanings shine through throughout their early writings.
Despite Smithson’s dismissal of politics being a subject for much
debate we find quite a few strategic references to Labour politics
structuring their texts of the 1950s as compiled in their anthology
Ordinariness and Light. Especially Aneurin Bevan’s ideas and
his political testimony of 1952, In Place of Fear, were an explicit
reference. Bevan (1897-1960) was the Labour minister who installed
the National Health Service, one of the key infrastructures of the
post-war British welfare state. His Ministry of Health was also
involved in drawing up the new Towns and Country Act of 1947
enabling the execution of the large scale housing programmes
for the next decades, including the planning of the New Towns.
The very first chapter of Ordinariness and Light bearing the
straightforward title ‘The Problem’, opens with a quote of Bevan’s:
‘The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to
bring it under control.’ 27
Bevan’s mentioning of the Great Society was – as might be

27 Alison and Peter Smithson, recalled here to demonstrate the larger web of socialist ideas
The quote is taken from Aneurin at play – a reference to Graham Wallas, author of the 1914 book
Bevan, In Place of Fear, William
Heinemann Ltd., London 1952; bearing the very same title of The Great Society.28 The socialist
more references to Bevan’s book idea of controlling the Great Society through state intervention
on pp. 18, 19, 22, and 68.
28 Graham Wallas (1858-1932), and legislation meant controlling industrialization, including its
psychologist, educationalist,
leader of the Fabian Society and
driving forces of capitalism and entrepeneurship, as well as other
co-founder of the London School forces of relentless modernisation such as the one of technology.
of Economics; he published The
Great Society in 1914. Since Ordi-
nariness and Light was published
in 1970, and contains a couple of Today, the phrase the ‘Great Society’ is better known through
revisionary notes inserted in the
older, original texts, the reference
US president Lyndon Johnson’s appropriation as part of his so-
may also be an allusion to the US called war on poverty that was a central aspect of his economic
president Johnson, who famously
declared the ‘war on poverty’ in policies of the mid-1960s. Here, with Johnson, the Great Society
1964, under the same heading of
‘The Great Society’. However, stands for the institutes of the welfare state, the benefactors
the Bevan reference predates the
Johnson reference with twelve
of the poor and working classes, involving new laws to secure
years, and Bevan is the source access to education and health care. In the case of Wallas’ original
explicitly mentioned by the
Smithsons themselves. definition, the phrase meant quite the opposite representing the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 247 21-04-13 16:56

shift from a society organised around direct personal relations to
one of impersonal associations, from a society founded on local
and national institutions to one structured by global systems and
networks, not unlike the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft
as described as early as 1887 by Ferdinand Tönnies, Wallas’
German contemporary.29 And although it would be an anachronism
to equal the concept of the Great Society with the one of the
spaces of flows as defined by Manuel Castells,30 it is certainly
related to it to the extent that the notion of the Great Society is
characterized by the new global condition following nineteenth
century industrialisation and the establishment of multinationals
and international geo-politics.
In his book, Wallas broadly painted such a new society governed by

a global web of trade and industry, effecting the daily life of every
citizen, surprisingly perhaps we can already recognize the concept
of the megalopolis:
‘In those countries where the transformation first began a majority
of the inhabitants already live either in huge commercial cities,
or in closely populated industrial districts threaded by systems of
mechnical traction and covering hundreds of square miles. Cities
and districts are only parts of highly organised national states,
each with fifty or hundred million inhabitants; and these states are
themselves every year drawn more effectively into a general system
of international relationships.
Every member of the Great Society (...) is affected by this ever-
extending and ever-tightening nexus. A sudden decision by some
financier whose name he has never heard may, at any moment,
close the office or mine or factory in which he is employed, and he
may either be left without a livelihood or be forced to move with
his family to a new centre. (...) Even in those English villages into
which the Great Society may seem to have scarcely penetrated the
29 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemein-
change of scale is already felt. The widow who takes in washing fails
schaft und Gesellschaft. Grund- or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a
begriffe der reinen Soziologie,
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell- wringing-machine under the influence of half-a-dozen competing
schaft, Darmstadt 2005; the first
1887 edition had as subtitle: world-schemes of advertisement.
Abhandlung des Communismus
und des Socialismus als empiri-
(...) all know that unless they find their way successfully among
scher Culturformen. world-wide facts which reach them only through misleading words
30 In his famous three volumes
of The Information Age: Economy, they will be crushed. They may desire to live the old life among
Society and Culture, published familiar sights and sounds and the friends whom they know and
between 1996 and 1998, in parti-
cular the first volume ‘The Rise of trust, but they dare not try to do so. To their children, brought up
the Network Society’.
31 Graham Wallas, The Great
in the outskirts of Chicago or the mean streets of Tottenham or
Society. A Psychological Analysis, Middlesborough, the old life will have ceased to exist, even as an
MacMillan and Co., London, 1932,
pp. 3-5; original edition 1914. object of desire’ 31
dvdh10PRINT.indd 248 21-04-13 16:56

The latter claim of a disappearance of nostalgia may be disputed
as we know now, but clearly Wallas’ picture of the new global
condition already holds various key elements that would remain
characteristic for urban culture and everyday life in the twentieth
century, such as the impact of the media, the change of scale, and
social mobility, be it forced or voluntarily – elements which also
consistently resurface in the Smithsons’ reflections on modern
society and architecture. Wallas wrote his book just before some of
the ‘greatest’ events of the twentieth century: before the Great War
of 1914-1918, before the Great Depression following the Wall Street
crash of 1929. And when Aneurin Bevan once again referred to
the Great Society, in 1952, the idea had now become intrinsically
connected with those devastating experiences as well as with the
event of the Second World War and the unmatched destruction
it brought on Britain and the everyday life of its citizens. Bevan’s
urgent demand that the Great Society was to be finally brought
under control, and the Smithsons’ reminding of this, cannot be
uncoupled from those larger historical events.
Moreover, to finally complete the picture, within the context of

the Cold War – as originating within the end game of the Second
World War – the welfare state project attained an extra geo-
political dimension that should be borne in mind with regard to
national and cultural politics. It is a subtext that is almost always
actively present in the debates of those decades, and surely so in
Bevan’s statement. Through the welfare state – the Great Society
brought under control so to speak – it became possible to devise
what is often loosely referred to as the ‘third way’, a new Western
European identity which – to put it in very general terms – was to
realise an alternative to both the capitalist, market-driven economy
of corporate USA on the one hand and Soviet Union Communism
and the occupied satellite states in Eastern Europe on the other.
Questioning the Welfare State
In itself it may be rather easy to see how the politically moderate,

Fabian idea of controlling the Great Society and its violent forces
of modernisation aligns with the Smithsons’ idea of a ‘machine-
served society’ as defined by them from the mid-1960s onward.
In this ideal world of a machine-served society the available
‘machine energy’ is at the service of a ‘lyricism of control’, of
‘calm as an ideal.’ It is about ‘energy ordered and controlled’,
dvdh10PRINT.indd 249 21-04-13 16:56

about ordered flows of traffic too, and about the need to reduce
urban densities, all in order to prevent ‘overcrowding’, since
overcrowding would mean ‘violence’ and ‘stress’. Ultimately,
this late twentieth century world with its ‘technology and its
mechanisms under control’ is about enabling ‘each individual’
to ‘choose his degree of contact … or protection … and thereby
pleasure … in the machine-served society’ according to the
Smithsons in 1973.32
That Peter Smithson in 1978 proposed to embrace the idea of

the market seems quite at odds with the statement of 1973,
just as it sits most awkwardly with the Smithsons’ disgust with
commercialism and any display of material wealth. Perhaps it
indicates only the extent to which Peter and Alison must have
been disappointed by the British welfare state politics. Their
emphasis on the individual and individual choice may once
again be read as parallel to Aneurin Bevan’s In Place of Fear,
especially its final chapter, in which Bevan explained his idea
of a ‘Democratic Socialism’. Bevan’s Democratic Socialism was
a careful construction of a position between the two extremes
of Soviet Communism and a politics of economic laissez-faire.
Here, Bevan designated individual well-being as the ultimate
measure of socialist progress and civilisation:
‘There is no test for progress other than its impact on the
individual. If the policies of statesmen, the enactments of
legislatures, the impulses of group activity, do not have for
their object the enlargement and cultivation of individual life,
they do not deserve to be called civilised.’ 33
Bevan defined his Democratic Socialism as a project for the

‘ordinary man and woman’, as something ‘essentially cool in
temper’, against the ‘taste’ for war as the greatest adventure
of all (Fascism), against ‘the abandonment of private judgment’
(Communism), and against conspicuous consumption, media
hype and public spectacle.34 Such values are also to be found
throughout the Smithson writings.
Yet, one could argue, that it was exactly the provision of welfare
for all that would bring about a system that would paradoxically
corrode the very same values it was based upon. In the 1970s,
with the welfare state system fully expanded and social mobility
Without Rhetoric, 1973, pp. 14-19. as a normalized condition, culturalist notions of ordinariness,
33 Aneurin Bevan, In Place of
Fear, 1952, p. 168. the importance of education and belonging turned out to be
34 Ibid., p. 169. incompatible with individual choice and aspiration as construed
dvdh10PRINT.indd 250 21-04-13 16:56

by mass media and peer pressure. This is something the
Smithsons themselves must have realised too, and it is perhaps
another reason why they started to talk about the ‘shift’ in their
work form the late 1970s onward, with a special focus on the more
ephemeral aspects of architecture, once again inhabitation of
course, but more than ever the ephemeral aspects of dressing,
decoration, layering, while creating events, rather than theorising
all sorts of structuralist notions as ‘patterns’, which involve the
long term and deep structure so to speak.35
However, this shift does not simply concern the identification of

a change within the work of the Smithsons itself, a new direction
so to speak. This shift enabled them also to look back from the
1970s and critically review their earlier design production, to
see it in a new light as it were. They would reconceptualise their
own body of work or as Peter Smithson himself put it: the shift
is not so much about a fixed moment to be identified somewhere
35 At a couple of occasions: within their design production, it concerns the moment when they
Alison and Peter Smithson,
The Shift, Academy Editions, actually became aware of this shift, when it became an idea as
London, 1982, with an early
publication in the special is-
Smithson would say, an idea that could redirect from then onwards
sue of Wonen-TA/BK, nr. 19-20, the design production as well as retroactively tease out new
1978, which was devoted to the
Smithsons; Max Risselada has meanings from the older work.36
discussed some aspects of this
shift in his essay ‘Another Shift’
in: Van den Heuvel, Risselada,
2004, pp. 50-58.
When Smithson talked about this shift, it was in an almost
36 In the interview with Hans van detached way, as if it didn’t concern himself and Alison but
Dijk, in: Wonen-TA/BK, nr. 19-20,
1978, p. 34. someone else. Slightly earlier, this realization of a turn in their
37 The series consists of the fol- work and its larger context of the welfare state got a much more
lowing seven essays:
Peter Smithson, ‘Intitiators and
acute expression, namely in their series of ‘Collective Design’
Successors’, in: Architectural essays written for Architectural Design between 1973 and 1975,
Design, nr. 10, 1973, pp. 621-623;
Alison Smithson, ‘The Violent most particularly Alison’s revisionist essay of 1974 ‘The Violent
Consumer. Or Waiting for the Consumer, or Waiting for the Goodies’.37 The ‘Collective Design’
Goodies’, in: Architectural De-
sign, nr. 5, 1974, pp. 274-279; series was dominated by Alison Smithson’s contributions, not only
Peter Smithson, ‘Lightness of
Touch’, in: Architectural Design,
because she delivered the four longest essays, but because of the
nr. 6, 1974, pp. 377-378; way she addressed the welfare state project, its flawed politics
Alison Smithson, ‘Re-appraisal
of Concepts in Urbanism’, in: and the need to find new ways to proceed as architects and as a
Architectural Design, nr. 7, 1974, society. Peter opened the series with ‘Initiators and Successors’
pp. 403-406;
Alison Smithson, ‘Collective in the October issue of 1973, trying to redefine the architect’s
Quality’, in: Architectural Design,
nr. 11, 1974, pp. 719-721; special contribution to collective design in general terms, while
Alison Smithson, ‘The Good Tem- refraining from any political commentary and at the same time
pered Gas Man’, in: Architectural
Design, nr. 3, 1975, pp. 163-168; explaining the recently completed Robin Hood Gardens in terms
Peter Smithson, ‘Making the Con- of such responsibility to create a ‘place’ that clearly communicated
nection’, in: Architectural Design,
nr. 5, 1975, pp. 271-274. the manner in which it was ‘to be used’:
Robin Middleton notes that the ‘So that its occupiers are left in no doubt, yet be unaware of having
series wasn’t preconceived as
such. been “told”, which is intended to be the quiet part and which is the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 251 21-04-13 16:56

noisy, where one is expected to walk and where to drive, where to
play, where to deliver or bring the ambulance. The form-language
of the building to indicate and enhance use.’ 38
It is this kind of claim, together with the idea that one is

‘building toward a community structure’, that made the Smithsons
vulnerable to fierce criticism when the newly built estate was
vandalised by its inhabitants and didn’t live up to expectation.39
Alison Smithson started her contributions to the series only

half a year later with ‘The Violent Consumer. Or Waiting for
the Goodies’, in the May issue of Architectural Design, which
was written in a very different tone, much more combative and
fiercely criticizing the welfare state project, rampant vandalism
and individual response or the lack of it. She continued thus with
three other contributions: ‘Re-appraisal of Concepts in Urbanism’
(nr. 7, 1974), ‘Collective Quality’ (nr. 11, 1974) and ‘The Good
Tempered Gas Man’ (nr. 3, 1975). Peter contributed two other texts,
laterally addressing the issues at stake: one minor piece called
‘Lightness of Touch’ (nr. 6, 1974), which was made up of lecture
notes from 1972, and a final text his transcription of another lecture
‘Making the Connection’ (nr. 5, 1975). Both texts discussed the
language of modern architecture, the first one expanding and
amending Le Corbusier’s five points into a language ‘without
rhetoric’ and open to accommodate the ‘signs of occupation’ of
the users, an argument that reiterated that of their book Without
Rhetoric of 1973. The last lecture also stressed the need to further
develop the language of architecture, once again synthesizing
Wittkowerian cosmology with Miesian philosophy, and highlighting
Bath as a perfect demonstration of the fusion of the neo-Palladian
‘ideal’ with the Picturesque ‘real’, and ultimately putting forward
Shadrach Woods’ Free University complex in Berlin as the one
example of the possibilities offered by the 1970s, a building that
according to Smithson was firmly rooted in the larger modern
tradition harking back as far as Alberti.
Within the work of the couple, both Robin Hood Gardens and
‘The Violent Consumer’ mark the moment that 1950s culturalism
38 Peter Smithson, ‘Collective
Design: Initiators and Succes- breaks down as a concept to understand developments in
sors’, in: Architectural Design, society at large and to develop comprehensive planning models
nr. 10, 1973, pp. 621-623; especially
the so-called verbal illustration in response. Especially, Alison Smithson seemed to have been
nr. 1, p. 621.
39 Charles Jencks in particular
acutely aware of this, or at least she was the one who most needed
chose Robin Hood Gardens as a to reflect on this. From the earliest Team 10 correspondences it
target in his 1977 book The Langu-
age of Post-modern Architecture. becomes clear that the Smithsons assumed, as so many, that the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 252 21-04-13 16:56

specific ‘culture group’ one was to build for, was the one of the
middle classes.40 The Smithsons wrote among others that the
welfare state was to cause a ‘levelling down of middle and upper
classes’ and that the ‘removal of economic limits to working class
aspirations’ would eventually lead to a similar lifestyle pattern
for the former working classes. They believed that welfare state
politicies together with a new consumerism would bring about
the levelling of class differences quite naturally. The new, post-
war middle class way of life would provide some sort of generic
framework keeping it all together.
In 1957, in a published conversation between a still thirty-

something Peter Smithson and the distinguished planners
Sir William Holford and Arthur Ling, in which they discussed the
developments in CIAM, Smithson expressed such convictions
unambiguously. Speaking of a ‘new sort of social set-up’ driven
by ‘different sorts of status-urges’ he summarized:
‘As we have all been saying, we are in a state of change towards
a middle-class society which will correspond roughly to the sort
of set-up one has in Sweden or in the United States of America.’ 41
The reference to the USA shows that the new consumer culture
was considered formative here, next to the arrangement of
welfare. This becomes evident too, from the way Smithson views
new developments in advertising as related to the shifting class
consciousness of the period:
‘Take the simple example that one is always discussing, the impact
of the ad-man. I mean that mass-production techniques have
produced mass-communication techniques and the ad-man has
changed working class objectives fantastically even in the last five
years. And if you imagine what is going to happen in the next five
years – that, for example, the shape of the man’s car, the shape of
his refrigerator, the shape of his kitchen equipment, how he works
in his kitchen, the shape of his living room, will be dictated, not by
architects or the culture instigators of previous epochs – the “avant
garde” artist and his clients, the upper class, but by industry which
will itself produce a new pattern of culture simply by having to get
‘HABITAT’, undated manuscript rid of its products.’ 42
of the year 1954, published in:
Alison Smithson (ed.), The Emer-
gence of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M.,
The Architectural Association, The argument runs very close to the Smithsons’ ‘But Today We
London, 1982, pp. 14-16.
Collect Ads’ statement of 1956, but here, the visual spectacle of
41 William Holford, Arthur Ling
and Peter Smithson, ‘Planning advertising and its values are much more explicitly placed against
Today’, in: Architectural Design,
June, 1957, pp. 185-189. the background of an assumed shift toward a new middle class
42 Ibid., p. 187. way of life, and not so much as part of an avant-garde project for
dvdh10PRINT.indd 253 21-04-13 16:56

an aesthetic revolution as in the case of the 1956 statement. Take
for instance the way car and kitchen are – once again – pointed out
as key characteristics of the new home fit for this new lifestyle.
The two page piece ‘But Today We Collect Ads’, along with their
participation in the Independent Group, earned the Smithsons
the status of forerunners of Pop Art, even though they themselves
dismissed Pop Art as a formalist game, and of propagandists
of ‘low brow’ ordinariness, in which the paraphernalia of the
American consumer culture – cars, refrigerators and, of course,
the splashy colour ads promoting them – became the new totems
of post-war European society. This was of course triggered by
the Smithsons incredibly strong and poetic riddle-statement,
still often quoted, and from which the title of the statement was
derived:
‘Gropius wrote a book on grain silos,
Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes,
And Charlotte Perriand brought a new object to the office
every morning;
But today we collect ads.’ 43
The Smithsons – at this particular point very much in line with

Independent Group fellows as Toni del Renzio or Lawrence Alloway
– speculated on how advertising would conflate the various taste
groups in society, from the popular to the educated:
‘Advertising has caused a revolution in the popular art field.
Advertising has become respectable in its own right and is beating
43 Alison and Peter Smithson, the fine arts at their old game. We cannot ignore the fact that one
‘But Today We Collect Ads’, Ark:
the Journal of the Royal College of the traditional functions of fine art, the definition of what is fine
of Art, November 1956, pp. 49-50;
‘but today’ was a pun on the name
and desirable for the ruling class and therefore ultimately that which
of the ‘This is Tomorrow’ show, is desired by all society, has now been taken over by the ad-man.’ 44
paraphrasing an advert from the
‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition ca-
talogue for the roofing contractor
S.J. Woodford, ‘But today?’, first Hence it was concluded:
advertisement page in the back of
the unpaginated 1956 catalogue.
‘Mass production advertising is establishing our whole pattern
44 Ibid. It should be noted that of life – principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standard of living.
the favourite ‘ad-man’ of the time
would have been Herbert Bayer; We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are
well-known through Alexander to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own.’ 45
Dorner’s book The Way beyond
Art; the spatial lay-out of the
Smithsons’ collaboration with
Nigel Henderson and Eduardo In 1974, less than twenty years later, amidst economic and
Paolozzi, ‘Parallel of Life and
Art’, was taken from Bayer; Bayer political turmoil in Britain (miners’ strikes, the call for a three-
also figures in the Smithsons’ day working week, IRA bombings in London, first oil crisis and
celebration of the first generation
of modern architects, the special so forth and so on), we find this enthusiasm for the ‘exciting
issue of Architectural Design
of 1965, ‘The Heroic Period of impulses’ of commercial practice makes way for a deep pessimism.
Modern Architecture’, reprint
1981, p. 63. In ‘The Violent Consumer’ Alison Smithson noted scathingly,
45 Ibid., p. 50. but also candidly:
dvdh10PRINT.indd 254 21-04-13 16:56

‘Mass communications tend to be an iceberg: the bit most of us
never see – baser films, banal magazines or comics, baser instinct
paper-backs, blatant advertising – is that to which the ship of state
is most vulnerable. The hidden bulk of the iceberg out-balances
all the visible face civilized society judges as acceptable – that is
free education, the family, the creative minority in the community,
the myriad balancing good works of government, state, municipality,
and institutions.’ 46
‘The Violent Consumer’ essay fully lives up to its title; the piece
is a devastating assessment of the consumer society as a morally
corrosive phenomenon and of its big ‘do-gooder’, the welfare state,
which was painted by Smithson as a system tailored to assure that
everybody might participate in the ‘consumer race’ and its sheer
material profit. The idea of a society moving toward a shared way
of living as embodied by the dominant ‘culture group’ of the middle
classes had turned out to be a fata morgana. Smithson concluded
that it was no longer possible to assume that:
‘(...) we are all similarly cohesive groups, now of various shades
of middle-class, speaking a common caring-for-possessions and
established-values language; (...) that as new-society-equals, all
children feel equally secure swimming in the great society, with
hidden potential for equal understanding and subscribing to the
socialist dream. But those for whom the socialist/democratic
societies are said to have been called into being – for whom they
can still be said to be primarily bureaucratically kept in existence;
the very people for whom all this bureaucratic structure was created,
that all might share this ideal – feel the most bitter.
We must face that for more than half of us, this universal-society
is not the answer. It was a marvellous way for some, to the next stage
of consideration-for-others, but we must move on to that next level
where the underlying belief in brotherhood is rooted in a sufficiently
strong trust that we are all Greeks – collectively understood in our
bones – to allow society to freely fragment, become compartmented,
group in its own loose way, seek difference in quality through effort
in work ... or not as the case may be.’ 47
The idea of allowing society to ‘freely fragment’ is in itself not a

new idea to the Smithsons. As we have seen it is also tied to their
idea of a context-responsive approach which almost as a matter
of course leads to the creation of fragments and enclaves. But
here, the problem runs deeper than the shift from total planning
Consumer’, 1974, p. 274. to proceeding by way of intervention and transformation. The
47 Ibid., quote on p. 278. problem concerns the social fabric itself. In ‘The Good Tempered
dvdh10PRINT.indd 255 21-04-13 16:56

Gas Man’ Alison Smithson claims that ‘the collective gesture
has withered to vandalism’; in ‘Collective Quality’ smaller and
larger acts of vandalism against the collective are described,
from the house owner who ruins a historic streetscape by
replacing his chimney in an insensitive way, to football hooligans
demolishing ‘objects – collectively paid for – such as trains’ and
the emergence of ‘no-go areas’ in Marseilles, Belfast or New York.
Alluding to the then new fashion of participation she asks what
modes of operation are available to the individual if one sought
to contribute to the larger whole of the collective that ultimately
constitutes ‘quality of place’:
‘(…) where is the freedom of the individual to remember quality,
have a quality insight, make the instinctive, unpremeditated
contribution that might enrich the depth of quality of place?’ 48
The longing is for an almost unself-conscious vernacular as

recognised by Alison in the domestic scenes of Pieter de Hooch
that lavishly illustrate the essay:
‘What is the collective nature of the civilising choice? Keeping to
this problem of the house, how do we play the Pieter de Hooch
game? … match the inside to the outside face, and both to daily
life? … the acts of placing, caring, renewing, cleaning, enjoying
… so that they mesh together to become the fabric of a culture?
… every item of life contributing to a unison whose nature joins
the poetry of the collective?’ 49
In a slightly later text, written in July-November 1976, Peter

wrote about the same issue and ideal. Singing the praise
of Giancarlo De Carlo’s housing project for the village of
Matteotti visited during the Team 10 meeting at Terni of that
same year, Smithson started by defining his idea of a ‘burgher
society’ as represented in the De Hooch pictures: ‘continuity
of family’ as the first characteristic, followed by ‘continuity of
possessions, continuity of place, continuity of involvement’.50
This ‘burgher society’ of equals was assumed to be ‘a society
of specialists living and working in the same place, expecting
certain perfections, each from each, right through the social
48 Alison Smithson, ‘Collective
Quality’, 1974. scale’. And this then was represented in an architecture with
49 Ibid. ‘the houses, each different, all in the same style. Houses looking
50 Peter Smithson, ‘Some into streets and yards, making one indivisible internal world.’ 51
Thoughts After Team X Terni’,
typoscript Smithson archive, According to Smithson De Carlo had succeeded in bringing
eventually published as ‘Apro-
pos Terni’ in: l’Architecture together the qualities of such a ‘burgher town’ with a ‘detailed
d’Aujourd’hui, nr. 189, Febru-
ary 1977. architectural language’, that was ‘developed out of that of
51 Ibid., p. 1. modern architecture, and inescapably communicates some of
dvdh10PRINT.indd 256 21-04-13 16:56

its heroic stance’. This then was what Team 10 was all about:
housing as ‘urban-fabrics not buildings’.52
But this was of course the very problem that Alison Smithson
also referred to in ‘The Violent Consumer’, that very ‘urban-fabric’,
‘fabric of a culture’, or more poignantly the lack of it. Peter also
touched on it when he wrote that the Matteotti housing was
for industrial workers who in his view were not concerned by
such qualities as possessions, place or involvement, especially
with their children moving socially upward. Discontinuity was
much more likely to appear. He ‘resolved’ this assessment by
concluding that the project offered a ‘new fabric, something
alongside the existing fabric … a new start’, that to him seemed
capable of accruing new meanings and uses over time.53
Such political incorrectness is also what Alison Smithson

in ‘The Violent Consumer’ put on the table with regard to
the debasement of the welfare state and the premises it was
built upon. Where Van Eyck had already rhetorically asked
how one could build the counterform of society as an architect,
when society itself has no form (rhetorical in the sense that
the architect and architecture apparently stand outside of
society in this formulation), Smithson politicized the question
in no uncertain terms:
‘The drive towards uniformity in the guise of socialism or social
democracy is becoming undesirable to many who find no quality,
no identity in such a framework.’ 54
‘Identity’, which at first in the 1950s seemed the key to go beyond

the Functional City and rationalist planning, now had to be
redefined and recalibrated into a much more flexible multiplicity,
also with regard to migration in a post-colonial era:
‘We assume we are English with English standards, and that all-
comers see these standards clearly and will go along with them
and contribute to their furtherance. But implicit in the various
Emancipation Bills of the nineteenth century was a diffusion of
standards; a taking aboard of multifarious ethics and rules for
behaviour and redress of the previously closed social élite. (…)
52 Ibid., pp. 3-5.
53 Ibid., pp. 5-6. With the opening of Universities and so on, to all came a de-
54 Alison Smithson, ‘The Violent Anglicizing which effectively swept away the incestuous control
Consumer’, 1974, p. 277; the quote
by Van Eyck runs: ‘If society has mechanism of our Englishness. The glue of a particular society
no form, can architects build the
counterform?’, in: Aldo van Eyck,
became less and less adhesive. Gradually, the visible result, a
‘The Fake Client and the Great hundred years after such emancipation we see the loss of the
Word “No”’, in: Forum, August
1962, nr. 3, p. 79. particular English milieu: today an indigenous cultural mix
dvdh10PRINT.indd 257 21-04-13 16:56

that permits the last break-up of towns and cities, and these
somehow get rebuilt in a life style more alien to many of us than
ever were Victorian Italian Romanesque or Victorian Venetian
Gothic. In many buildings, added even to cultural institutions,
instinctive sense of English scale seems lost.
To those that use any city, the mix is certainly becoming
stranger, incomprehensibly so. However, we in England continue
to assume our communal Englishness … but can we – since the
influx of hired labour? Since Emancipation? … is any northern
European country itself?’ 55
According to Smithson the ‘paternalistic universal answer

welfare state’ had largely failed:
‘Where attempts have been made to think out needs,
the immediate beneficiaries of the welfare state smash and
foul those portions of cities provided specifically for them,
and do so in blind violence against it knows not what. Lack of
sacredness for the results of labour, lack of respect for others’
possessions or contributions, leads ultimately towards a
vandalism of people.’ 56
Clearly, this must be read with the fate of Robin Hood

Gardens and its vandalisation in the back of our mind, even
though Smithson refrained from mentioning their project.
However, she did defend modern buildings fiercely against
accusations that:
‘the wrong forms have been provided, forms expressing wrong
aspirations for the beneficiaries of a socialist state; and more,
that these forms would contain something wilfully architectural
that calls up the vandals.’
According to Smithson modern buildings were ‘releasant,

not at all overpowering or threatening.’ She also pointed out that:
‘the anonymous apartment block without any open space or
community-provided feature is at a high premium in one part
of the city; not far off, people rehoused from so-called much
worse conditions, apparently hate the same modern amenities
(but with open space and other social facilities) and in a few
years the whole environment is a wreck. Anonymous is here
called prison, open space and full light are here judged threatening.’ 57
She claimed there was a fundamental problem with the

55 Ibid.
56 Ibid. welfare state system in that it didn’t hold people responsible
57 Ibid. or accountable, that there was no ‘care of possessions’
dvdh10PRINT.indd 258 21-04-13 16:56

when simply provided by the state instead of being earned.
One needed a system of governance in which ‘allowance of
freedom’ is ‘balanced by responsibility for that freedom’.
Smithson painted a colourful but most disturbing picture of the

council housing system and its social shortcomings, very different
from her ideal of a trusting and friendly society, the ‘togetherness
of one extended family’, she said:
‘(…) a whole family – not necessarily understanding any rules of the
collective, under stress, perplexed, disorganized, financially muddled,
aggressive, bad cooks, poor shoppers, without knowledge of true
value, unable to weigh alternatives, perhaps bearing insurmountable
family problems, without real direction – a whole family is simply
given a key and starts paying rent for a portion of a fairly expensive
bit of property, complete with grounds and equipment – the result
of years of theory and design and paper work, and three to five
years construction time, work of many dedicated people – which is
simply entrusted to their care. They are just there, in a non-existent
collective without even any instincts of community.’ 58
And:
‘(…) in the present world of municipal housing, subisidies are in
fact cruel to a greater number than they are kind to, for they tend to
pack together, without distinction, families with completely different
standards of cleanliness, noisiness, obtrusivenss, and so on.’ 59
Eventually, there was no mutual ‘trust’, the ‘glue’ that held

society together was gone, and consumer politics as an outcome
of ‘socialist theory and consumer urge’ had reshaped the working
class as a ‘class of resentment’ instead.
The quotations above are perhaps extensive – Alison Smithson

elaborated her argument among others including society’s
responsibility to children as well as anti-American remarks –
yet they show how far removed she was from the optimism of
the 1950s and Independent Group days. Consumer culture, the
world of media, but also the mechanisms of fashion, although
still acknowledged as forces of their own, by now they had lost
their appeal to the Smithsons as indicators of the way forward
to an open, egalitarian society that was the dream of post-war
British society.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
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Free Choice and Fragmentation
The so-called shift of the 1970s was already in evidence in

the 1960s. After the dissolution of CIAM Team 10 members
got involved in numerous projects for the welfare state, and
despite the economic boom of those years, the fantastic rise
in living standards and new opportunities, one also sees the
emergence of a new cultural pessimism, that culminated in the
events of May 1968. Paradoxically, Team 10 itself was confronted
with this on the occasion of the Milan Triennale, organised by
Giancarlo De Carlo, who had chosen the classic Team 10 issue
of the greater number as the general theme. Van Eyck, Woods,
the Smithsons and De Carlo himself made special installations
each addressing what they considered the most acute issues
in town planning. Yet, in the spirit of 1968 the Triennale was
occupied by students and artists protesting the establishment.
Within the Team 10 discourse itself the new cultural pessimism

was most evident in the re-edition of the Team 10 Primer in 1968.
A new 16 page preface was added by Alison Smithson, which
contained a patchwork of statements by founding members and
other participants: Ralph Erskine, Giancarlo De Carlo, Alison
and Peter Smithson, Jerzy Soltan, Jaap Bakema, Shad Woods,
Karl Polonyi, Aldo van Eyck, José Coderch, Stefan Wewerka,
and Brian Richards. However, the texts speak of dismay with the
practice of planning and building, even though this was what
Team 10 earlier had claimed to be their aim. ‘Not to theorize but to
build, for only through construction can a Utopia of the present be
realized’, as the 1962 introduction read. The 1968 texts then show
an embarrassing account of the limited possibilities of architects
to improve the situation of mass building, in Western Europe and
the USA in particular, or to intervene in the politics of planning
toward a new post-industrial knowledge-driven society of which
the architects themselves were instrumental in more than one way:
as builders, teachers, and theorists.
The new preface also offered the possibility to add new projects,
and perhaps in line with the new late capitalist condition university
projects dominate: for Urbino, for Zurich, for Bochum and for
Bremen. Other projects were urban renewal projects revitalizing
the old fabric for modern uses by way of meaningful and intelligent
strategies of intervention, Urbino again, but also Berlin and Paris.
Underneath it all there was also a sense that one was entering
a new geopolitical phase which one didn’t seek to support while
dvdh10PRINT.indd 260 21-04-13 16:56

at the same time couldn’t resist getting involved in; most notably
Alison Smithson and Shadrach Woods mentioned the ongoing
Vietnam war and the extreme costs of post-colonial warfare and
Cold War technologies as opposed to the money spent on decent
quality housing. Smithson included two projects by the Hungarian
Polonyi for Ghana stating that ‘it is perhaps in the new countries
that architects most significantly fail; as if our discipline was too
cumbersome to touch their needs.’ 60
In general, on the one hand one felt one’s talents and energies
were not used quite enough (Soltan: ‘it is an unhealthy paradox
that in a domain so pragmatic, in a science and art so very much
applied as urban design, theorizing is what remains to the majority
of the practitioners’), and when they were called upon to build,
it seemed neither under the right conditions nor for the right
purposes. General discontentment was the result. ‘The noise of
the stencil machine is everywhere’ Bakema wrote, referring to
all the pamphlets, posters and little magazines produced in the
many architecture schools he visited (Philadelphia among others).
Yet, at the same time he also admitted ‘we can put on paper what
has to be done and in the next moment we do quite another thing’.61
In its simplicity this statement summarized the predicament of
Team 10, which Ken Frampton would once again elaborate in
his critique ‘Des vicissitudes de l’idéologie’. To some extent the
Smithsons accepted such limitations too, when talking about
design as ‘staging the possible’.62 Even though the Smithsons
used the phrase when explaining their interest in exhibitions as a
testing ground and demonstration of ideas, this notion can also be
expanded to their built work. Certainly, a most personal and very
specific project as the Upper Lawn pavilion was intended as such,
but in general, when the built projects are necessarily restricted
to fragmentary interventions, those fragments come to represent
almost naturally the bigger ideas at stake. Alison Smithson
stated that ‘in such long-stride, long-term art as architecture,
it is almost an immoral act of building not to leap with foresight,
and so to offer to people a quality which might not have been seen
before, therefore which no one can know, or choose to want, until
60 Alison Smithson, Team 10 it is there’.63 Such statements were in line with Peter’s, when he
Primer, 1968, p. 15, caption to discussed the long term processes before an idea in architecture
illustration nr. 12.
61 Ibid., p. 5. becomes an accepted vernacular, or vice versa, before a craft
62 Alison and Peter Smith- convention was generalized into a conceptual understanding.
son, ‘Staging the Possible’, in:
Italian Thoughts, 1993; also in
ILA&UD Year Book 1981, 1982.
The Smithsons’ change of heart with regard to welfare state
Consumer’, 1974, p. 276. politics can – at least partly – be retraced by way of their actual
dvdh10PRINT.indd 261 21-04-13 16:56

involvement in welfare state housing. From 1963 onward they had
worked on a housing project for Manisty Street in the borough of
Poplar for the London County Council. There they would personally
experience the many restrictions imposed by the welfare state
bureaucracy through tight budgetting, statutory guidelines for
housing, as well as the difficulties in communication between
the council and the local community. The project consisted of two
small-scale gallery access blocks, randomly inserted in the war
damaged urban fabric of East London. The Manisty Street blocks
were never built, but in 1966, the project was redeveloped into
the much larger Robin Hood Gardens estate to be finished by
1972. Complaining about the proliferation of bureaucracy, and the
unsustainable promises to the public by politicians and planners,
Alison Smithson rather dramatically contributed the following
to the extra 1968 preface of the Primer:
‘If we examine our position in England, we must also in the
general political context question whether the Welfare State in
choosing so much for us might not be freezing our life pattern,
forcing social benefits to answer a time before, unopposed by
allowing no incentives. Incentives naturally generate decisions of
choice. Freely made choices are the redirective factors in society.
Without free choice bureaucracy becomes a dead load and it is
here the politico/planner/bureaucrat/, jammed in the manipulation
of the administrative machine now too big for anyone to master,
tends to act against any re-establishment of honesty and resultant
trust in a community. We are locked in a wasting struggle with
Welfare State Bureaucracy in a very similar way to how men were
in the size-kind war of 1914-1918. Even at a simple day to day
level, useless struggles with committees are wasting valuable
working energy and time. Only by the reduction of friction between
bureaucracy and action can the available talent be spread as far
as it needs to be.’ 64
If we accept the predicament as painted by Bakema – putting

on paper the ideal, actually having to do something else – what
alternative models then did the Smithson imagine for the welfare
state? What models for ‘freely made choices’ did they envisage,
and of which their built work is then nothing but a glimpse
due to its fragmentary character? Their two books of the early
1970s, Ordinariness and Light (1970) and Without Rhetoric (1973),
summarize the couple’s ideas. Ordinariness and Light covers
the early years bringing together a selection of their writings of
1952-1960, especially the ones on town planning (subtitle ‘Urban
Primer, 1968, p. 5. theories 1952-60, and their application in a building project 1963-
dvdh10PRINT.indd 262 21-04-13 16:56

70’). The book’s argument largely revolves around two concepts,
the Golden Lane project of 1952-53 and the idea of a Cluster City
of 1957. Without Rhetoric spans the larger period of the 1950s, 1960s
and early 1970s focusing on the issue of expanding the language of
modern architecture.
Rereading Ordinariness and Light it should be noted that its year

of publication, 1970, marks a time lapse of up to eighteen years
from the original writing. By then the Smithsons’ own ideas
about the welfare state and town planning had already shifted
profoundly. Perhaps herein lies the explanation for the Smithsons’
reservations in their preface to the anthology. They stated, in an
apologetic tone, that to them the publication seemed in hindsight
‘a tumultuous rag-bag of a text, naive, embarrasingly rhetorical,
but stuffed with good things.’ 65
Without clarifying what exactly then they considered to be

so naive and embarrassing, the Smithsons summed up their
‘good things’ in a remarkably a-political fashion:
‘The main themes we still believe in passionately: the restoration
of the feel of the land; the invention of an architecture structured
by notions of association – of place; the re-direction of our cities
and towns towards safe-movement, openness and light by inserting
into the old structure urban events at the scale of our new patterns
of communication.’ 66
Although the main body of texts was written much earlier than
‘The Violent Consumer’ essay of 1974, its conclusion to ‘allow
society to freely fragment, become compartmented’ instead of
seeking some sort of ‘universal-society’ was already present
in the pages of Ordinariness and Light. As noted the book was
organised around the two different, major concepts for the
welfare state project as devised by the Smithsons: the elaborated
66 Ibid. Golden Lane idea and the proposition of a Cluster City. The two
67 The chapters ‘Cluster City’, concepts largely coincide with the two parts of Ordinariness
and ‘Fix: Permanence and Tran-
sience’ were published in The and Light, the first being the until then unpublished, and already
Architectural Review, in 1957 and
in 1960; ‘The Built World: Urban mentioned, ‘Urban Re-identification’ manuscript from the early
Re-identification’, ‘Caravan:
Embryo Appliance House?’, ‘An
1950s, and the second a compilation of what the Smithsons
Alternative to the Garden City called ‘essays on urban theory,’ published in the second half
Idea’, ‘Letter to America’, ‘Mo-
bility’, ‘Scatter’, ‘The Functions of the 1950s, mostly in Architectural Design, but also in the
of Architecture in Cultures-in-
Change’, and ‘Social Foci and Architectural Review and the Architect’s Year Book.67 The third part
Social Space’ were all published
in Architectural Design between
of the book is an appendix documenting the design of Robin Hood
1955 and 1960; ‘Aesthetics of Gardens, by the time of publication already under construction.
Change’ was published in the
Architects’ Year Book, nr. 8, 1957. Its inclusion served to demonstrate the application of the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 263 21-04-13 16:56

theorized ideas in the collected writings as well as the various
transformations of those initial ideas.
To be able to think of the city, its territory and districts as both a

comprehensive whole and a collection of fragments, the Smithsons
first of all proposed to think of the city in terms of layers and
different systems loosely working together. The new infrastructure
of motorways that provided a new sense of freedom by way of
mobility was considered the foremost system among those.
Surprisingly, the Smithsons hardly looked at public transport
systems when theorizing the post-war city. Second, the city was
also regarded as a collection of fragments or enclaves providing
different qualities in the sense of ‘patterns’, that is as spatial and
territorial configurations vis-à-vis the specific lifestyles they were
to accommodate. Third, the house itself should be a basic cell,
not in terms of functionalist Existenzminimum, but as a container
open to appropriation by the inhabitants, providing its inhabitants
the possibility to alter the house as need arose or a change of
lifestyle occurred.
To start with the latter, the house as a basic cell offering choice to
the inhabitant. Golden Lane designed in 1952 provides the clearest
example in this respect; a rationalised, neutral slab structure
offering various housing typologies. Access was organised by
way of the famous decks, the ‘streets-in-the-air’, but perhaps
more importantly in between the collective deck and the private
cell a so-called yard garden was inserted. This ‘yard garden’ was
a space left empty and open to ‘appropriation by the inhabitants:
one could add extra bedrooms, a place for house work, a house-
shop, or simply enjoy it as a large outdoor space. According to the
Smithsons this extra function would not ‘interfere with the normal
working of the plan’, since the scheme offered the possibility
of two separate front doors.68 In the chapter ‘Realisation: Cost,
Legislation, versus Dreams’ the Smithsons further explained:
‘The Golden Lane Project was a pilot scheme to try and develop
solutions and techniques. Suppose we project a scheme to
optimum social and structural standards? The houses would be
larger and simpler than those in Golden Lane, where rooms and
equipment were provided to statutory (and obsolete) standards.
Internal finishes, partitioning, equipment and services would in
the first place be of the simplest. We would provide enough space
to make civilised life possible, and occupiers would furnish those
68 Alison and Peter Smithson, things which were personally essential. Thus we could provide
Ordinariness and Light, 1970,
pp. 56-57. for the man who would die without a Morris wallpaper or a private
dvdh10PRINT.indd 264 21-04-13 16:56

bathroom for his guests. For the “cobbler or the candlestick-maker”,
his work-bench and store could be right at his door; no need to
travel from Hendon to Holborn.’ 69
According to the Smithsons the ‘choice should be the individual’s

not the State’s.’ 70 Subsidies should be geared to this basic cell.
In the welfare state system ‘housing subsidies come between
us and the individual’s choice. There can only be a reality where
the individual makes a choice from given and real alternatives.’
Choices available to the consumer society include then:
‘Houses or guns, guns or butter, TV or picture window,
car or sun lounge, clothes or model home.’ 71
And another list of choices reads:

‘Open space
Enclosed space
Extra cells (as distinct from space)
Fine finishes and fittings equipment
The bare necessities better car
Bare structure better clothes.’ 72
The two other categories of choice, that of the creation of

enclaves and the city as a set of systems were closely intertwined.
Mobility was regarded perhaps the foremost creative (some would
say destructive) force here:
‘Mobility has become the characteristic of our period. Social and
physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one
of the things that keeps our society together, and the symbol of
this freedom is the individually owned motor car.’ 73
Cluster City was the concept that embodied this ideal, more so
than the earlier Golden Lane project, even though we can already
see an approach based on systems and mobility present in
Golden Lane, not so much in the competition entry of 1952, but in
its restaging for the 1953 CIAM conference in Aix, the Urban Re-
identification grid. There the Smithsons defined the city of Golden
Lane as consisting of three layers on top of each other, the road
infrastructure ‘on the ground’, the ‘ground elements’, being all
69 Ibid., pp. 95-96.
sorts of amenities, work and service programmes for the city, and
70 Ibid., p. 83.
71 Ibid., pp. 82-83. the ‘space elements’, the interconnected system of streetdecks of
72 Ibid. the housing blocks. Next to this, the city was rather roughly broken
73 Ibid., p. 144; already stated as
such in Upper Case nr. 3, 1960,
up in specialised districts, characterised in a sketchy diagram
and Urban Structuring, 1967, as: ‘offices’, ‘factories’, ‘craft’ and ‘ceremonial’. In a way, the
and in the 1958 essay ‘Mobility’
in Architectural Design. Smithsons’ entry for the competition Hauptstadt Berlin of 1957-
dvdh10PRINT.indd 265 21-04-13 16:56

1958 and done together with Peter Sigmond, largely followed the
same scheme: the existing roads on ground level were left intact to
accommodate car traffic, on top of it a new, vast layer of pedestrian
decks was projected connecting the programmes of shopping,
leisure, housing, government buildings, museums and so forth
and so on.
In the diagram of Cluster City, dated 1955, the Smithsons had

slightly shifted this layering method of the Golden Lane model;
the motorway system became a more independent system, while
aggregating the landscape and the enclave-like districts into
a new composition. The motorway system was thus one of the
most important ‘identifying systems’ of the contemporary city
and the new landscape, a similar category as fortifications or
harbour areas from earlier times. The construction of motorways
re-organised cities and societies, controlling pressure and
channeling flows. ‘To lay down a road in a built-up area is a very
serious matter, for one is fundamentally changing the structure of
the community’, the Smithsons stated. And next to mobility and
its infrastructures, density was a major instrument in establishing
different qualities of place. In the Cluster City diagram we see a
simple differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ densities, mostly
depending on programme and distance to motorways. Such
notions of accessibility and availability together with identity and
change made Cluster City something of a precursor to the post-
industrial city leaving behind the egalitarian welfare state model;
the Smithsons description boiled down to a multi-nodal network:
‘In the Cluster concept there is not one “centre” but many.
Areas of high intensity of use, related to industry, to commerce,
to shopping, to entertainment, would be distributed throughout
the community, and connected to each other and to frankly
residential dormitories and dormitory-used villages by urban
motorways. It is useless to pretend that our lives are so simple
that we can all “live where we work”. We have to accept that
families have more than one “worker” in them and that choice
of where one lives is a complex matter. Our job is to give choice;
to make places that are meaningfully differentiated; to offer
true alternative lifestyles.’ 74
It should be remembered at all times that this idea was

presented as an alternative to then contemporary town planning
practice in Britain, most notably that of the planning of the
New Towns, probably the largest welfare state project of all in
74 Ibid., pp. 132-133. those years. All the new terms and ‘typologies’ were devised to
dvdh10PRINT.indd 266 21-04-13 16:56

dislocate the ongoing programme and try and think of alternative
modes of operation in order to recreate the English landscape,
cities and identity along the lines of a modern understanding of
place construction: cluster, greenways, landcastles, patterns of
growth and change, houses riding the landscape, and so forth and
so on, all these new terms and concepts were in function of this.
With regard to the idea of a polycentric Cluster City (and what

we would call today a network city), there remains an issue
pertaining to the way the several systems would actually
work together. At this particular point the Smithsons spoke of
‘making the connection’, ‘connective linkages’ or ‘events in a
75 Alison and Peter Smithson, connective network’. Sometimes these connections were literal
‘The Space Between’, in: Opposi-
tions, nr. 4, 1974, pp. 74-78. connections as in the case of a road system or creating routes
76 Gordon Cullen, ‘The “Eco- and pathways, but they could also be spaces simply left open,
nomist” Buildings, St James’s,
in: The Architectural Review, or what Peter Smithson called the space between,75 a very
February 1965, pp. 115-124.
77 This notion is developed
straightforward example being the already mentioned yard-garden
among others through the of the Golden Lane housing scheme. The idea of a ‘charged void’
exchanges with Ungers at TU
Berlin, in the second half of the belongs in this category as well, an idea Gordon Cullen suggested
1960s, see ‘Peter Smithson:
Without Rhetoric’, in the series: for the first time when reviewing the Economist,76 and which
Veröffentlichungen zur Architek-
tur, Heft nr. 2, TU Berlin, 1966,
the Smithsons themselves had recognized in the work of Mies
and ‘Alison & Peter Smithson: when they spoke of his ‘open-space-structured urban pattern’
Seminar zu Mies van der Rohe’,
in the series: Veröffentlichungen and how his buildings would ‘charge the space around them with
zur Architektur, Heft nr. 20, TU
Berlin, 1968. It was subsequently connective possibilities’;77 the ‘doorstep philosophy’ and the street
integrated into the various publi-
cations by the Smithsons such as
idea,78 both formulated in the years leading up to the formation of
Without Rhetoric, 1973, Changing Team 10; and finally perhaps in the case of visits to North America
the Art of Inhabitation, 1994
(in particular pp. 16-22), and of and reflections on American urban design, the devices of interval,
course The Charged Void volumes,
2001 and 2005. measure and distancing between buildings and blocks.79
78 As already formulated by the
English Group (Smithsons and
Howells) in the CIAM Commis- Within the body of work of the Smithsons, there are not many
sion Six at Aix-en-Provence, 1953,
and later by the Smithsons in examples of full scale city designs. There are of course the well-
their texts ‘The Built World: Ur- known, more theoretical exercises of Golden Lane (the 1953
ban Re-identification’, integrated
in Ordinariness and Light, 1970, version) and Hauptstadt Berlin. Cluster City itself is nothing but a
pp. 104-113 (also published as an
essay in Architectural Design, diagram. Most of the urban work – as already mentioned – concerns
June 1955, pp. 185-188), and the
chapter ‘Human Associations’ fragments, interventions within existing contexts. There are three
in Ordinariness and Light, 1970, exceptions to this: the competition design for a city extension of
pp. 39-61.
79 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hamburg, the new district of Steilshoop (1961), a series of designs
‘Density, Interval, and Mea-
sure’, in: Landscape, Spring 1967,
for expanding the village of Street in Somerset (1964-1966), and
pp. 18-20, reprinted in: Architec- the competition scheme for Kuwait City (1968-1972), however none
tural Design, September 1967,
pp. 428-429; Alison and Peter of those was actually realized. The common denominator behind
Smithson, ‘The Space Between’,
in: Oppositions, nr. 4, 1974, pp. 75- the urban plans remains the idea of a moderate consumerism of
78; Peter Smithson, ‘Space is the
American Mediator, or the Blocks
an egalitarian, democratic society – the preferred combination of
of Ithaca: a Speculation’, in: the models of Sweden and the United States as suggested by the
The Harvard Architecture Review,
Spring 1981, pp. 106-112. Smithsons during the 1950s. The Cold War context is most evident
dvdh10PRINT.indd 267 21-04-13 16:56

in their proposals for Berlin, which they called ‘the open city’ in
need of an ‘open centre’; they also noted that ‘[a]n open society
needs an open city. Freedom to move and somewhere to go, both
inside and outside the city.’ 80
Karl Popper’s definition of an open society (of 1945) already

contained the predicament for the architects of the post-war period
who aimed to build toward an egalitarian society – the result of the
mismatch between a fragmenting society that has no clear, self-
evident form of its own and the call for architecture to counter this
by providing images and forms of a clear identity and community.
Popper defined the open society as an ‘abstract society’ that
‘functions largely by way of abstract relations, such as exchange
or co-operation’. Because of this, the ‘social groups’ of the open
society are inevitably ‘poor substitutes’ of the ‘real groups’ of a
so-called closed, or tribal society, according to Popper. Yet, this
is the price one has to pay for the ultimate ‘gains’ of an abstract,
open society: a new individualism and personal freedom that
become possible and that go beyond any sort of class system,
allowing for ‘relationships of a new kind (...) freely entered into,
instead of being determined by the accidents of birth’.81 As such,
the ‘abstraction’ of human and social relations is not an original
insight of Popper’s; yet, he connects it to the idea of twentieth
century democracy and thus, he values this abstraction as
something that also holds positive effects and connotations.82
Ordinariness and Light, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1970, The problem of abstraction of human relationships returns in the
p. 180; other references are found
in Upper Case nr. 3, 1960 and Smithsons’ work too, most specifically with the so-called ‘human
Urban Structuring, 1967.
association’ diagram, which they produced together with Bill and
81 Karl Popper, The Open Society
and its Enemies, Routledge & Gill Howell at the ninth CIAM conference in 1953.83 The diagram
Kegan Paul, London, 1945, 2002
edition, pp. 166-167. distinguished between the four categories of house, street, district
82 Popper connects the emer- and city. On the house level (as place of the family and birth, a very
gence of Open Societies with
the emergences of commerce, ‘real’ group one might say) the Smithsons spoke of ‘involuntary
trade, travelling and migration,
basically a society of ‘burgers’; association’, and on the level of the city (the most abstract level)
how the industrial revolution and of ‘voluntary association’. Of the higher levels (higher than the
the new forms of capitalism and
organisation of labour might or house) they said that ‘it is extremely difficult to define the higher
might not be compatible with
such an idea of society is not levels of association, but the street implies a physical contact
quite elaborated.
community; the district an acquaintance community; and the
83 As part of the meetings of
Commission Six at CIAM 9, 1953, city an intellectual contact community’.84 They also stated that
‘Report of the English Group’ as
published in Alison Smithson in a modern society ‘real social groups cut across geographical
(ed.), The Emergence of Team 10
out of C.I.A.M., The Architectural
barriers’, and ‘the “extended family” can be scattered through
Association, London, 1982 many districts and classes of a town; and the “assessment
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 48 group” of the intellectual or artist may be international and non-
85 Ibid., p. 42 collingual, yet with more in common than with many neighbours’.85
dvdh10PRINT.indd 268 21-04-13 16:56

How to respond to such ascending indeterminacy in terms of
architecture and planning was to be the subject of fierce debate
at the Team 10 meetings.
Urban Infrastructure and Building Group Concepts
In the exchanges within Team 10 circles, the idea of a city as a

set of systems loosely working together (as proposed by the
Smithsons) caused clashes between the Smithsons and the Dutch
in particular, Jaap Bakema and Aldo van Eyck. The Dutch were
working toward a full integration of the disciplines of architecture
and urbanism to overcome the shortcomings of functionalist town
planning. Firmly building on the Dutch avant-garde traditions of
De Stijl (Van Doesburg, Rietveld and Mondriaan, less so Oud)
and Dutch Functionalism (the so-called Nieuwe Bouwen, most
notably Duiker and Van der Vlugt, but also the urban studies of
the Rotterdam CIAM group Opbouw), Van Eyck coined this a
‘configurative discipline’, while Bakema spoke about the architect-
urbanist and his idea of ‘Total Space’, a cosmological design
approach embracing all scales from what he called ‘van stoel tot
86 Aldo van Eyck ‘Steps Toward stad’ – from chair to city.86 In the early years, when the Smithsons
a Configurative Discipline’, in:
Forum, Augustus 1962, pp. 81-94; would still seek a ‘unison’ of everything that made up the everyday
Jaap Bakema, Van Stoel tot Stad.
Een Verhaal over Mensen en life patterns speaking of a ‘fabric of culture’ and the ‘poetry of the
Ruimte, De Haan, Zeist / Stan-
daard Boekhandel, Antwerpen, collective’, this seemed to be in line with Van Eyck and Bakema,
1964; Van Eyck and Bakema’s work but by 1962 at the Royaumont meeting a gap opened up between
laid the foundations for what later
would be coined (Dutch) Structu- the parties. Among others, discord arose with regard to the
ralism, esp. by Arnulf Lüchinger,
Structuralism in Architecture Albertian ‘city-as-building’ analogy as favoured by Aldo van Eyck.
and Urban Planning, Karl Krämer
Verlag, Stuttgart 1981; and Wim The idea of the city as a building or big house, and the building
J. van Heuvel, Structuralism in or house as a small city, was a most popular one in architectural
Dutch Architecture, 010 Publis-
hers, Rotterdam, 1992. circles at the time, and certainly with the Dutch architects of
87 The other editors were Dick
Apon, Gert Boon, Joop Hardy,
Forum, the journal that was led by Bakema and Van Eyck among
Herman Hertzberger, and Jurri- others.87 At the 1959 CIAM conference in Otterlo, they had handed
aan Schrofer who was responsi-
ble for the graphic design. out their first issue largely compiled by Van Eyck, which was a
88 Forum, nr. 7, 1959. manifesto-like stocktaking of CIAM and Team 10 ideas under
89 Kenzo Tange was at the Ot-
terlo conference in 1959, Kisho the heading of ‘The Story of Another Idea’, which culminated in
Kurokawa at Royaumont in 1962
(Tange, Kikutake, and Maki were
Van Eyck’s credo ‘vers une “casbah” organisée’. 88
also invited), Kurokawa and
Maki were invited for the 1965
Berlin meeting but didn’t attend, This was the time of the rise of the megastructure, from
Kurokawa came to the 1966
Urbino meeting, and finally, Tange Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale, and the first ideas for Toulouse-
came again to the 1971 meeting
in Toulouse; see for the full list
le-Mirail by the team of Candilis Josic Woods, to the Japanese
of participants reconstructed Metabolists, who in the 1960s would be represented at Team 10
from the archives in: Risselada,
Van den Heuvel, 2005, pp. 346-353. meetings by various members.89 Nevertheless, the city as building
dvdh10PRINT.indd 269 21-04-13 16:56

analogy came under attack within Team 10 circles, and most
notably by the Smithsons. This was surprising since the couple
had issued a rather clearly formulated invitation to the meeting,
including the main topic to be discussed by the participants.
It stated among other things that the participants were to focus
on the possible interrelations between the ideas of an urban
infrastructure and building group concepts. The problem of the
greater number and the large scale were – once again – up for
debate in this Team 10 gathering:
‘Theme of the meeting:
would focus on reciprocal urban infra-structure / building group
concepts.
That a communication system can both “structure” and offer
“building organisation potential is clear: what is less clear is how
to sustain this building organisation potential in the actual building
groups, in the “infil” of the infrastructure.’ 90
The Smithsons then suggested two possible ‘modes of operation’

towards an answer, the first being a concept as proposed by the
Candilis Josic Woods office and the second from the Metabolist
camp:
‘1. An extension of the infra-structure idea into the building group,
so that a system with growth potential is put forward and the ultimate
form is not fully anticipated (the STEM idea in its ideal sense);
2. The “group form” idea, in which all the components are directed
towards the final pre-conceived form (as Maki’s Shinjuku project).’ 91
So, to the participants this might have naturally appeared as a call

for all sorts of megastructure projects merging architecture and
urbanism in an effort to meet the new demands of the post-war
society, technology driven, providing welfare and affluence. Yet, at
the meeting all kinds of large scale projects dealing with this issue
of infrastructure and infill were consistently criticized and rejected
by the Smithsons. For instance, Jaap Bakema’s competition
entry for the University of Bochum was met with disbelief and
scepticism from Peter Smithson. Bakema’s project entailed a
superstructure proposal growing from central entrance points
and making clever use of the falling slopes of the site. Eventually,
the university complex was to be a gigantic complex integrating
all necessary academic functions. Smithson then dismissed the
90 As quoted from a copy, pre-
sent in the Bakema and Smithson project as being too literal, he said:
archives at NAi Rotterdam; see
also my summary of the Royau- ‘I think there is a danger involved in this city – the one-big-building-
mont meeting in: Risselada, Van
den Heuvel, 2005, pp. 99-101. thing – it’s taken too literally where it is in fact a metaphor and
91 Ibid. it doesn’t have to be everything-connected-to-everything, all
dvdh10PRINT.indd 270 21-04-13 16:56

geometries tied to all other geometries. This is system building
which results in a system which is one-big-thing. I have the
strongest feeling that dislocation of the elements is a better
technique on the whole for making a collective than sticking them
together. We agree generally the business of systems of linkages
but they needn’t be physical.’ 92
In the exchanges with Aldo van Eyck the discussion became

completely derailed. Van Eyck showed the work of his favourite and
much admired student Piet Blom, the project of Noah’s Ark, since
he himself had no new projects to show to his Team 10 peers.93
The project embodied the full integration of architecture and
planning as envisioned by Van Eyck. It proposed the large-scale
urbanisation of the Amsterdam region by way of a vast system
of interlocking grid structures based on massive, polycentric
units each housing 10-15.000 people and projected between
the cities of Haarlem, Alkmaar, Amsterdam and Hilversum.
As is well-known at some point Alison Smithson said that some
sort of Gestapo mentality emanated from it, and that to her it
92 Alison Smithson (ed.), represented a fascist-like approach to the issue of the greater
Team 10 Meetings 1953-1984,
Rizzoli, New York, 1991, p. 81.
number.94 Peter Smithson once again called the city-house
93 The relation between Piet analogy as something taken too literal:
Blom and Van Eyck begs more
research; for a first attempt to as- ‘We are looking for systems which allow things to develop as they
sess the work of Blom with regard need to develop, without compromising each other. Here you have
to the Team 10 discourse see Dirk
van den Heuvel, ‘The Kasbah a system which takes absolutely literally the concept that the city is
of Suburbia’, in: AA Files, nr. 62,
2011, pp. 82-89; and Dirk van den a big house. But the city is not a big house, and it’s a complete false
Heuvel, ‘Piet Blom’s Domesti-
cated Superstructures’, in: Delft analogy, a false image.’ 95
Architectural Studies on Housing
(DASH), ‘The Urban Enclave’,
NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2011, This outspoken position of rejecting the megastructure,
pp. 56-70.
94 This incident is well-documen- superstructure or ‘the one-big-building-thing’ as unproductive
ted by now in: Francis Strauven, with regard to the issue of urban infrastructure and building
Aldo van Eyck. The Shape of
Relativity, Architectura & Natura, groups, can also be retraced in the design production of the
Amsterdam, 1998, original Dutch
edition 1994; I myself formulated Smithsons of the time. As a follow-up to their competition
a slightly different interpretation
trying to balance the Van Eyck entry for Hauptstadt Berlin they had entered another Berlin
and Smithson positions, in: competition for Mehringplatz (in autumn 1962), this time together
Dirk van den Heuvel, ‘The Spaces
Between / Encounters’, in: with Günther Nitschke, German architect who was most familiar
Dirk van den Heuvel, Madeleine
Steigenga, Jaap van Triest, Les- with contemporary Japanese architecture and the Metabolists.96
sons: Tupker / Risselada. A Double
Portrait of Dutch Architectural But for Mehringplatz, there was no attempt at a superstructure
Education 1953/2003, SUN, Am- as in the case of the Hauptstadt Berlin competition scheme, but
sterdam, 2003, pp. 96-153.
95 Team 10 Meetings, 1991, p. 79. an almost Baroque elaboration of the future traffic node with the
96 He edited a special issue on systems of car infrastructure and office buildings taken apart
the topic for Architectural Design.
97 The project is published as
instead of being fully integrated into one built structure.97 However,
part of their Urban Structuring this was not the project they showed to their Team 10 colleagues in
book, 1967, and in Architectural
Design. Royaumont. They brought two completely non-architectural plans
dvdh10PRINT.indd 271 21-04-13 16:56

one could say, dealing only with infrastructure and not so much
with building groups. As a follow-up to the 1959 Otterlo incident
they brought again their London Roads Studies, but this time
extended with a second study into what they called Greenways and
Landcastles (1962-1963), and a preservation scheme for the city
of Cambridge called Citizens’s Cambridge (1962). In a way, these
schemes represented the Smithsons’ idea of a Cluster City, that is
creating new identities by way of planning the infrastructure and
actually nothing else. They were the Smithsons’ substitute for the
functionalist masterplan by way of zoning.
The Greenways and Landcastles study was a further elaboration

of the London Roads Studies of 1959. The study was now no
longer about the traffic system but about how to develop a parallel
structure that could offer peace and quiet to the stressful life
of the London citizens. To this end, the Smithsons performed
several analyses of the region, for example to map areas of
‘noise’, ‘smell’ and ‘stress’. Another analysis related to the larger
areas of greenery such as parks, squares, mews and cemeteries,
as to create links between them, the so-called greenways
for pedestrians and cyclists. This new structure sometimes
coincided with combined traffic arteries of roads and railways,
and sometimes it ran parallel of them. The aim was to achieve a
polycentric network which would reduce pressure on the centre.
The ‘landcastles’ were clearly identifiable pockets of residential
neighbourhoods which were surrounded by the greenways and
consequently had a quiet, sheltered character.
The 1962 Citizen’s Cambridge planning study concerned an

early, if not the first preservation scheme in order to maintain
and strengthen the special qualities of the small university
town. Instead of the new requirements of mass car ownership
pedestrians’ interests were put first here. The Smithsons noted
how the qualities of Cambridge were suffering from the town’s own
success. Besides the pressure from the large student populations
Cambridge had to deal with a substantial increase in tourism,
that paradoxically threatened to kill the qualities that were the
town’s attraction. The Smithsons sought a solution by creating
a new regional centre just outside the existing inner city, turning
the old centre into a pedestrian zone, instituting a one-way traffic
scheme and providing a shuttle service and strategically situated
car parks. A new by-pass completed this ‘immediate action plan’,
as they called their proposal.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 272 21-04-13 16:56

However, in the early 1970s the issue of the city as a large-scale
building structure was taken up again in Team 10 circles, also by
Alison and Peter Smithson. Alison’s essay ‘How to Recognise and
Read Mat-Building’ published in Architectural Design in 1974 was
the immediate outcome of this renewed interest.98 The 1973 Berlin
meeting at the just realized Free University complex by Woods
saw large scale projects pinned up on the walls, and the 1974 visit
to Holland included several projects once again dealing with the
idea of the ‘city as house and the building as city’, most notably
the Centraal Beheer project in Apeldoorn by Herman Hertzberger
(1968-1972) and the Kasbah housing project by Piet Blom (1969-
1973).99 The Smithsons themselves had worked on quite an
astonishing project for Kuwait City (1968-1972). Together with the
offices of BBPR, Candilis Josic Woods and the Finnish firm of
Reima Pietilä, they were invited to develop a plan for the whole city
as well as a design for a government building.100 It was from this
commission that the very term ‘mat-building’ first arose, referring
to an approach that stressed the interconnectedness of buildings.
Mat-building as a term did not relate to a specific building type
but rather to a design scale somewhere between architecture
and urbanism. Its purpose was the regulation of buildings without
immediately limiting their programme or form.101
In their proposal the Smithsons tried to pinpoint what they

saw as the specific qualities of the capital of the British
98 Alison Smithson, ‘How to Re-
cognise and Read Mat-Building. protectorate, with the aim of strengthening the city’s identity
Mainstream Architecture as It within the developing, increasingly international economy of the
Has Developed towards the Mat-
building’, in: Architectural Design, Arab peninsula. They decided that the city’s location between
September 1974, pp. 573-590.
99 Risselada, Van den Heuvel,
the desert and the sea was its most notable characteristic.
2005, pp. 182-197 and 202-215. Therefore they proposed an urban pattern that extended along
100 See for more on this: As-
seel al-Ragam, ‘Explorations of the coast instead of reaching inland. The distinct quality of the
Mat-Building. Urban Critique of light at sunrise and sunset – a result of the location between sea
Kuwait, in: Tomas Valena with
Tom Avermaete, Georg Vrachlio- and desert – implied in the Smithson’s view the use of low-rise
tis (eds.), Structuralism Reloaded,
Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart, volumes for the new government centres and business offices.
2011, pp. 150-156.
The low-rise volumes were arranged in an ample 20 × 20 m grid
101 For more on the mat-building
phenomenon see also Hashim of pilotis. Quite like Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital design, which
Sarkis with Pablo Allard and
Timothy Hyde (eds.), Le Corbu- must have been an inspiration to the Smithsons and which was
sier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat
Building Revival, Prestel and Har-
also included in the Mat-building essay’s canonical overview
vard University Graduate School of paradigms, the ground level of the Kuwait buildings was kept
of Design, 2001. Tom Avermaete
discusses the mat-building phe- entirely free for pedestrian encounter. The Smithsons thought
nomenon from the perspective
of the work of the Candilis Josic this consistent with:
Woods office, Another Modern:
The Post-War Architecture and
‘that Arab sense of space as being low, light, unmonumental,
Urbanism of Candilis-Josic- full of stops and starts and shadow – with a high degree of
Woods, NAi Publishers, Rotter
dam 2006. connectedness to allow for change of mind and inroads of time….
dvdh10PRINT.indd 273 21-04-13 16:56

It would seem that the Arabs are more spontaneous, less worldly
than the west or the east.’ 102
The new grid of pilotis differed from the grid of the historic city,
and thus made the new intervention visible and tangible. The new
geometry was attached to the existing city structure by using
mosques as reference points. Long, open gallerias were planned
between the mosques, thereby defining a spatial format for the
otherwise formless structure. Car parks and air-conditioning
buildings were two more infrastructural elements contributing
to the formal definition of the new city structure. Above ground
level, the floors consisted of freely divisable slabs, limited only
by the distance to vertical circulation shafts, all in order to
cope effectively with future changes. Interchangeability would
be the second hallmark of mat-building, after connectedness.
The greatest possible variety of building programmes could be
accommodated, according to the needs and location, ranging
from new ministeries and universities to expanded Souks.
The outside of the built volume was therefore kept rather
amorphous. The architectural expression was derived from a
sophisticated façade system. Overhangs provided shading and
a ‘veil’ of grids allowed for the further regulation of sunlight
and natural ventilation.
It is hard to fully assess the many paradoxes in the work of

Team 10 and the Smithsons at this particular moment in time.
The early 1970s provided the opportunity to look back, to critically
judge built results like the Berlin Free University, Toulouse-le-
Mirail, Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer headquarters or Blom’s
Kasbah housing, while at the same time one could project these
ideas and critique into the future. This was the hinge point
Alison Smithson used when writing her essay on mat-building:
‘having got some built examples – you can now write a little piece,
how to recognise the new architecture – quite clear – how to read
the new architecture.’ 103
Alison Smithson’s introduction to her idea of so-called

mat-building was one of the clearer moments in the Team 10
102 For a rather complete
documentation see Alison and discourse. Whereas normally the group consciously refrained
Peter Smithson, The Charged from synthesizing their ideas into one single message, and
Void: Urbanism, Monacelli Press,
New York, 2005, pp. 136-169; also persisted in producing clouds of thoughts open to a multiform
included in the mat-building
essay in Architectural Design, of interpretations, Smithson published a concise, albeit reduced
September 1974, see p. 576.
summary of the Team 10 meetings in 1973 in Berlin and 1974
Meetings, 1991, p. 124. in Rotterdam. It must be noted at this point that by the early
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1970s Alison’s writing of the history of Team 10 had taken on
a more personal dimension than in earlier years. At the time
Alison Smithson was more or less designated as the editor
of the Team 10 Primer, probably due to her earlier publications
in Architectural Design on the CIAM-Team 10 debates.104
After the 1968 edition of the Primer, this was no longer the case,
any Team 10 publication of hers became part of a larger project
of stocktaking, similar to the one of the ‘Collective Design’
essay series.
The opening lines of Smithson’s 1974 essay clarify our

understanding of the ambitions of Team 10:
‘Mat-building can be said to epitomise the anonymous collective;
where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual
gains new freedoms of action through a new and shuffled order;
based on interconnection, close-knit patterns of association,
and possibilities for growth, diminution, and change.’ 105
To build for the anonymous collective was undoubtedly the

ultimate question for architects of the post-WWII period in
general, and the Team 10 discourse emerged from it, with the
issues of habitat and le plus grand nombre as the key questions
for architects. But Smithson also used her essay to draw
some lines of definition, and in many ways it can be read as
a continuation of the debates of 1962 in Royaumont. In her
short text, which served as an introduction to the sixteen page
overview of qualified examples, Smithson singled out the
Berlin Free University as the one building that made the idea
of mat-building visible. At the same time she fiercely criticized
Hertzberger’s office building, which she called ‘an off-shoot of
104 In the archive one finds notes
with a kind of division of tasks the mat-building phenomenon’. Blom was completely ignored.
between the members, especially There was only a swipe at ‘casbah-ism’.106 Apparently, some
the 1961 Paris Statement; see
also ‘The Aim of Team 10’, in: lines of definition had to be drawn, and Hertzberger’s project
Risselada, Van den Heuvel, 2005,
p. 92. was only included to serve as some sort of counterpoint to
105 Alison Smithson, ‘How to make Woods’ achievements more visible yet.107
Recognise and Read Mat-Buil-
ding’, 1974.
106 Hertzberger has a fantastic,
hilarious story, telling that the
Still, such strong opposition could not mask the fact that
Smithsons simply refused to get ‘casbah-ism’ and mat-building, or even cluster were actually
out of the car when Team 10 ar-
rived at the site of Blom’s project very close concepts, despite the obvious differences between
in Hengelo.
the actual projects. The Smithsons defined their cluster idea
107 In Team 10 Meetings, 1991,
Smithson also criticised the in rather vague terms which seemed to include the kasbah idea:
Hertzberger project in no uncer-
tain terms, see p. 124. ‘The Cluster is a close knit, complicated,
108 Alison and Peter Smithson, often moving aggregation with a distinct structure.’ 108
Ordinariness and Light, 1970,
p. 131.
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Hauptstadt Berlin drawings too, show an explicit reference to the
kasbah typology, perhaps partly meant as a pun for the informed
reader, but it also demonstrates that it was considered a valid
concept in itself.109 And as became clear from the Smithsons’
explanation of the mat-building configuration and how it was
conceived as to accommodate ‘that Arab sense’ of space of
encounter and exchange, one sees how the idea of mat-building
itself implied some sort of ‘casbah-ism’ in the sense of a touch of
mild orientalism quite characteristic of those new post-colonial
realities.
Part of the ongoing debate between the Smithsons and the Dutch
was the appropriate form language suited for the anonymous
collective and the various urban concepts for connectivity and
encounters. The Israeli architect Arthur Glikson and guest at
some of the Team 10 meetings spoke in this sense about a division
between two standpoints, one of ‘understatement’ and one of
‘overdesign’.110 Shadrach Woods and the Smithsons were on the
understatement side, Van Eyck and Hertzberger on the one of
overdesign. Clearly, the Smithsons were aiming for an ordinary,
anonymous vernacular as they argued for in their 1973 book
Without Rhetoric, a demonstration of which they had built with
their Robin Hood Gardens project, also finished in this same
period as the Free University, Centraal Beheer and the Kasbah.
The Dutch, and Hertzberger and Blom probably even more so
than Van Eyck, looked for a language that consistently articulated
individual units and cells, corners, doorsteps and other spatial
transitions. Referring to Blom’s work Peter Smithson would claim
that in Dutch structuralism form and structure were confused,
and that it was actually highly formalistic.111 Yet, this was probably
too easy a dismissal. Rather, one sees the divide between two
different principles of architectural organisation at work: one
109 The archive of the Deutsches
Architektur Museum in Frankfurt
that thought the city as a set of different systems working only
holds all drawings and sketches loosely together (Smithsons), and the other that tried to develop a
of the Smithson competition
entry. coherent, all-encompassing language fully integrating architecture
110 In the report of the Berlin and urban planning (the Dutch structuralists).
meeting as published by Ungers
in 1966, as part of the series
‘Veröffentlichungen zur Architek-
tur’ produced by Ungers when a Part of this ongoing argument between the parties concerned
professor at the TU Berlin: Heft
nr. 3, ‘Team X: Treffen in Berlin’. a juxtaposition of the concepts of the ‘visual group’ and the
111 ‘Mart Stam’s Trousers. ‘appreciated unit’. The former term was proposed by Bakema
A Conversation between Peter
Smithson & Wouter Vanstiphout’, based on the many studies by the Rotterdam Opbouw group, for
in: Crimson (eds.), Mart Stam’s
Pendrecht among others, while the latter was formulated by the
Scenes of Dutch Moral Moder- Smithsons as a form of critique. The visual group was basically a
nism, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam,
1999, p. 132. design unit that accommodated the smallest community unit of a
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district comprising houses for all age groups and family seizes,
thus assuring a socially balanced mix of people living together,
which the visual group would also express architecturally.
The Smithsons for their part had stated that:
‘social groups are not created by location alone but by
community of interest and physical and psycholigical
interdependence. The family can still be tight-knit and possessive
when its members are thousands of miles apart; the “extended
family” can be scattered through many districts and classes of
a town; and the “assessment group” of the intellectual or artist
may be international and non-collingual, yet with more in common
than with many neighbours.’ 112
This so-called appreciative unit that the Smithsons proposed

instead of the visual group was therefore not a specific design
unit, it had to be defined anew for each specific situation. Hence,
it had no clear structure, form or language of its own, necessarily
remaining vague and undefined in those terms.
The Dutch for their part would criticize the more laconic attitude
of the Anglo-Americans toward architectural articulation
and expression. Woods’ Free University for instance became
a target when completed, especially the fire doors which
compartmentalized the long, collective interior streets of the
building effectively killing the very idea of a street. Woods and his
Ordinariness and Light, 1970, p. 42. project architect Manfred Schiedhelm had simply accepted this
113 A reference to this debate
is included in Alison Smithson’s without giving any further design attention to the effect the fire
essay on Mat-building, 1974, doors had on the experience of the continuity of the interior streets
p. 574; according to Smithson
Schiedhelm himself wasn’t very and their semi-public status.113 Shadrach Woods was not present
happy either with the fire doors.
114 The full text reads:
at the 1973 meeting held at the site of his magnum opus, he was
‘On listening to the last tape already too ill with cancer and would die soon. He was sent the
(Berlin April 4 1973)
I really feel I must decline tapes though, and replied with a short poem saying:
To clutter the streets with over-
design. ‘… I really feel I must decline
A door that is more than a door
is much
To clutter the streets with overdesign.
of a bore (except to the Dutch). A door that is more than a door is much
An unroofed space with grass,
a tree, of a bore (except to the Dutch)
Lightwell?, Courtyard?, wait and
see! …’ 114
The intellectual grid is all in your
head.
But people (& pipes) need direct Because of the realism that shimmers through in Woods’
routes, instead
Of so much indeterminate art, defence (a door is a door), and his rejection of any kind of
in which building is clearly to the
last part. spectacular technophile fetisjism, that was so characteristic
Enough pretentious verbiage &
fraud & perversity.
of the megastructure wave and the incipient high tech,
A modest recommendation: Reyner Banham would characterise the architecture language
When next in Berlin, go and see
the university.’ of the Free University as ‘unrhetorical reticence’ and
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‘unsettlingly ineloquent’.115 Yet, this ‘unrhetorical’ quality of the
Free University was the very reason the Smithsons embraced the
building as the most important one of those years, succesfully
developing the kind of ‘non-demonstrative’ language of ‘control’ that
in their eyes belonged to the core efforts of the Modern Movement
and its inheritors.
The Language of Modern Architecture
The shift of the mid-1970s also concerned the issue of architectural

form language as developed through the various design projects
and the Team 10 discourse. Looking at the major built projects:
Hunstanton School, the Economist, St Hilda’s and Robin Hood
Gardens, the consistency of development is striking. From the
late 1970s onward we see that the Smithsons came up with
various, different language systems so to speak. This is only partly
explained by the various contexts in which they were working.
One group of projects concerns the work at Bath University
between 1978 and 1985, and the second the work in Germany, in
Lauenförde and Bad Karlshafen for Tecta and Axel Bruchhäuser
from 1986 onward. Generally speaking, the projects in Bath
represent the ‘lumpish’ language of Conglomerate Ordering, a
heavy, romantic kind of architecture of a bare materiality romantic
quality, inviting weathering and ageing, while the ones in Germany
embody a language of the ‘light touch’, of ‘lattices’ and ‘layering’,
further investigating the architecture of inhabitation.
As discussed the conversation on the language of architecture

as entertained by the Smithsons throughout their life largely
included the Team 10 circle: not just the competition with the
Dutch, or the affinities felt for Woods, but also the summer
school exchanges with De Carlo, and the various lectures the
Smithsons delivered at the invitation of Ungers in Berlin and Ithaca.
Yet, it could also be argued that the whole issue of a language of
architecture belonged to the specific English contribution to the
post-war debate on modern architecture. When the Smithsons spoke
about it, they were also addressing – albeit implicitly – their peers
of Independent Group days, the so-called ‘classicizing party’ and
Reyner Banham, but for instance also John Summerson or Robert
115 Reyner Banham, Megastruc-
Middleton. At all times, it should be remembered that the whole
ture. Urban Futures of the Recent idea of a language of architecture is first and foremost a concept
Past, Thames & Hudson, London,
1976, p. 140. stemming from classical architecture, and as such quite eloquently
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communicated by Summerson.116 He was also the one who put the
whole problem of modern architecture and its principae in terms
of a ‘missing language’, at which occasion he defined language
as a coherent ‘system of inventions’, which in itself is already a first
displacement as might be noted on the side – the notion of system
belonging to a very different realm (technology) than language
itself (culture). At this point, it should also be remembered that
Peter Smithson (and through him Alison) was quite knowledgeable
of classical architecture theory having studied at the Royal
Academy Schools with Richardson, even though he posed as being
antagonistic toward neo-classicist revival as such.117 Despite the
popularity of linguistics in the 1960s then, when the Smithsons
started speaking and writing about ‘language’, this should in the
first instance be understood as a reference to this discourse, even
though it conveniently connects with structuralism, how language is
also social and implies class group dynamics between the academic
and established versus the vernacular, so-called spontaneous
and authentic.
The problem of the fragmentation of the ‘fabric of culture’

posed a major challenge with regard to this question of
architectural form and form language, probably even more so
than Summerson had already pointed out, although he would
also use the formulation of programme as ‘a local fragment of
social pattern’.118 As well-known, the issue of language and
meaning rang throughout the architecture world of the 1960s and
1970s prompting very different responses, which ranged from
116 For instance his introduc- Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction to Aldo Rossi’s
tion of classical architecture to
a larger audience based on six Architettura della Città, from Rowe’s proposal of a Collage City
radio talks for the BBC: The Clas-
sical Language of Architecture, to Eisenman’s interest in deconstructivism. For Alison and
Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1963; Peter Smithson, it meant among others they would start to
literature on the topic is vast, two
releatively recent studies are Syl- speak about language and form language next to the categories
via Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy
and the Invention of a Modern of pattern and form they had used in the early Team 10 years.
Language of Architecture, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA, 1992, and One could say that the ideas regarding pattern and form eventually
the instant classic Adrian Forty’s crystallized in their book Urban Structuring of 1967, which was
Words and Buildings of 2000.
117 See also Catherine Spellman, still about structures (as the title indicates) or systems, mixing
Karl Unglaub (eds.), Peter Smith-
son: Conversations with Students.
Independent Group terms with Team 10 ideas – note how it was
A Space for Our Generation, all about system, structure, relationship, association and pattern:
New York, 2005, in particular ‘It was necessary in the early ‘50s to look to the works of painter
pp. 14-20.
Pollock and sculptor Paolozzi for a complete image system,
for a Theory of Modern Architec- for an order with a structure and a certain tension, where every
ture’, in: RIBA Journal, June 1957,
p. 309. piece was correspondingly new in a new system of relationship.
119 Alison and Peter Smithson, It is our thesis that for every form of association there is an
Urban Structuring, 1967; and Up-
per Case nr. 3. inherent pattern of building.’ 119
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The idea of language and even style in the sense of a modern
vernacular were ultimately elaborated in their Without Rhetoric
of 1973 with the most telling subtitle: An Architectural Aesthetic
1955-1972 (1973); most telling, for its emphasis on the ‘aesthetic’
rather than the ‘ethic’ of course. Without Rhetoric is a compilation
of texts taken from the Brutalist discourse of the 1950s combined
with 1960s and early 1970s texts on use, inhabitation, technology
and classical architecture, including the lectures for Ungers in
Berlin, all re-edited into one large essay. Ordinariness and Light of
1970 represents a middle-ground, but is in the end closer to Urban
Structuring and the issues of the large scale, town planning and
housing, since the included texts dated from the 1950s exclusively.
The key project was the Economist (1959-1964), which is absent
from both Urban Structuring and Ordinariness and Light, but central
to Without Rhetoric. In Without Rhetoric the Smithsons would
situate a new found interest in the issue of style, which they would
date back to the ‘mid-Economist years’, that is around 1962, when
they clashed with most of the Team 10 colleagues at Royaumont:
‘What we are looking for is the gentlest of styles, which whilst
still giving an adumbration of the measures of internal events and
structures, (rooms activities, servicing arrangements, supports),
leaves itself open to – even suggests – interpretation, without itself
being changed.’ 120
It was not a concept of adaptablity or flexibility the Smithsons set

Without Rhetoric, 1973, p. 69. forth here, rather an architecture that anticipated the change of
121 Van Dijk, 1978, p. 32-33; meaning assigned to it by its users through use and experience.
orginal Dutch text: ‘Ik ben uit
op het plezier van vormen die In his interview with Van Dijk Smithson made this clear enough:
interpretabel en niet expliciet
zijn. Habraken en Hertzberger ‘I am looking for the pleasure of forms that are open for
zeggen dat de dingen werktuiglijk
veranderd moeten kunnen worden
interpretation and that are not very explicit. Habraken and
door de mensen. Ik beweer daar Hertzberger say that things must be capable of being changed by
entegen dat de mensen in staat
zouden moeten zijn om hun huis people in an instrumental way. I on the other hand would claim
anders te zien. Je hoeft het niet
fysiek te veranderen, maar je that people should be able to see their house in a different way.
zou in staat moeten zijn je eigen
betekenis eraan toe te voegen.
You don’t have to change it physically, but you should be able to
Het is een proces in de geest van add your own meaning. It’s a process in the mind of the observer.
de beschouwer. Het is de geest
die er bezit van neemt, zoals een It is the mind that takes possession of it, like a young man his
minnaar zijn geliefde. Hij wil haar
niet veranderen, maar niettemin girl. He doesn’t want to change her, but still she becomes a part
wordt zij een deel van hem en
wordt er een wederkerigheid
of him and a reciprocity is developed. I am completely open for
ontwikkeld. clear things, the work of Palladio, Schinkel, Prussian classicism.
Ik sta helemaal open voor heldere
dingen, het werk van Palladio, I would love to live in a such a house, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
Schinkel, het Pruisisch classi
cisme. Ik zou graag in zo’n huis We change it by using it and by the way we think about it.’ 121
willen wonen, maar ik zou er
niet iets aan willen veranderen.
We veranderen het door het te Thus to develop a language, neutrality, anonymity, a ‘non-
gebruiken en door de manier
waarop we erover denken.’ demonstrative’ kind of architecture or an architecture
dvdh10PRINT.indd 280 21-04-13 16:56

‘without rhetoric’ seemed the most appropriate direction to
follow for the Smithsons:
‘it would seem that one of the things that is crucial to the long use
of an idea in architecture (…) is a special sort of anonymity of styling
(a conclusion no one would have dared think about in 1952 [sic]
at the 9th CIAM Congress at Aix-en-Provence), and this is an
important and civilizing realisation.’ 122
Without Rhetoric must (among many other things) be regarded as

a response to Reyner Banham who had criticized the Economist
building as regressively picturesque.123 In this sense the book
itself was not so unrhetorical. Banham was not mentioned, on the
contrary, he was suppressed from the publication even though
the Brutalist argument was repeated and several references to
‘another architecture’ were made. 124 Louis Kahn was present, most
clearly of course in that very notion of a ‘machine-served society’,
which referred to Kahn’s paradigmatic distinction between served
and servant spaces. And when the Smithsons stated that the ‘first
primitive histories of building services as useful things are just
being written’, they referred to Giedion’s Mechanisation Takes
Command of 1948; Banham’s writings on the subject were left out,
Without Rhetoric, p. 85; 1952 both his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age of 1960, and his
should be 1953 actually.
follow-up to Giedion’s book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered
123 Reyner Banham, ‘Revenge
of the Picturesque: English Environment of 1969.
Architectural Polemics, 1945-
1965’, in: John Summerson (ed.),
Concerning Architecture. Essays
on Architectural Writers and Wri- In addition, the couple took a stand against the Futurist position
ting, The Penguin Press, London that Banham (and with him Archigram) would promote. At the
1968, in particular pp. 272-273; see
also Reyner Banham, The New beginning of Without Rhetoric the Smithsons had already made
Brutalism. Ethic or Aesthetic?,
Karl Krämer Verlag, Stuttgart, clear that according to them:
1966, pp. 74-75.
‘When the few had cars then was the time for rhetoric about the
124 His name is left out of the in-
dex of the book, but he is actually machine, of violence as an ideal. When all have machine-energy
mentioned once in a footnote,
nr. 6 on p. 6, in which the Smith- – cars, transistor radios and light – to throw about, then the
sons once again criticize Ban-
ham’s 1966 book: ‘Not much to do
time has come for the lyricism of control, for calm as an ideal:
with the Brutalism that popularly for bringing the Virgilian dream – the peace of the countryside
became lumped into the style
outlined in Reyner Banham’s enjoyed with the self-consciousness of the city-dweller –
The New Brutalism, Architectural
Press, 1966.’ into the notion of the city itself.’ 125
125 Ibid., p. 14; Peter Smith-
son, ‘Without Rhetoric. Some
Thoughts for Berlin’, lecture at Here, the Smithsons reject the Futurist position of Marinetti,
TU Berlin at the invitation of O.M.
Ungers, text dated 20 September ‘violence as an ideal’ and the destructive urge for the new.126
1965, revised 9 October 1965; The Smithsons’ rethinking of the consumer society, its technology
published in: Veröffentlichungen
zur Architektur, Heft nr. 2, Februar and media culture brought the Smithsons to link Sigfried Giedion’s
1966; integrated in: Alison and
Peter Smithson, Without Rheto- call for Befreites Wohnen and Corbusian machine poetics with a
ric, 1973, p. 14.
sense of security, control and continuity for modern city dwellers.
Without Rhetoric, 1973, pp. 92-93. In Without Rhetoric they would recognize this mostly in the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 281 21-04-13 16:56

work of Mies van der Rohe, but already by 1959, at the occasion
of an AA School symposium organised together with the ICA,
Peter Smithson would talk about a ‘humane, poetic, disciplined,
machine environment for a machine society’ while stating that
‘without Le Corbusier there would be no modern architecture
as an ideal, although there would be modern buildings’.127
And according to him Le Corbusier’s ‘dream’ was of a ‘city of
shining towers in a sea of trees, with the automobile used at the
scale at which it is a moving poetic thing and not a stinking object
– an essentially controlled, quiet environment with the energies
of transit and communication channelled and not randomly and
wastefully displayed’. Any display of mechanisms, which was part
of the celebration of the machine by (neo-)Futurist tendencies,
was now considered an obsolete ‘early nineteenth century
attitude towards machines’.128
This was written five years after Hunstanton, where almost

anything was ‘displayed’, and about nine months before the
Smithsons would embark upon their Economist project, in which
we find the application of cladding and suspended ceilings. The
language suitable for a ‘machine-served society’ was apparently
consistently under scrutiny, examined and elaborated into new
variations. Alongside such classic issues as mass-production,
standardization and repetition129 – all in order to raise the standard
of living for all (‘mass-production would give houses to those
who had previously none’ 130) – there is the issue of the part and
127 ‘Le Corbusier. A Symposium’,
in: Architectural Association Jour- the whole and how part and whole were to be mutually defined
nal, nr. 832, May 1959, pp. 254-262. through a coherent language system. The Smithsons addressed
128 Ibid.; Reyner Banham spoke
after Peter Smithson contesting this issue at various instances in their career, and again, it shows
Smithson’s view on almost every-
thing he had said. the extent to which their conception of a language of modern
129 Quite extensively discussed architecture was imbued with classicist notions - and this time
in Without Rhetoric, also in
relation to classical and neo- in opposition to the Picturesque, that had no affinities with such
classicist architecture.
‘structuralist’ notions.131
130 Peter Smithson, ‘The
Rocket’, in: Architectural Design,
July 1965, pp. 322-323; it served
as an introduction to the theme In 1965, in a two page statement Peter Smithson came up with
issue dedicated to technology two basic concepts to understand the evolution from Hunstanton
and architecture, it would be
almost fully integrated into to the Economist, and one may add, to Robin Hood Gardens a
Without Rhetoric.
131 Banham in his ‘Revenge of
few years later. This piece was titled ‘The Rocket’ after the 1829
the Picturesque’ of 1968 touches ground-breaking steam locomotive design by Stephenson –
on this too, when he stated that
the younger generation had a reference to Smithson’s own northern background of course.
absorbed picturesque planning
techniques and thus were giving The text addressed the issue of technology and how from it a new
in to the policies of The Architec-
tural Review camp, even though
language might evolve, not just from the machine itself, but from
the younger architects would its much broader context: the Stephenson invention also involved
stick to a modern form language
as if embarrassed to admit this. the transformation of mobility systems, the new landscape and the
dvdh10PRINT.indd 282 21-04-13 16:56

concomitant modes of perception (as always with the Smithsons
understanding of technology and its cultural repercussions).
In ‘The Rocket’ Smithson distinguished two possible modes
of making things: one a method of the ‘assembled’, the other
‘designed’. Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive stood for the
assembled, all of its parts still recognizable and clearly definable,
remaining themselves, whereas the counter-example, a modern
locomotive (a photo of an unidentified English electric diesel
locomotive), represented the ‘designed’, where special parts came
together in one way only, namely to constitute the ‘object’ of the
modern locomotive. This distinction between the ‘assembled’
and ‘designed’ came close to another such proposition by the
Smithsons, namely the one of an aesthetics of ‘concealment’
and one of ‘display’, of a year later, published in the context of
product design and home interiors.132
From here onwards the Smithsons started to re-arrange various

language systems so to speak, and their interrelated development:
from the ‘Constructivist/Sachlichkeit’ that used ‘ready mades’
provided by industry (steel beams, glazing, ships handrails
and so forth and so on) to the ‘Purist/Bauhaus’ that developed
a ‘unifying aesthetic’ while absorbing such achievements of
machine technology, from the body of an E-type Jaguar to the
logic of Miesian curtain walls that were of a language in which a
‘catalogue’ aesthetic had been sublimated into the unique and
one-off. The Smithsons considered the IIT Metal and Mineral
Building as an exemplar of the ‘assembled’, the later Colonnade
Apartments in Newark of the ‘designed’, for it was in their view
the outcome of a perfected technology of repetition and quality
control of the serially produced, one which resulted in a coherent
architectural language. In this sense they also referred to the
architectural practice of SOM. Despite the apparent banality of
132 Peter Smithson, ‘Conceal- the commercial aspect (they mentioned Lever House here) SOM
ment and Display. Meditations on
Braun’, in: Architectural Design, succeeded in delivering an equal level of coherence, especially
July 1966; also integrated in
Without Rhetoric, 1973. so in the case of the Manhattan Chase Bank. The influence of
133 Alison and Peter Smithson, SOM must in fact have been tremendous, and is perhaps too
Without Rhetoric, 1973, pp. 17-19;
An unnoted SOM example might often underestimated. When discussing inspirational examples
be their Manufacturers Hanover
Trust Company bank building of
that marked the further development of modern architecture the
1953-1954, that stands on a corner, Smithsons listed, without blinking, the Chase Manhattan Bank
just like the bank in the Econo-
mist group, and equally similar alongside Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Mies and Hilberseimer’s
has a public bel-etage accessed
with escalators and of a larger Lafayette Park in Detroit, and Max Bill’s Hochschule in Ulm.133
than standard floor height, clearly
expressed through the modula-
tions of the curtain wall system Although not as something to be exhibited or displayed then, for
that lends the volume its specific
identity. the Smithsons technology maintained a crucial role in furthering
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the language of modern architecture with the experience of
the Economist as a moment of learning, making another step.
Talking about air systems and lighting they said:
‘we have tried to melt these devices into the architecture to
make them one with it: mostly by concealment or contrivance:
and no special enrichment or re-ordering has taken place, rather
a gentle modification without definite flavour.
We are now trying more confidently to think servicing, think air-
systems, think lifts and other mechanisms: think them into the
matrix of ordering decisions from the very beginning, as we have
already managed to do with vehicle movement, and storage and
servicing. It is difficult because here today’s architect is on his
own: Brunelleschi didn’t have air-conditioning, and Violet-le-Duc
didn’t theorize about central vacuum cleaning systems.’ 134
In the Economist this lead to an ‘ambient’ kind of architecture,

very different from earlier Brutalist rough poetry it seems:
‘Ambient light, ambient air, no fuss about detail – awareness in
a quiet way of the sweet functioning: that is architecture; and
in a large building, its achievement involves us now with the
organising of the mechanisms and services with a clear formal
objective in mind. For, as Kahn says, the “suspended ceiling” speaks
about nothing – not of the services it hides, not of the structure
which is above, not of the space below – nothing, except perhaps
its manufacturer’s taste.
In a real building the light and the space and the air are one…
sniff the air… sense the space… know how to act. How to keep
this sense of what is going on… where the light and heat and air
are coming from… how to get in and out… and where the lifts are…
these are the questions.
In the Economist Building we answered them with a simple plan
with an obvious services core; a suppression of the pipe-work
with an easily-read hierarchy of access panels from the sealed
tight to the readily accessible, doors to walk through which cannot
be confused with cupboards; light, on the whole being made
just to seem to be around, air arriving and departing obviously,
but unobtrusively, the arrangement of the storage and work areas,
so that they indicate their intended use.’ 135
It was all about a new kind of vernacular, a matter-of-factness to be

understood ‘instinctively’ according to the Smithsons; and perhaps
more important, this went beyond the sheer visual, inhabiting the
134 Ibid., pp. 60-61. architecture of the ‘machine-served society’ one ‘senses’ space,
135 Ibid., p. 48. where to go and how to behave, rather than ‘seeing’ it. This idea
dvdh10PRINT.indd 284 21-04-13 16:56

seemed to be very different from the transparency of the As Found
of the 1950s, and its non-visual aspect would be further radicalized
with the Conglomerate idea of the 1980s.
Although Smithson seemed to suggest a linear development,

from the rejected Futurist position as something belonging to
the nineteenth century to the machine-calm of the mid-twentieth
century, from an ‘assembled’ Rocket to a ‘designed’ diesel electric
locomotive, and from display to concealment, such straightforward
development cannot be discerned in their own work. Rather, at
different times and depending on the specifics of the project we see
the ‘assembled’ and ‘designed’ re-appear differently elaborated.
For instance, the House of the Future belongs to the ‘designed’
with its special parts and concealment of the mechanisms of air
conditioning, pipes and other equipment. But for the Sugden House,
of the same year, a very different approach was developed, one in
which we can still ‘read’ the distinct qualities of the constitutive
elements such as the standard Crittal windows and the re-used
stock brick. Hunstanton seems a clear example of the ‘assembled’,
when thinking of the abundant use of steel beams and how they
work together with the concrete floor elements, the brick infill
and glazing system, but also the famous water tank and as found
display of the wash basins in the wash rooms. For the Economist
the Smithsons designed a double system, a supporting, load-
bearing skin structure (the Economist is not a curtain wall building)
and a protecting cladding system (the roach-bed Portland stone,
the suspended light ceilings, but also the full integration of services
into partitioning walls and window sills), that absorbed the lessons
of the ‘designed’ systems of Mies and SOM.136 St Hilda’s seems
more of a hybrid system structurally speaking, with the added
layer of timber bracing that acts as a veil or ‘yashmak’. Robin Hood
Gardens can be regarded as an example of the language of the
‘designed’, in this case a completely coherent language of (pre-
stressed) prefab concrete, even though its mullions seem an overt
reference to the steel curtain wall systems of America.
At this point, the issue of a form language of modern architecture

touches on the Brutalist concern for the handling of materials
and bringing out their specific qualities. In a retrospective text
Peter Salter, former office assistant to the Smithsons, has
noted how the detailing and preparing during the construction
phase of a project was a special part of the work done in the
‘The Pavilion and the Route’, in: office. According to Salter the construction details contained
Architectural Design, March 1965,
pp. 143-146. certain design strategies bringing together the specific idea
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of order, use and meaning. Salter worked on the drawings for
the Second Arts Building at Bath University. He explained
how ‘construction rules’ were developed from ‘strategic
ideas’, which ‘provided a coherence to the details that enabled
a “reading” of the built spaces:
‘One such idea was “economy of means” as an aesthetic
tool – that is to say, a decision was made to spend the money
on the things that the inhabitant touched in the building.
This offered a radical understanding of the space. Ceilings were
left as constructed and services were surface-mounted, but
doors, window linings and spandrel panels were finished with
British Columbian pine and beech-faced plywood panelling.
Door linings and other frames were constructed out of solid timber,
not built up from small-section stuff. This clarity offered a kind of
calmness to the space.’ 137
And Salter added:

‘The idea of reading strategies from the detail was all around us.
The office and home of the Smithsons was in an Italianate lodge,
its layout of historical propriety converted into a new pattern of
use. Each alteration to the house was marked by a plywood and pine
component or lining. This rigour enabled an understanding of the
different generational uses of the building.’ 138
Both examples by Salter represent other, later variations on

the ‘assembled’ and ‘designed’, with concealment and display
yet again defined in slightly different ways specifically tailored
to the project. As an instrument to develop and fine-tune such
design strategies, the working drawings were thus crucial to
the Smithsons’ work. Salter meticulously described how office
routines revolved around most accurate drawing methods
137 Peter Salter, ‘Strategy and
Detail’, in: ‘Architecture is not specific to the Smithson office. He mentioned among others how
Made with the Brain’: The Labour
of Alison and Peter Smithson, Ar-
interns were asked to first draw axonometrics of past projects,
chitectural Association, London, to get familiarized with the Smithson laborious way of thinking
2005, pp. 40-49; this quote on p. 44.
138 Ibid., p. 48. and working, how Peter would use 1:25 and 1:1 drawings for both
139 Another former assistant to exploration and information, how he would also use notes and
the office, Louisa Hutton, also
gives a wonderful account of her free hand drawing 1:25, and how Lorenzo Wong – one of the most
time working with the Smith-
sons: ‘Godparents’ Gifts’, in:
faithful assistants in the office – in particular would scrutinize
‘Architecture is not Made with the all such drawings, marking them up with red pencil revisions.139
Brain’: The Labour of Alison and
Peter Smithson, Architectural As- The importance attached to working drawings returns in the key
sociation, London, 2005, pp. 50-60;
Christopher Woodward, ‘Drawing publications of built projects, where the Smithsons make sure
the Smithsons: An Artisanal Me-
moir’, in Max Risselada (ed.), Ali-
that such drawings were always included, as well as extensive
son & Peter Smithson. A Critical descriptions of the construction specifics.
Anthology, Ediciones Polígrafa,
Barcelona, 2011, pp. 258-267.
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What once again comes through in Salter’s description is how
such strategies of detailing were part of the Smithsons’ aim to
set up ‘a dialogue between object and user’. This dialogue was
to be based on a form language evolved for ‘the architecture
of a machine-served society on a basis of the pleasures of
common use’.140 It is the ‘simple life, well done’ as recognised
by the Smithsons in the cases of Bath, Lafayette Park, Oud’s
Kiefhoek housing or the former ‘burgher cultures’. According
to the Smithsons there was no real reason why that ‘trick’ could
not be pulled off again. This was at least what they tried to do
in Robin Hood Gardens:
‘We have tried to evolve the form-language to indicate and to
enhance use. Concrete near the eye is smooth and moulded to
be self-cleaning and neat – able to be touched. Concrete far from
the eye is coarser – it is concrete to be passed by, not lived with.
Joinery to be touched has smoothly rounded edges and is made of
excellent timber of straight knot-free grain – inviting further waxing
and polishing. Where much wear or weather is expected, timber is
protected by paint, glossy – suggesting wiping down, re-painting.
And so on.’ 141
One wonders perhaps what has happened to the glamour couple

of Marylin Monroe and Joe diMaggio, who initially inhabited the
streets-in-the-air of Golden Lane. Although ‘re-painting’ was
already a part of the Brutalist statement in Architectural Design,
January 1955 (the very last words: ‘the repainting of the Villa at
Garches?’), there it seemed to be part of a reworking of Surrealist
strategies capable of absorbing and turning around the media
spectacle, even including the handling of materials that was also
mentioned in that statement. Repainting here, in 1972, was thought
of as part of a fabric of culture free from that ‘iceberg’ of the mass
communications with its ‘baser films and instincts’, a culture of
care and mutual responsibility as situated by the Smithsons in
those workers’ houses in Kiefhoek and Pieter de Hooch paintings.
As noted, the Smithsons seem to have been aware that the

dream of an egalitarian society brought about by a welfare state
had started to falter along the way. Already in Without Rhetoric
Without Rhetoric, 1973, p. 77. they wrote:
141 Peter Smithson, ‘Signs of ‘a form-language based on common use and the pleasures of
Occupancy’, in: Architectural
Design, February 1972, pp. 97-99; common use is resisted today in spite of its having been normal
reprinted as verbal illustration
with the first essay in the Col-
to all Europe since the rise of the Burgher cultures of the 1400s.
lective Design series, ‘Initiators Now form-language can set up a dialogue between object and user…
and Successors’, in: Architectural
Design, October 1973, pp. 621-623. the user responds by using it well… the object improves: or it is
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used badly… the object is degraded… the dialogue ceases: and it
can revive… for there is a secret and permanent life in things solidly
established and intensely made, that can come alive for other uses,
other generations – even when the damage is extremely severe,
only a ruin or a fragment left.’ 142
Of course, when this was put down on paper, the Smithsons had
no idea to what extent Robin Hood Gardens was to become a ruin
itself, a so-called sink estate, largely due to poor maintenance
management by the council authorities. But the problem is not so
much the vandalism that hit Robin Hood Gardens estate – in the
1970s vandalism was rampant throughout the country and left no
urban estate untouched.143 The main question concerns to what
extent did Robin Hood Gardens embody welfare state aspirations,
while at the same time being a fragment, an intervention in an
existing and decaying urban-industrial fabric? Surprisingly
unshaken by the strong criticism on their work and ideas during
the postmodernist years, the Smithsons were unequivocal in a late,
retrospective statement in The Charged Void:
‘This building for the socialist dream – which is something different
from simply complying with a programme written by the socialist
state – was for us a Roman activity and Roman at may levels:
… in that it was built for an elaborate system of government and one
with its own permanent building bureaucracy;
… in that it takes its stand alongside the heroisms of what has been
made before – the port and the roads;
… in that it is as heroic as supplying a Romanised city with water:
whether one sees this service as dramatic and obvious as an
aqueduct or as secret and craftsmanly as the underground conduit;
… in that one has to deal with the problem of repetition;
… in that it is a bold statement working with the land forms;
Without Rhetoric, 1973, p. 77. … in that it provides a place for the anonymous client;
143 In the early 1970s, vandalism … in that it wants to be universal, greater to our little state –
became a key to read the state of
the country, by some as a form of related to a greater law.’ 144
working class and/or youth rebel-
lion to middle class paternalism
and its values (dubbed ‘political The latter statement remains especially puzzling in the
vandalism’); see among others
Colin Ward (ed.), Vandalism, sense that the universal is mentioned again, since in the
Van Nostrand Reinhold, New
York, 1973 (which incidentally 1950s, within the CIAM debates universalism was already
opens with a photo of the Pruitt-
Igoe Housing estate); another rejected in favour of cultural specificity. Clearly, Robin Hood
key publication of the time was Gardens, its form language and the handling of materials still
of course Oscar Newman, Defen-
sible Space, Macmillan, New York, aspired to embody some sort of general, societal framework
1972.
in the spirit of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. With the
The Charged Void: Architecture, fragmentation of society and the demise of welfare state
The Monacelli Press, New York,
2001, p. 296. planning we see that projects of a ‘Roman’ ambition remained
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absent from the Smithsons’ work after Robin Hood Gardens
and after ‘The Violent Consumer’. If one were to characterize
the subsequent work, one might define it as the creation
of ‘fragments of an enclave’. More than before a strategy
of intervention and transformation is proposed to arrive at
specific qualities of place.
One of the questions that arises at this point is whether there is

still one common language available or even possible for modern
architecture; a common language which might hold a multitude
of variations, or whether one should accept and work with a
multitude of architectural languages. The Smithsons do accept
a variation of ‘patterns’ with equally varied centres in the case
of town planning and the scattered landscape of a Cluster City
as suggested by Alison Smithson in ‘The Violent Consumer’.
But equally clearly, the Smithsons resisted the idea of an
eclecticism of architectural languages. In his 1978 interview with
Van Dijk, Peter Smithson was unequivocal about this, he opposed
the idea of a collage of languages; he might have been referring
to Jencks among others and his book The Language of Post-
modern Architecture of 1977:
‘The fashionable architecture critics claim that the style and
architectural theory for today should be the one of eclecticism.
They maintain that the only language which can be understood by
many is the one that is derived from a collage of other languages.
It is a kind of theft. That is so alien to puritan cultures that it is for
me impossible to work in that way. So logically speaking, I have to
accept that it is possible to extend the language we already have
and to make it more explicit.’ 145
145 Van Dijk, 1978, p. 32; original

Dutch text: ‘Door de modieuze Smithson thought so, because to him language itself is capable
architectuurcritici wordt beweerd
dat de stijl en de architectuur- of holding a multitude of meanings; ambiguity is always at play
theorie tegenwoordig die van
het eclecticisime moeten zijn.
even in the case of the most clearly articulated signs and words,
Ze houden staande dat de enige as demonstrated by the example of historical architecture,
taal die door velen begrepen kan
worden er een is die door een col- including Palladio’s work or neo-classicism.146 Meaning is then
lage van andere talen verkregen
wordt. Het is een soort diefstal. something essentially ‘open’, it is latent and slumbering,
Dat is iets wat puriteinse cultu-
ren zo vreemd is, dat het voor mij
a ‘vagueness’ to be actualized in time, accrued by use and all
onmogelijk is op die manier te sorts of forms of appropriation, rather like Van Eyck had postulated
werken. Ik moet dus logischerwijs
accepteren dat het mogelijk is in his debate with Jencks and the semiologists.147
om de taal die we al hebben uit te
breiden en explicieter te maken.’
146 Ibid. The Smithsons would continue to pursue their project for a
147 Aldo van Eyck, ‘A Miracle of
Moderation’, in: Charles Jencks,
‘fabric of culture’ that paradoxically took the shape of an ‘open
George Baird (eds.), Meaning in society’ made out of enclaves: inviolate fragments as safe havens
Architecture, George Braziller,
New York, 1969. in the larger fabric that was the great, globalised society. It is at
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this point that they seemed to concur with Kenneth Frampton’s
idea of a Critical Regionalism, which he developed in response
to the dominance of postmodernism in the early 1980s:
‘Its salient cultural precept is “place” creation; the general
model to be employed in all future development is the enclave
that is to say, the bounded fragment against which the ceaseless
inundation of a place-less, alienating consumerism will find itself
momentarily checked.’ 148
Such enclaves, the creation of which will be the topic of the final
chapter, can be a single cell for contemplation, or a vast expansion
of landscape and sky; they act as places for regeneration and
revitalization, just as they are vessels for continuity preserving
specific values of culture while carrying them into the future.
148 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Pros-

pects for a Critical Regionalism’
in: Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing
a New Agenda for Architecture. An
Anthology of Architectural Theory
1965-1995, Princeton Architectu-
ral Press, New York, 1996, p. 482;
originally published in Perspecta:
The Yale Architectural Journal,
nr. 20, 1983, pp. 147-162. Surprisin-
gly, in the 1985 edition of Modern
this statement is not included
in the final chapter on Critical
Regionalism.
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7 AT HOME
Domesticity and The Order of Things
‘Gone Swimming’
With the event of postmodernism in architecture Alison and

1 See Erten Erdem’s PhD re-
search for more on this: Shaping Peter Smithson were relegated to a position in the margins
‘The Second Half Century’: The
Architectural Review 1947-1971, of the ongoing discourse. Major shifts in the British world of
MIT, Cambridge MA , 2004.
architectural publishing accompanied the postmodernist surge
2 Steve Parnell, Architectural
Design 1954-1972, PhD Thesis, and had an immediate impact on the Smithsons’ access to their
University of Sheffield, 2011, esp.
Chapter 6 ‘A Critical History of familiar publicity platforms. In 1973 De Cronin Hastings retired
AD 1965-1972’. As is well-known
the 1970s brought economic
and said farewell to his lifetime project of The Architectural
hardship for the building industry, Review; Pevsner and Richards had quit their editorial work for
architects and their journals
included; Parnell has researched the Review just two years earlier, in 1971.1 But more importantly
this in relation to both The Review
and Architectural Design, see in 1975 Andreas Papadakis, owner and founder of the publishing
p. 214 and 216.
house Academy Editions, bought the troubled Architectural
3 When listing the items on
and/or by the Smithsons in the Design, after which he transformed it into a mouthpiece of the
pages of Architectural Design it
is striking to see how important new postmodernist fashion in architecture.2 The last substantial
the late 1960s and early 1970s piece by the Smithsons as published in Architectural Design was
actually were, when Robin Mid-
dleton was technical editor of the Peter Smithson’s ‘Oxford and Cambridge Walks’, in the June issue
journal. Only 1970 shows a dip in
the Smithson production for the of 1976. After that, no major text by the Smithsons would appear in
magazine: in 1964 they appeared
in 4 out of 12 issues, in 1965 in the pages of the magazine any more, whereas in the preceding two
9/12, in 1966 in 6/12, in 1967 in 4/12, decades they had dominated the pages of the journal, especially
in 1968 3/12, in 1969 in 6/12, in 1971
they appeared in 6/12 issues, in during the last three years before Architectural Design changed
1972 in 5/12, in 1973 in 4/12, in 1974
in 7/12, in 1975 also in 7/12, and owners.3 From 1973 to 1975 the ‘Collective Design’ series of essays
in 1976 in 2/12; after that nil. Total
overview: 1951, Sep; 1952, nil; was published, just as two major pieces on the history of Team 10,
1953, Sep, Nov, Dec; 1954, Jan, in casu Alison Smithson’s mat-building essay in September 1974
Aug, Sep; 1955 Jan, Jun, Sep,
Dec; 1956, Mar, Jul, Oct; 1957, Apr, (almost a special theme issue) and her extensive account of the
Jun; 1958, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Oct,
Nov; 1959, Apr, Jul, Sep; 1960, Feb, 1962 Royaumont meeting in November 1975. Eventually, the one
Apr, May, Sep, Dec; 1961, Feb,
Jul, Nov; 1962, Apr, Aug, Dec; publication by Academy Editions dedicated to the Smithsons was
1963, Jul, Sep, Oct; 1964, Jun, the monograph The Shift, of 1982, with David Dunster as chief
Aug, Sep, Oct; 1965, Feb, Mar,
May, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec; editor of this series of monographs, who mentioned that, by that
1966, Feb, May, Jul, Aug, Sep,
Nov; 1967, Jan, Jul, Sep, Dec; time, he considered the Smithsons as unjustly forgotten, the very
1968, Apr, Sep, Oct; 1969, Jan,
Apr, Jun, Jul, Oct, Dec; 1970, Sep; reason to offer them once again a podium.4
1971, Feb, Mar, May, Jul, Aug, Oct;
1972, Jan, Feb, Apr, Jun, Sep;
1973, Feb, Aug, Oct, Nov; 1974, This shifting position – from the zenith of their fame in the
Jan, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Sep, Nov;
1975, Apr, May, Jun, Aug, Sep, early 1970s to the margins of the discourse by the end of the
Oct, Nov; 1976, Jun, Oct.
decade – can be best demonstrated by the assessment of the
4 In conversation with the author
17 September 2007. Smithsons’ achievements by the star author of Academy Editions,
293 At Home
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Charles Jencks, in particular on the basis of his famous diagram
of the ‘Evolutionary Tree to the Year 2000’.5 As well-known, the
diagram is a chronological index depicting the major historical
developments of the architecture of the twentieth century by the
use of architects names and style labels only (no buildings or
designs were included for instance); a pattern of splitting and
merging clouds of the various tendencies resulted, which were
categorized under the metahistorical terms of ‘logical’, ‘idealist’,
self-conscious’, ‘intuitive’, ‘activist’ to ‘unself-conscious 80%
of environment’.6 The diagram was first published in 1969, with
Alison and Peter Smithson’s names included, just as the labels
‘Brutalism’, ‘CIAM-Team X’ and ‘Pop’, whereas in the updated
version of 2000 the Smithsons were removed. ‘Brutalism’ was kept,
‘CIAM-Team X’ and ‘Pop’ as well, just as their Team 10 fellows
Bakema, Van Eyck, and Erskine or their main rival Stirling, while
new names included were De Carlo, Ungers, and Woods; also
writers were part of the historic movements now such as Colin
Rowe and Jencks himself.7 The Smithsons were quite aware of the
changing mood of the 1970s, in 1978 Alison Smithson wrote with
some dismay about the new situation and historicist collageing:
‘Now it is the era of the ragpickers and the antique dealers.
So be it; it is no joy to fight the zeitgeist…. So we go swimming.’ 8
This shifting position within the architecture discourse can

be retraced by other instances as well. In the early issues of
Oppositions, the journal of the then just established Institute for
5 Charles Jencks, Architecture
and Beyond. Success in the Art Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, they were still
of Prediction, Wiley-Academy, ranked as central figures. Eisenman republished his review of the
Chicester, 2000.
6 Ibid., these terms were con- Robin Hood Gardens estate in the very first issue of the journal of
sciously borrowed from Claude
Lévi-Strauss. 1973, a full bibliography of the Smithsons’ writings was published
7 Ibid., pp. 4-5 and 46-47; the by Julia Bloomfield (who happened to be one of the former office
name of Sandy Wilson was also
removed from the last version. assistants), and Ken Frampton wrote a most laudatory review of
8 One page typoscript, Alison their Without Rhetoric, setting it against Venturi’s Complexity and
Smithson, ‘The Smithsons……
Gone Swimming’, dated July 2 Contradiction and Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture.9 In 1975
1978.
l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui published a special issue evaluating
9 Peter Eisenman, ‘From Golden
Lane to Robin Hood Gardens; the work of Team 10. In a much more critical mood Frampton
or If You Follow the Yellow Brick
Road, It May not Lead to Golders measured the internal contradictions of the claims made by the
Green’, in: Oppositions, nr. 1,
1973, reprint of the publication in
self-proclaimed inheritors of the CIAM legacy. By 1977 the tables
Architectural Design, September had turned completely. Charles Jencks – one time a (critical)
1972; Julia Bloomfield, ‘A Biblio
graphy of Alison and Peter attendant to the Team 10 meeting of 1966 in Urbino – picked up
Smithson’, in : Oppositions,
nr. 2, 1974, pp. 105-123; Kenneth what Frampton had left to his readers to conclude for themselves.
Frampton, ‘On Alison and Peter
Smithson’s Without Rhetoric:
To Jencks the ‘essentially humanist values of “place, identity,
An Architectural Aesthetic 1955- personality, home-coming”’ could not be communicated by any
1972’, in: Oppositions, nr. 6, 1976,
pp. 105-107. kind of architectural language ‘based on the machine metaphor’
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in the way the Smithsons and Team 10 were pursuing according
to Jencks: ‘their Robin Hood Gardens simply does not do the
trick’.10 Instead, Robin Hood Gardens was classified as an example
of architecture signifying ‘social deprivation’: ‘the repetitive
pattern and homogeneous material’ signified ‘council housing’,
‘anonymity’, and ‘the authorities didn’t have enough money to use
wood, stucco, etc.’ A strategically placed photograph of critic
Paul Goldberger at the elevator with his hands raised as if held
at gun point with an equally strategic caption summed up the
final verdict:
‘The long empty streets in the air don’t have the life or facilities
of the traditional street. The entry ways, one of which has been
burned, are dark and anonymous, serving too many families.
The scheme has many of the problems which Oscar Newman
traced to a lack of defensible space. Here architectural critic
Paul Goldberger mimes an act that often occurs.’ 11
There is quite some innuendo to briefly recapture here, but the

following points may be mentioned in order to try and grasp the
shifting positions and the confused, at times confusing assumptions
behind the arguments exchanged. First, what remains striking is
that in suggesting that the architecture of Robin Hood Gardens
provoked crime and other deviant behaviour, Jencks seems to
take up a behaviourist position, not unlike the modernists, and
the functionalists in particular. Whereas the Smithsons, although
aiming for the establishment of a clear connection between use
10 Charles Jencks, The Language and architectural form, they also propounded that there was a
of Post-modern Architecture,
Academy Editions, London, 1977, simultaneous disconnection between use and architecture at work
revised enlarged edition 1978,
pp. 22-23. – when they spoke of the ‘secret’ or ‘parallel’ life of architecture for
11 Caption to illustrations nrs. instance, or when they observed that modernist buildings and their
34 and 35, p. 23; this particular
image triggered a response by language were appreciated very differently in different contexts,
Peter Smithson published in
Architectural Design, nrs. 7-8, the same sort of (modern) building could be characterized by some
1977, p. 461, which was then ans-
wered by Jencks in Architectural
as a ‘prison’ and by others as ‘releasing’.12 And although Jencks
Design, nrs. 9-10, 1977, p. 588. claimed that his argument for a postmodernist language was built
Peter Smithson talks about how
Goldberger seems to act as if hit on the notion of ‘multi-valence’ in contrast to modern architecture
on the head, Jencks claims it was
to mime an act of vandalism as if that would comprise a ‘univalent’ phenomenon, the sort of ambiguity
breaking the lights.
(or ‘vagueness’) as observed by the Smithsons was precluded from
12 The first remark was made in
the context of the Hunstanton his understanding of architecture as a linguistic grammar system.
School, see also The Charged
Void: Architecture, 2001, p. 42; the Indeed, the two parties entertained a profoundly different notion
second by Alison in her essay of meaning: Jencks thought of meaning as something coded, as
‘The Violent Consumer’, 1974.
13 Peter Smithsons, ‘Signs of semiotics, something to be ‘read’ visually, whereas the Smithsons
Occupation’ in: Architectural
Design, October 1972, pp. 97-99;
(and Team 10) understood meaning as the outcome of patterns
‘Signs of Life – Venturi and of ‘use’ and experience (here they came close to the Lefebvrean
Rauch’, in: Architectural Design,
August 1976 pp. 496-498. notion of lived experience).13 A similar different kind of conception
295 At Home
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with regard to the notions of meaning, identity, everyday
experience and semiotics comes to the fore when one compares
the Smithsons’ essay ‘Signs of Occupancy’ of 1972 and published
in Architectural Design, with the famous ‘Signs of Life’ exhibition
by Denise Scott-Brown, Steven Izenour and Robert Venturi on
Levittown, which was on show in 1976 in Washington.
When Jencks did ‘read’ modern architecture as having multiple

meanings (in apparent contradiction to his own claims about
modern architecture being univalent), it was almost invariably for
the sake of ridicule. He admitted himself to ‘modern architecture-
bashing’ as a ‘form of sadism which is getting far too easy’.14
Mies van der Rohe was a main target (technology as fetish), but
also Aldo Rossi’s Gallaratese housing complex in Milan (fascist)
was included just as Herman Hertzberger’s Amsterdam old age
home of De Drie Hoven (an unfortunate stacking of columns and
infill panels in a pattern reminiscent of white crosses and black
coffins). But then, Jencks was not after subtlety and nuance, he
was after the complete displacement of the modern architecture
discourse in the first place, as a precondition to establish his idea
of ‘multi-valency’ in architecture; fed-up with its claims of moral
superiority he aimed to reveal modern architecture’s ‘credibility
gap’ between ‘statement and result’, which according to him had
reached ‘impressive proportions’.15 The Language of Post-modern
Architecture had therefore an entirely different approach than
Jencks’s earlier Modern Movements in Architecture of 1973, in
which he demonstrated how the modern movement and the avant-
gardes were a multiform collection of overlapping and all too often
contradicting tendencies, much in contrast with the homogeneous,
historiographical constructs of the mid-twentieth century period
which had supported the modernist paradigm. However, in The
Language of Post-modern Architecture, Jencks resurrected modern
architecture as a homogeneous phenomenon once again, an
architecture of a form-language which remained largely abstract
14 Jencks, 1978, p. 25.
15 Ibid., p. 24. and devoid of meaning according to Jencks, and against which he
16 Ibid., p. 128; this slip – which could build the case of his alternative proposition for a ‘radical
seems contradictory to Jenck’s
argument regarding the ‘univa- eclecticism’. Ultimately, this ‘amalgam’ would even provide room
lence’ of modern architecture –
is explained in a note as follows:
for ‘Modernism’ as one of its many constituent ingredients too,
‘If meaning consists in relation ‘precisely because the theory of semiotics postulates meaning
then a restricted as well as rich
palette can articulate it. My gene- through opposition’, a cursory yet crucial remark regarding
ral favouring of rich over restric-
ted systems is partly due to our the whole discursive construct behind Jencks’s book, quickly
Miesian age, and partly due to the
fact that elites and specialists
followed by the one admission by Jencks of the quality of modern
are better at decoding restricted architecture, namely that the language of modern architecture held
systems than the general public.’
p. 134, endnote 62. the ‘possibility of rich meaning using a restricted language’.16
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Equally remarkable, Jencks’s choice of terms remained largely
in line with those developed throughout the 1950s and 60s; but
he turned them around against those who had introduced them
– once again, nothing seems as slippery as discursive language.
Architectural eclecticism as ‘the natural evolution of a culture
with choice’ was defended by Jencks in unmistakably structuralist
and Brutalist terms alike:
‘if our pattern books today include four hundred building systems,
if “local” materials now mean everything down at the hardware
shop, then our natural vernacular is eclectic if not polyglot, and
even the present attempt at a simple Neo-Vernacular is bound to
be infected by these mixed sources. In semiotic terms, the langue
(total set of communicational sources) is so heterogeneous and
diverse that any singular parole (individual selection) will reflect
this, even if only in excluding the diversity. Such are the facts of
architectural production.
A corresponding argument can be made concerning
consumption. Any middle-class urbanite in any large city from
Teheran to Tokyo is bound to have a well-stocked, indeed over-
stocked, “image-bank” that is continually restuffed by travel and
magazines. His musée imaginaire may mirror the pot-pourri of
the producers, but it is nonetheless natural to his way of life.’ 17
The musée imaginaire reference brings Jencks eerily close

to earlier Independent Group exchanges, or even Van Eyck’s
universalist ‘Story of Another Idea’, as presented in 1959 in
Otterlo. Jencks’s idea of ‘multi-valence’ seems derived from
Van Eyck’s use of ‘multi-meaning’ and Herman Hertzberger’s
‘polyvalence’. But whereas Van Eyck and his colleagues of
Dutch Forum and Team 10 sought to overcome eclecticism,
Jencks embraced it:
‘it seems to me desirable that architects learn to use this
inevitable heterogeneity of languages. Besides, it is quite enjoyable.
Why, if one can afford to live in different ages and cultures,
restrict oneself to the present, the locale?’ 18
Despite Jencks’s own claims this embrace of eclecticism, which

he paired with such notions as ‘pattern book’ and ‘image-bank’,
rendered the proposition as an empty formalism, meaningless and
contextless from the perspective of the Team 10 discourse and
the Smithsons and Van Eyck. They would never think of parole as
a simple form of ‘selection’, as if a consumerist option, but rather
17 Ibid. as a way of appropriation, a spoken and ‘lived’ vernacular, almost
18 Ibid. as a base on which the superstructure of a langue would rest,
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which in its turn would represent the larger system of abstracted
and generalized rules of universal human interaction.19
Regarding ideology there is another profound opposition to note.

If the Smithsons and Team 10 could be reproached for making
themselves an instrument, albeit rather ambiguously so, of welfare
state bureaucracies, Jencks produced here a depoliticized and
naturalizing account of the incipient neo-liberal dominance in
politics and ideology: eclecticism as the ‘natural way of life’ of
the ‘middle class urbanite’, ‘quite enjoyable’ for the ones who
can ‘afford’ it. While quite aptly criticizing architects for their
often embarrassing alliances and untenable claims with regard
to politics and authorities, Jencks gave up on any such claims
of architecture as liberating citizens or enabling democratic
development. He stated that ‘there is nothing much the architect
can do’ considering the ‘triumph of consumer society in the West
and bureaucratic State Capitalism in the East’.20 The most an
architect could do was in a Venturi-like way embrace ‘complexity’
and display ‘contradiction’ through:
‘dissenting buildings that express the complex situation. He can
communicate the values which are missing and ironically criticise
the ones he dislikes. But to do that he must make use of the language
of the local culture, otherwise his message falls on deaf ears, or is
distorted to fit this local language.’ 21
But this was of course the very problem as raised within the
Team 10 discourse, just as it was the source of its internal
contradictions; remember Van Eyck when he asked how architects
could build society’s counterform if society itself had no distinct
shape of its own, or Alison Smithson in her essay ‘The Violent
Consumer’ when she diagnosed the combination of welfare
state policies and consumerist values as destructive to any
such concept of a ‘language of the local culture’. Upon closer
inspection one might argue that the proposed eclecticist amalgam
19 It must be noted that it was
actually Herman Hertzberger who of styles could not overcome the fallacy of the reworkings of
would utilize the langue-parole
distinction most explicitly throug- modern architecture of the second half of the twentieth century,
hout his teachings.
that this ‘post-modern’ notion itself was built on that same
20 Jencks, 1978, p. 37; even Ro-
bert Venturi was called to order misunderstanding.
by Jencks for his statement that
‘Main Street is almost all right’,
as too easy a way out and an op- Finally, to try and understand the displacement of the modern
portunistic embrace of American
capitalism and its consumer architecture discourse as proposed by Jencks and others, we
values, which may create ‘private
wealth’, but also ‘public squalor’, must note the displacement of the issue of housing and the house
p. 35, Jencks referred to Kenneth
Galbraith here. as a paradigm. Clearly, Jencks did not consider the welfare state
21 Ibid. system as a category of its own; nor do we find any special interest
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in social housing as a key institution for architectural practice in
The Language of Post-modern Architecture. On the contrary, Jencks
famously opened his argument with the demolition of the Pruitt-
Igoe housing project by Minoru Yamasaki in St Louis. To Jencks
it symbolized the ‘death of modern architecture’. The caption
summarized his point succinctly, in particular the last remark:
‘Several slab blocks of this scheme were blown up in 1972 after
they were continuously vandalised. The crime rate was higher than
other developments, and Oscar Newman attributed this, in his
book Defensible Space, to the long corridors, anonymity, and lack
of controlled semi-private space. Another factor: it was designed
in a purist language at variance with the architectural codes of the
inhabitants.’ 22
Thus, in the last instance the whole social issue and its very
real complexity was reduced to a debate on ‘codes’ and the
communication of the right (or wrong) messages preferably
by way of a consumerist vernacular.23 When Jencks – as a
conclusion to the first chapter, which described modern
architecture’s death – eventually defined the ‘major commissions’
and the ‘most prevalent building types’ that would represent
the ‘major monuments of modern architecture and the social
tasks for which they were built’, he left out the modern house
and social housing projects, just as other classic welfare state
programmes as university buildings, schools and hospitals.
The four categories of buildings considered most characteristic
to modern architecture were according to Jencks: ‘monopolies and
big business’, ‘international exhibitions, world fairs’, ‘factories
and engineering feats’, and ‘consumer temples and churches of
distraction’.24 It was apparently all about the cycle of production
and consumption as driving forces behind the world of late
capitalism. Housing, and especially mass housing were only
briefly discussed under the category of ‘factories and engineering
feats’. Clearly, while aiming to displace the modern architecture
discourse, the house as paradigm and housing as a major task for
architects were to be designated a very different position within
the whole debate. If those questions of inhabitation and dwelling,
which had so passionately ignited the CIAM and Team 10 debates,
22 Ibid., p. 9.
23 The recent 2011 documentary were still something of an issue to Jencks, then only as a matter
‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban of intellectual ‘pastime’ (how picturesque one might add). The final
History’ by Chad Freidrichs
re-opened the debate questi- chapter of The Language of Post-modern Architecture discussed
oning the way the estate was
stereotyped by critics as part of among many other things various weekend homes and country
their diatribes against modernist
architecture. houses as an ‘opportunity’ for architects to create ‘visual puns’
24 Ibid., p. 26-35. by way of all sorts of serious and silly metaphors, from Stanley
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Tigerman’s Hot Dog House to Peter Eisenman’s conceptual
House VI, whose rigour was appreciated by Jencks in terms
of ‘humorous touches’ and ‘witty’ semantics, thus completely
overlooking the profound (post-)existentialist overtones of
Eisenman’s project in relation to the problem as formulated by
Summerson, namely the one of a missing language of architecture
in the first place (including the refutation of transcendent meaning
as part of any architectural ordering).25
In Retreat
The ‘shift’ as discussed by the Smithsons in their 1982 Academy

publication didn’t address the postmodernist debate of those
years apart from the one page introductory statement on the two
‘trees’ or traditions they wished to distinguish: the one of ‘enquiry’
and the one of ‘classicism’.26 Still, their idea of a shift did concern
the further development of the language of architecture in the
first place. The language of architecture was a topic successfully
monopolized by postmodernism one may state in relation to
the semiotic issues of meaning and communication, yet to the
Smithsons, following Summerson, it was also central to the
development of the modern architecture discourse, and as such
it recurred throughout their writings. In The Shift they argued how
their own interest had moved to an ‘aesthetic of the light touch’.
This was an idea that Peter Smithson had started developing from
the early 1970s onward, among others through a lecture given at
the opening of the new school building for the Harvard Graduate
School of Design in 1972, and of which a reworked version was
published in 1974 in Architectural Design with the title ‘Lightness
of Touch’ as part of the ‘Collective Design’ series.27 Comparing the
25 On the side it might be noted
that Peter Eisenman’s work can
five points of Le Corbusier with his and Alison’s work, he defined
be regarded as a response to this new language as ‘gentle, interpretable, even dressable’ and
John Summerson’s RIBA lecture
of 1957, in which he postulated ‘accommodating’. While the architecture of the Heroic Period was
the possibility of the language
of architecture gone missing; ‘universal’ theirs was ‘place-connected’, ‘place-establishing’, and
in conversation with the author
Summerson’s postulate was once
‘time-capable’. The garden was not to be on the roof, but a ‘quiet
again recollected by Eisenman place immediately accessible from living spaces’. The ‘dressable’
as the beginning of his critique
of the modernist, humanist para- architecture was demonstrated by the examples of St Hilda’s
digm and the concomitant centra-
lity of dwelling and inhabitation College dormitory building and their Upper Lawn weekend house.
for architecture, 30 July 2008.
Through diagrammatic pencil drawings, once again based on
26 Alison and Peter Smitshons,
The Shift, 1982. p. 8. Le Corbusier’s ‘5 points d’une architecture nouvelle’, Smithson
27 Peter Smithson, ‘Lightness of explained the key characteristics of this architecture of ‘light touch’.
Touch’, in: Architectural Design,
June 1974, pp. 377-378. In these diagrams, the dormitory building of St Hilda’s re-appeared,
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especially the lattice work of the added timber frame; ‘light touch’
then, was about a hybrid structure, ‘part-cellular’ (as opposed to
the ‘pilotis’), with fixed service cores (as opposed to the free plan
idea), and a ‘dressable facade’ of the ‘layered’ elements of the fixed
facade structure and the added frame (in contrast with the ‘facade
libre’ with its ‘fenêtre en longueur’).28
In The Shift this aesthetic was further explained as one that

was based on ‘overlay or lattice’, which ‘form[ed] part of, or
supplement, longer lasting structures’, and which ‘suggest[ed]
the possibilities of design contributions to their inhabitants’.29
This was a paraphrasing of the same argument as already
propounded in ‘Signs of Occupancy’ and Without Rhetoric,
both also from the early 1970s,30 and which aimed at a redefinition
of the relationship between the architecture and the user in terms
of inhabitation: an architecture that accommodated ‘events’,
and invited added ‘decorations’ by its users.31 In the concluding
remarks to The Shift, the Smithsons mentioned as the three key
projects: the competition design for Lucas Headquarters (1974),
the Yellow House (1976) and the House with Two Gantries (1977).
All three of them remained unbuilt, the designs still displayed
facade structures of a transformed Miesian language. They
were an elaboration of the timber frame of St Hilda’s, based on
a strongly articulated, repetitive tectonic language of the basic
elements, of which the diagonal braces featured as the most
striking ones. In his lecture ‘Three Generations’ – also developed
throughout the 1970s when visiting various architecture schools
– Peter Smithson mentioned the diagonal as an element that was
characteristic of the third generation of modern architects, even
28 Ibid. though he also identified Mies as an early source.32 These pergola-
29 Alison and Peter Smitshons, like structures or lattices, formed frameworks rather than façades.
The Shift, 1982., p. 67.
30 Peter Smithson, ‘Signs of
As frameworks they aimed at the accommodation of the everyday
Occupancy’, 1972, and Alison life of the inhabitants by allowing for appropriation through the
and Peter Smithson, Without
Rhetoric, 1973. very acts of inhabitation, made visible by what the Smithsons
31 Alison and Peter Smitshons, had earlier called the ‘stuff and decoration of the urban scene’.33
The Shift, 1982., p. 67.
32 Peter Smithson, ‘Three Hence, according to the Smithsons between the ‘layers’ there
Generations’, in: Oase, nr. 51,
1999 pp. 82-93; first published in:
‘seem[ed] to be room for illusion and for activity’, as they put it in
ILA&UD Annual Report 1980, 1981; a slightly puzzling way.34 The design strategy was to be perfected
and in Alison and Peter Smith-
son, Italian Thoughts, 1993. later, when the Smithsons started working with Axel Bruchhaüser
33 Alison and Peter Smithson, and redesigned his house and factory in the German forests during
The Shift, 1982., p. 72; an auto-
quotation from the Smithsons the 1980s and 90s.
1952 Urban Re-identification
manuscript, later published at
other places, most notably in
Ordinariness and Light, 1970. Still, in 1982 at the peak of historicist postmodernism, it seemed
34 Ibid., p. 67. almost too cool an understatement to strictly limit the notion of a
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‘shift’ to modernist architectural grammar and linguistics, while
also by-passing the postmodernist brawl of the day. To once again
list the abovenoted aspects:
– the coming down of the welfare state project, not just through the
election of Margaret Thatcher and the subsequent abandonment of
welfare state institutions as the LCC, but also through the post-
1968 critique on structuralism and humanist thought in architecture
and planning, under which the Team 10 discourse usually –
and probably too routinely – is classified;
– the major shift in the British and international debates
with postmodernism emerging as the new discursive game,
thus sidelining Team 10 and the Smithsons;
– the Smithsons themselves reaching a decisive, almost conclusive
point in their career with the realization of Robin Hood Gardens
in 1972, the publication of Ordinariness and Light in 1970 and
Without Rhetoric in 1973.
There are some other things to note as well:

– in the first place, probably the lack of new commissions
once Robin Hood Gardens was finished; though this was not
exclusively typical for the Smithson position, many architects
were forced to close office because of the ongoing building
crisis of those years and the lack of welfare state commissions
(Alan Colquhoun for instance, to name but one);
– the closure of the Team 10 discourse, withe the very last
Team 10 meeting in 1977, organized by Georges Candilis in
Bonnieux, France;
– the loss of a publication podium in the United Kingdom
after Architectural Design changed its editorial policies;
and so forth and so on.
Just as there are also a couple of biographical aspects to be

mentioned, and although perhaps slightly speculative, they
should be mentioned here as well, since they help to explain
the Smithsons’ very different position within the larger discourse
from the one they had occupied through the 1950s and 1960s.
Various authors have touched upon this, Max Risselada,
David Dunster and Peter Cook, in the first place.
35 Peter Cook, ‘Regarding the

Smithsons’, in: The Architectu- Cook paid hommage to his intellectual parents in an extensive
ral Review, July 1982, pp. 36-43;
interestingly enough, around the essay written for The Architectural Review, just as the Academy
same time the AA School had
invited Alison Smithson for a
Monographs edition of The Shift published in the year 1982.35
seminar on Team 10, which led to Cook suggested how the Smithsons cherished their existence in
the publication of The Emergence
of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M., 1982. the relative quiet away from the centre of discursive action:
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‘Peter Smithson has returned to regular teaching [at Bath
university], but only at a place that appears not to hustle him and
allows for a very easy disappearance into the gentle Somerset
trees. In other words, the hurly-burly of the international pecking-
orders, the plotting of New York, the twittering of London are not
for him. Alison is more likely to come in to the fray on issues that
really engage her interest, so that she might sometimes crop up
as a conference speaker: and then return, puzzled (or bored) at the
crassness of most architectural chat.’ 36
Cook linked the Smithsons’ mood to their South Kensington

house, ‘very calm’ and ‘behind a wall’, ‘distanced by a lawn’
with ‘tea at a certain moment in the day’.37 This house was their
home-cum-office at 24 Gilston Road, called Cato Lodge, an
Italianate villa built in the famous year of 1851 and to which the
Smithsons had moved in 1971. For ten years, they had lived just
across the street at 2 Priory Walk, a four storey terraced house
with basement, and before that in Limerston Street, also close
by in Chelsea, just south of Fulham Road, after having moved
there from their room in 32 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury. Moving
socially upward from rooming with Theo Crosby in the late 1940s
to the upper middle class chique of Cato Lodge in the early 1970s
delineated the Smithsons career in quite a characteristic way.
Besides a demonstration of their aspirations and how they had
established themselves, it also marked a new phase not just
of their career, but of their life – with Alison being 43 years old
and Peter 48. In hindsight one might argue that it was only then
that they became their truly selves, forced by the circumstances
(the combination of a lack of commissions and postmodernism
taking over) and the closure of the first period of their patient and
consistent reworking of the modernist legacy (the realization of
Robin Hood Gardens and the publication of Ordinariness and Light
and Without Rhetoric).
Such a hypothesis seems plausible, because after that the whole

design production moved away from any kind of Corbusian or
Miesian following; especially the built production of the 1980s and
afterward, the two sets of various projects at Bath university and in
Germany for Axel Bruchhäuser. The proposition of an architecture
of ‘light touch’ as made in The Shift was only the foreshadowing of
the many other shifts to come, smaller ones as well as bigger ones.
The most profound one concerns the abandonment of the search
36 Ibid. for ‘total image systems’ that was central to the Smithsons’ work
37 Ibid. in the 1950s; or to put it slightly more careful, at the very least we
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are looking at the temporary adjournment of such a possibility of
a total system approach until (postmodern) times might change
again. The so-called ‘shift’ and the architecture of ‘light touch’
entailed an approach that built on the realization of fragments and
enclaves only, not the ‘total systems’ of the 1950s any more.
The Smithsons’ interest in specificity and context responsiveness

evolved into an architectural language of fragments and
interventions that can only be understood from the specific
project situation and the particular development of the Smithsons’
theoretical investigations. Whereas the built projects before
the ‘shift’ can still be regarded as belonging to an architecture
language akin to total systems and their representations (the
microcosmos of the macro-cosmos – complete image systems),
even as they already carried the idea of fragments and intervention
within them; this is hardly possible to maintain when looking at the
projects realized from the late 1970s onward.
The Hunstanton school and its gymnasium are a most didactic

and eloquent example of the reflection of the architectural order at
stake here, on the larger scale of the whole just as in the smaller
bits and pieces; the ‘fragment’ of the sports hall demonstrates
this best, it maintains its own integrity while it also stands for
the larger whole, but one could also point to the raised water
tank, how it is both an a-symmetrical ‘sign’ for the whole school,
while it also creates a ‘local’ symmetrical focal point when one
arrives closer to the project and its entrance. As such Hunstanton
communicates its architectural principles most effectively, which
makes them transferable and imitable. In the case of the Bath
school of architecture this seems hardly imaginable. And when
following the Smithsons’ writings of the period, clearly, this was
intentionally so. The building acts as a perfect illustration of the
‘canon of conglomerate ordering’ and the requirement that such
a building of that canon:
‘has spacial presence – more awsome than object presence –
something not remotely reducible to a simple geometric schema or
communicable through two dimensional images.’ 38
And that such a building:

‘is hard to retain in the mind ... elusive except when one is actually
there; then it seems perfectly simple.’ 39
‘The Canon of Conglomerate
1993, p. 62. The school acts as a fragment added to the 1960s campus creating
39 Ibid. a most specific connection between the raised level of the campus
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deck and the eastern entrance and landscape, with bus stop and
car park. The architectural language of the building, of a romantic,
almost Ruskinian sensibility, establishes a surprising reversal
– the new Smithson school building is perceived as if ‘older’ as
the original campus buildings. Thus the school building renders
the architecture of the 1960s campus as fresh and new again.
The ‘lumpish’ building’s geometry is completely dependent on
the conditions of the site, such as climate, sun path and specific
routes, and the accommodated functions with every floor of a
different spatial configuration in terms of density, division of
rooms, floor heights, inner connections et cetera.40
The Smithsons linked this approach to what they called the

‘Gothic mind’. This may seem confusing since the Gothic of the
Smithsons was very different from the 19th century revivals and its
delight in Gothic detail.41 Speaking of a ‘set of mind’ the Smithsons
defined the Gothic as a way of working without having to think
in terms of ‘larger systems’.42 To them the Gothic concerned a
‘sensibility’:
40 The current managerial
demands of flexibility of a con- ‘In the middle-ages the sense of the land, known through walking,
temporary university are largely
at odds with the building’s spatial
riding, working on it permeated all acts of inhabitation.’ 43
lay-out as proven by a site visit
and Smithsons study day, orga-
nised by the Twentieth Century This sensibility should ideally work its way through to the
Society, 3 September 2011.
41 The Smithsons refer to what
smallest elements of the architecture, in particular ‘doors’ and
they call ‘the Gothic’ quite fre- ‘doorsteps’.44 Thus, we find a renewed definition of the 1950s
quently in those years, while not
fully explaining this; it is certainly doorstep philosophy here, just as one might add, a continuation of
not the Gothic revival of the 19th
century, nor the cathedrals but Arts and Crafts notions with regard to authenticity, the vernacular
the fabric of a pre-rationalist and the reciprocities between use, design and production.
town building before the Renais-
sance; see the conclusion to
Italian Thoughts, 1993, the chapter
‘Set of Mind’, pp. 102-103; and the Much of the language of the Bath university projects was quite
essay ‘The Recovery of Parts of
the Gothic Mind’ in: ILA&UD An- naturally derived from Peter Smithson’s earlier studies of the
nual Report 1990-1991, 1992, also town of Bath, in which he had already expressed an interest in
included in Italienische Gedanken,
weitergedacht, 2001, pp. 26-45. accidental detail, and the particular fragmentary character of
42 Peter Smithson, ‘The Reco-
very of Parts of the Gothic Mind’, the Georgian architecture and interventions as he saw them, and
in: ILA&UD Year Book 1990-1991, which were capable of establishing an overall connective ‘fabric’
The Contemporary Town, 1992,
p. 53; published in German in: in his view, while also successfully maintaining the feel of the
Italienische Gedanken, weiterge-
dacht, p. 42-44. Somerset landscape within the city boundaries. Again, one may
43 Ibid. say, a sensibility of the ‘land’ working its way through to those
44 Ibid.
details of doors and windows, pathways and pavement texture,
45 Peter Smithson, Bath: Walks
within the Walls, Adams & Dart, building silhouettes and rooftops.45
Bath, 1971, originally published as
‘Walks within the Walls. A Study
of Bath as a Built Form Taken over
by Other Uses’, in Architectural
To complicate things, it must be noted that even though the
Design, October, 1969; see also Smithsons’ new lines of thought are different from the years
‘Oxford & Cambridge Walks’, in:
Architectural Design, June 1976. before the shift of the 1970s, they also still relate to early modern
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sources. Although the later built work seems far removed
from the orthodox modern canon, especially in terms of formal
language, one cannot uncouple the new directions in their work
as epitomized by the catchphrase of Conglomerate Ordering from
the larger modern tradition.46 Rather, the Smithsons re-activate
other, more peripheral strands within that tradition (as argued for
in chapter 3), strands that still deal with function and use, but then
in a very different way from the positions and postulates as put
forward by the canonical historiographies such as Pevsner’s and
his proposition of Gropius as the central figure to the functionalist
paradigm. As noted before among the references used by the
Smithsons, Hugo Häring (Mies former office partner in Berlin
G days) is probably the clearest representative of one of those
‘other’ strands within the modern tradition as exemplified by his
farm buildings for Gut Garkau and his idea of Form Findung.47
Shaking off the lessons of Mies (and the purist Le Corbusier)
the Smithsons now seemed to have gotten much closer to their
Brutalist ambitions than ever before with a most ‘lumpish’ and
materially speaking very ‘present’ project.48 At Bath the Smithsons
also seemed to finally realize an architecture that could replace
what they had called a Banister-Fletcher approach to architecture
as ‘buildings’ in their introduction to The Heroic Period – that is
46 The best summary of the architecture as a collection of isolated objects; in its stead an
Smithsons’s texts on Conglo-
merate Ordering are in Italian architecture of ‘built-places’ had been proposed by them. At the
Thoughts, 1993, while the idea
as such was developed within
same time the Bath university projects and the Conglomerate also
the exchanges with De Carlo seemed an implicit critique of the postmodernist fascination with
and thus can be retraced in the
various ILA&UD Annual Reports ‘image’, spectacle, and visual coding. The Smithsons stated that
and Year Books. In the Charged
Void volumes the idea of Conglo- the Conglomerate concerned an architecture beyond the visual and
merate Ordering is retro-actively
applied to the much older design
harnessing all the senses; but then again, this was never explicitly
production of the 1950s, esp. put as a critique of their own day and age, but rather as part of their
Chapter 5 in the Architecture
volume of 2001. own, quite idiosyncratic agenda. Regarding postmodernism, cool
47 As noted before in the understatement remained the dominant form of rhetoric.
Chapter on Brutalism, Häring’s
farm building was included in
the early (draft) statements on
the New Brutalism, as well as Yet, the cool quiet of Cato Lodge was also a relative thing.
in The Heroic Period of Modern
Architecture, 1965, 1981. Another Despite the lack of building commissions and the end of the
late reference by the Smithsons special relationship with Architectural Design, a look on the
concerns their work in Bath, see
‘Think of it as a farm’ in Italian Smithsons list of works and publications makes it immediately
Thoughts, 1993, p. 80; reconfirmed
again in an interview with Kester clear that neither the design work ever stopped, nor the writing
Rattenbury in: Kester Rattenbury
(ed.) This is Not Architecture. and publishing. If energy wasn’t channelled by ‘fighting the
Media Constructions, Routledge, zeitgeist’ as Alison put it, it certainly was so by further exploring
London, 2002, pp. 91-98.
48 I have argued this before in both new and older design directions. For instance, after
‘Une dynamique générative’,
in: l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui,
Robin Hood Gardens a handful of other housing schemes were
nr. 344, January-February 2003, designed by the Smithsons, although none of them were realized:
special issue on Alison and Peter
Smithson, pp. 30-39. a project for Cherry Garden Pier in the London Docklands (1972-
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1976) as part of a collaboration with Theo Crosby and others,
a competition scheme for a block of apartments at Millbank,
also in London (1976-1977), a closed competition for Berlin, at
a site bordering the Lützowstrasse (1980) as part of the IBA
(Internationale Bau Ausstellung), and one for Maryhill, Glasgow a
tenements building consisting of three-storey walkup flats (1984).
In the design of these housing schemes we can see the similar
kind of shifts that culminated in the Bath university buildings
and later in the many projects for Axel Bruchhäuser and Tecta in
Germany. For each project a specific ‘language’ was developed,
again in response to the specific context of the site (noise, views),
climate and programme, different typologies and new spatial
configurations in relation to ‘density’ of space, room division
(combinations of smaller, specific rooms with open, more generic
rooms), access systems et cetera. But contrary to Robin Hood
Gardens, or the aspirations of the 1950s and 60s, there was no
‘Roman’ or ‘universal’ ambition at stake here, no project as heroic
as the one for the post-war welfare state. It was now all about the
local and bringing out the specific qualities of the project.
Arguably, the writings of the Smithsons followed a similar

trajectory as the design work. There were no more attempts at a
comprehensive publication similar to the ‘Urban Re-identification’
manuscript, Urban Structuring, Ordinariness and Light, or
Without Rhetoric. Rather one sees the consistent publication
of ‘thoughts in progress’ so to speak. And almost without
exception, they were published by way of collaborations with
editors outside of England, such as the Swedish Italian Thoughts
booklet and the German Italienische Gedanken, and Italienische
Gedanken weitergedacht.49 A documentation of the Upper Lawn
pavilion was done together with Enric Miralles at the Barcelona
school of architecture, the ‘sensibility primer’ AS in DS together
with Otto Das at Delft University, even Team 10 Meetings was
produced with then a relative outsider, Max Risselada, also at
Delft University.50 These ongoing thoughts were developed through
teaching at various institutes, mostly in Europe, and mostly
49 The first one being compiled
through professional friendships as the ones already mentioned.51
at the Stockholm Royal Academy And again, just as the building projects, the fragmentary yet
of Fine Arts by Bengt Edman,
the second translated and prolific production of thoughts, statements, speculations and
compiled by Karl Unglaub and
Hermann Koch. reflections resisted the fashion of the day, as it would resist
50 See also Max Risselada, easy following and transference to the (postmodernist) media.
introduction to the anthology
Alison & Peter Smithson. Apparently disinterested by the ‘hurly-burly’ and ‘pecking-
A Critical Anthology, Ediciones
Polígrafa, Barcelona, 2011. orders’ of the ongoing international discourse as Cook had put it,
51 Ibid. Alison and Peter Smithson preferred to dwell on the functions of
307 At Home
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Christmas decorations, the clarity of articulation in the paintings
by Piero della Francesca, the origins of the canopy, all sorts of
costumes from Di Giorgio’s vision of an architect to those of
the military, the importance of pavement and other territorial
textures (thus continuing townscape polemics) or simply,
the wonders of the sky above a road (and so on). In this way,
the Smithsons seemed to have deliberately placed themselves
outside of the mainstream of the architectural discourse – indeed,
‘going swimming’ as they said, pursuing what they were most
interested in.
Two exemptions should be mentioned at this point, two

publications that more or less frame the more fragmentary
bulk of writing and thinking: the publication of the relatively
modest Changing the Art of Inhabitation in 1994, published a
year after Alison’s death, and their monumental monograph of
The Charged Void as published by Monacelli in 2001 and 2005.
The former is a collection in the vein of earlier collections, this
time modelled on the ‘Three Generations’ essay with three
chapters on Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, and
the Smithsons themselves.52 The latter is an incomplete three
volume publication of the Smithsons’ oeuvre as they themselves
had edited it. The first volume The Charged Void: Architecture
was published eight years after Alison’s death, the second one
The Charged Void: Urbanism two years after Peter’s. A third volume
with a rather modest selection of texts remained unpublished.53
What once again comes through from the two publications is the
issue of inheritance and a careful but highly selective rereading
and redefining of the modern tradition and the Smithsons’ own
Changing the Art of Inhabitation, place in it. Despite the very different form language of the later
1994.
years after the so-called shift, the Smithsons still saw themselves
53 Unlike the volumes on archi-
tecture and urbanism which are a as firmly remaining within modern orthodoxy, in particular with
comprehensive documentation of
the design work, the third volume regard to the central issue of the modern tradition as they saw it,
of texts is not a comprehensive
overview of the Smithson wri-
namely the one of inhabitation.
tings, but rather a new selection
of a wide range of published and
unpublished texts that span the
period between 1958 and 1993
(the year that Alison died). These
texts were not part of the earlier
book compilations Ordinariness
Territories and enclaves
and Light, Without Rhetoric or
Changing the Art of Inhabitation.
The texts are compiled under the The organization of spaces and territories was obviously crucial to
heading of ‘The Space Between’.
In general, they address the issue the Smithsons’s design strategies for housing, with the example
of what might be called ‘place
making’ as something situated
of the yard garden in their competition scheme for Golden Lane
between the fields of architecture perhaps once again as a very early and clear demonstration of
and urbanism, a classic Smithson
and Team 10 subject. this. The very notion of a ‘doorstep philosophy’ as suggested by
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them during the early 1950s was already territorial by definition
one might argue. Yet, the Smithsons wouldn’t theorize their
ideas on territory in those terms until the late 1970s and 1980s
when they started participating in the summer schools that were
organized by Giancarlo De Carlo. De Carlo made the notion of
territory a major topic for subsequent editions of the summer
school thus supplying the Smithsons with a vocabulary to rethink
their earlier postulates.54 In Italian Thoughts, the first collection
of the Smithsons’ contributions to De Carlo’s summer schools,
we find essays on ‘Territory’ and ‘Territorial Density’ but also
on ‘Gates, Porches, Portals,’ and also one – but how can one be
surprised – on Janus, the two-faced Roman god, guardian of the
treshold, who can look both forward and backward at the same
time.55 In another collection, the German Italienische Gedanken,
weitergedacht, we find among others reflections and speculations
on ‘Markers on the Land’ (Markierungen auf dem Land), and
‘Tracks for the Territory’ (Pfade für das Territorium).56 And as
proposed by Peter Smithson in the case of ‘the shift,’ these new
terms would allow for a re-appreciation of the older works from
the 1950s, especially the Patio and Pavilion exhibit. In the original
catalogue of This is Tomorrow from 1956, the exhibit was described
as representing ‘a piece of the world’ and ‘an enclosed space’.57
For the BBC Third Programme, Peter Smithson talked about
‘a view of the sky, a piece of ground’.58 To think of architecture as
intrinsically related to the land and as enclosure in the first place,
remains a major shift with regard to the modern architecture of
the Heroic Period and the Smithsons’ intellectual parents, most
certainly Le Corbusier’s purist years as represented by his villa
Savoye and the way this machine à habiter was lifted off the
ground by way of its pilotis. The Smithsons’ agenda was for ‘re-
identification’ as most clearly expressed by their 1953 grid for
CIAM 9 in Aix-en-Provence. Here, in 1953 the ‘superstructure’
of the interconnected units of the Golden Lane scheme and its
‘streets-in-the-air’ still followed the idea of a brusque severance
54 See for an overview the of the relation between the ground and the buildings as something
ILA&UD Annual Reports and positive, while re-inventing the ‘street’ up ‘in the air’ by way
Year Book series as published by
De Carlo from 1976 onward. of the new, broadly spaced acces gallery typology, including
Italian Thoughts, 1994, pp. 76-79. the transition space of the ‘yard garden’ between gallery and
56 Published in the ILA&UD individual housing unit. By 1956, when CIAM reconvened in
Year Book series and in Alison
and Peter Smithson, Italienische Dubrovnik and Team 10 had started to take on the CIAM re-
Gedanken, weitergedacht, 2001.
organization, that aspect of their work (the broken relation
57 This is Tomorrow catalogue,
1956, 2010, Group 6, unpaginated. between ground and building) had changed completely, while the
58 Alison and Peter Smithson, ideas of re-identification and doorstep philosophy remained firmly
1994, p. 109. central to the Smithsons’ argument.
309 At Home
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In the case of the 1956 House of the Future – usually regarded as
the opposite or counterpoint of Patio and Pavilion, for instance
by Banham but also by Frampton – the notion of territory and the
creation of an enclosed space were key as well, even though the
spatial scheme itself was inversed here, with the House of the
Future holding a patio in a house, and the Patio and Pavilion a
house inside a patio. The garden of the House of the Future was
nothing less but a reference to the biblical garden of paradise as
explained by the Smithsons themselves; another Brutalist ‘image’
or ‘enabling image’, namely a medieval painting from an unknown
German master served as example here.59 In addition to the garden
allegory there was the idea of sun light penetrating the house.
Here too, the enclosed space of the patio was crucial since the
house itself was enclosed by windowless walls and sun light came
into the private rooms only through the enclosed garden of the
patio. The varying roof height around the patio was manipulated as
to profit maximally of the sun with the course of the sun directing
the organization of the daily domestic routines; the specific shape
also ensured that the rain water was captured in a bassin in the
garden, which had its ‘mirror image’ inside by a wash basin on
a slender pedestal. Colomina has pointed out before how this
garden was created as a ‘safe space’ of ‘Edenic innocence and
purity’ to produce an ‘encounter with an empty sky, made private
by the house’.60
Colomina also described the patio space as a ‘quasi-theological’

encounter – touching on the transcendental notions that were
at work within the Smithsons work, however the architects
couple themselves talked more often about the issues of safety,
security and privacy as profoundly basic human needs to explain
their proposals for enclosed spaces. These basic human needs
were listed in their ‘Criteria for Mass Housing’ and ‘Bye-laws
for Mental Health’ among others.61 They were psychological in
the first place perhaps, but also often defined as ‘instinctive’ to
the human ‘animal’, the human apparently being understood as
a social and territorial animal. And at this point, once again a
59 See Beatriz Colomina, ‘Un-
major shift regarding modernist orthodoxy can be noted. In the
breathed Air 1968’, in: Van den work and writings of the Smithsons, the paradigm of the house
Heuvel, Risselada, 2004, pp. 46-47.
60 Ibid., the ‘private sky’ refe- did not reappear as a reduction to productivist logics and total
rence is to Buckminster Fuller of mobilization in the vein of Gropius or Hannes Meyer; the paradigm
course.
61 There are various versions: of the house was considered as interrelated with the creation or
first published in 1957, revised in
1959; republished in Architectural
sustenance of individual and collective identities. Therefore, the
Design, September 1960 and in notion of territory – ‘a piece of ground’ or ‘an enclosed space’ –
the 1964 edition of the Team 10
Primer. was brought into play; its derivative notions of control, privacy,
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pride of ownership, and security positioned next to those classic
modernist tropes of health improvement, emancipation and
liberation. Re-territorialization was always part of the Smithson
project, next to de-territorialization, as one already might have
noted with regard to the issues of landscape and existing
cityscapes. During the 1950s and 60s these notions were still part
of the larger ambition to develop a planning approach responsive
to the new welfare state condition, even though from 1962 onward
the Smithsons acknowledged that these could only be realized
as fragments, as ‘contributions to a fragmentary Utopia’.62
With the demise of the welfare state as a directing force this
ambition seemed to have disappeared, and the notion of territory
was then not only connected with those of housing and identity,
with the landscape and the connecting infrastructures such as
road systems, but also with the creation of enclaves.
This was relativey new, not the idea of the enclave or the fragment
itself, but the foregrounding of it in their writings. It can be
situated mid-1980s, after the work on Bath university was done
and work for the German furniture manufacturer Tecta began.
The conversation on territory and architecture between Peter
Smithson and De Carlo was still very much ongoing, while Alison
herself started teaching abroad, lecturing in Delft, Munich,
Barcelona and Stockholm among others.63 Through these lectures
she formulated the idea of a ‘fragment of an enclave’, which was
eventually published as the essay produced by and for the Tecta
company firm as Saint Jerome: the Desert, the Study in 1991. They
would also be partially integrated in the 1994 Changing the Art of
Inhabitation.64
The beginnings of the idea of the enclave – once again leading

to a reconceptualization of earlier intentions and work – also
comprised another rereading of the modern legacy. It was
triggered by the reconstruction of the Barcelona pavilion of Mies
62 Peter Smithson, ‘Contributi- van der Rohe at the time, when Alison Smithson was teaching
ons to a Fragmentary Utopia’, in:
Architectural Design, February in the Catalan city. Building on the Three Generations idea
1966, pp. 64-67.
63 Soraya Smithson stated this
Alison Smithson held a seminar ‘A Fragment of an Enclave’ in
was due to her leaving the paren- Barcelona, in November 1985, where she herself gave a talk with
tal home, after the elder children
Simon and Samantha had already the title ‘Three Pavilions of the Twentieth Century: the Farnsworth,
left; Alison had much more time
available and was free to travel the Eames, Upper Lawn’, with the Upper Lawn as the ‘Brutalist
abroad, in conversation with the
author summer 2003.
grandchild’ of the Barcelona Pavilion.65 In an afterthought,
64 Alison and Peter Smithson, published as a conclusion to Changing the Art of Inhabitation,
1994, p. 33-35 Smithson supplied the following definition of ‘fragment of an
65 Ibid., p. 33. enclave’, a definition which brings back to mind Peter Collins’
311 At Home
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definition of the house as paradigm of the larger modern era:
‘The piece of territory that can support and become the mid- to
late-1980s equivalent to the idyll of the restorative-place-in-nature,
that for the last two centuries has taken the form of pavilion
within the landscaped park.’ 66
In her Barcelona lecture, she had explained the notion of idyll in

relation to the pavilion and territory:
‘The dictionary definition of “idyll” is as follows: a description
of a picturesque scene or incident, especially in rustic life;
an episode suitable for such treatment.
The three pavilions [the Farnsworth house, the Eames house,
and the Smithsons Upper Lawn weekend home] embody the idyll
as a place wherein to be restored to oneself; as a source of one’s
energies. The pavilion is thus seen as a place made idyll; a dream
of a stress-free way of life, a domain – often a greater garden –
often in the pretend wild; that is, in nature.’ 67
And as a tentative conclusion we read:

‘Territory is necessary to support the pavilion as idyll, to allow
the illusion of idyllic life. The pavilion in an enclave in a domain;
that is important in this story; not the formal solutions which
are very personal and already history.’ 68
The Picturesque as an ‘enabling image’ returns here, quite

emphatically, but this ‘restorative-place-in-nature’ is not
disconnected from the city:
‘All three pavilions are effective form-inventions for the place in
nature: the fragment of a would-be enclave, whose integrity relies
on the decent behaviour of others. In the St Jerome sense, a study
from which to appraise, contemplate, consider, re-assess, the city.’ 69
The Saint Jerome reference is of crucial importance. Based

on the Barcelona lectures on the notion of the pavilion and
the enclave, Alison Smithson would elaborate a lecture on the
habitats of the saint, and how they were depicted throughout
the Renaissance and Baroque. Written and published toward
the end of her life, Saint Jerome unintentionally became the
66 Ibid., p. 149. epitome of Alison Smithson’s thoughts on inhabitation and
67 Ibid., p. 141. her and Peter’s notion of domesticity.70 Perhaps one shouldn’t
68 Ibid., p. 142.
read too much biographical parallels into the text, yet this is
69 Ibid.
70 Alison Smithson, Saint
hardly impossible when one notes how Smithson interspersed
Jerome. The Desert, the Study, her discussion of Saint Jerome’s life and the many depictions
published by Tecta, Lauenförde,
1990. of him and his ‘habitat’ with all sorts of associations that were
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most specific to the Smithsons themselves, with regard to their
own idea of a professional life as architects and writers, as well
as the issue of inhabitation in general. The habitat of Jerome
would represent an inhabitation of the ‘light touch’, and one
finds one remark which mentioned that Jerome followed ‘the
third generation’s response to a new idea’, explicit example of
identification by allegory between Smithson and Saint Jerome.
Already in the very first lines of her essay, Smithson opened the
field for this game of associations by pointing out the ‘allegorical
capabilities’ of ‘Jerome’s two habitats’, namely the desert and
the study; allegorical capabilities that Smithson would relate to
a ‘quality of encapsulation’, be it the desert as the ‘restorative
place in nature’, or the study as the ‘energising cell supported by
urban order’. Jerome, the inhabitant of those two habitats, was
in need of these places of ‘quiet’, of ‘asceticism’, and of ‘a sense
of inviolability’ in order to live a life of ‘creative activity’ that
entailed ‘perfection of thought, creation of the perfected object,
for deliberated choice’. To this end his two habitats provided a
‘quality of encapsulation’, of ‘being cocooned’, since according
to Smithson:
‘a place for creative activity will need to continue to rely on its
fragment of space being within an enclave encapsuled within
a protective territory.’
An assertion to be restated at a later point in the text:

‘such a sense of inviolability relies on its fragment of functional
space being within an enclave encapsuled in its turn within a
protective territory.’
The two habitats, desert and study, were described as ‘places-

apart’ that acted as:
‘two magnetic poles that, holding certain truths, seem always
to be at work: in successive periods of our lives one or other of
these poles will particularly attract us, perhaps according to
current fashion. Both alternatives are present in a re-vitalising
role, as the one appears to re-energise the other for man’s sense of
well being.’
As mentioned before, those two ‘magnetic poles’ were also the

Smithsons’ Upper Lawn pavilion and their own Chelsea home,
Cato Lodge. They were the two Smithson habitats, their walled
gardens turning them into places set apart and perfectly fit for
the Smithsons’ own creative activity, enclaves ‘from which to
313 At Home
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appraise, contemplate, consider, re-assess, the city’. The books,
or ‘sensibility primers’, AS in DS, Upper Lawn Folly Solar Pavilion,
Changing the Art of Inhabitation and a text like Saint Jerome were
all a reflection of this, being structured on the Smithsons’ own
work and life and the places they inhabited.
Upper Lawn was the ‘restorative-place-in-nature’, Cato Lodge

the cell ‘supported by urban order’. We know much more about
Upper Lawn than we do about Cato Lodge, since Upper Lawn was
often used by the Smithsons as a demonstration of their ideas on
inhabitation; Cato Lodge much less so. In the 1986 book dedicated
to Upper Lawn the Smithsons summed up their intentions and
experiences. In his introduction Peter stated how ‘Upper Lawn
was a device for trying things out oneself’.71
This concerned the building process itself in the first place.

The Smithsons bought the site in 1959 and would work on the
weekend home for three years, clearing the garden, partly
demolishing the existing cottage, having a balloon-frame-like,
aluminium clad box built on two concrete stilts and beam and the
exterior wall of the former cottage. They called this phase ‘work-
camp’ and under ‘Aims’ they listed:
‘To test certain new products which are not yet permitted by
the Authorities in the London area. (...)
To try out on ourselves certain applications and assemblies
of materials which if successful we will later use on clients’
buildings.’ 72
Once the house was finished it was to be a ‘device’ to take in

the English landscape and climate:
‘To find out what it is like to live in a house in England all the year
round which presents glass walls to entire South, East and West,
but a solid wall to most of the North face.’ 73
After the box was glazed, a second-hand pair of Zeiss binoculars

for bird watching was bought, by which a whole new kind of
assessment began, namely the changing patterns of the days
and seasons. Once finished, in 1962, Upper Lawn was also a
device to re-assess a changing ‘pattern of habitation’:
71 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘a setting of rooms and small garden spaces which could be
Upper Lawn. Solar Pavilion, Folly,
UPC Ediciones, Barcelona, 1986, tuned to the seasons, to the changes in the pattern of family-use,
unpaginated.
to the changes in one’s sensibilities.’ 74
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
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And:
‘It was here we explored the small adjustments, the temporary
decorations, the invention of those signals for change which we
later would come to recognise as being necessary work for the
fourth [sic] generation of the Modern Movement.’ 75
And finally, Upper Lawn was a device for writing, especially

for Alison. From mid-1962 onward diary-notes were made
(to be published much later in the Upper Lawn book), just as a
‘document bag began to be a regular piece of luggage’ when going
to Upper Lawn for the weekend or a holiday. According to the
Smithsons:
‘in this way, the pavilion and its compound supported by
a peaceful English countryside were conducive to serious
reading, much editing and writing; to name but a few:
essays for Architectural Design; the computer print-outs prior
to the type-setting of Without Rhetoric; the major part of the
work on the Imprint of India + 1916 a.s.o. that gradually became
evocations of Sensibilities; the diary AS in DS, the diary of
the Upper Lawn garden; La Paradis Eloigne; Maigret’s Map ...
were all or in part written or re-written over the years at Upper Lawn.
The slow growth of these documents helped intellectually and
emotionally to bridge the troughs between what architecture
urbanism came our way.’ 76
The other Smithson habitat, Cato Lodge, hardly appeared in

the couple’s publications on inhabitation. Perhaps regrettably so,
since the way they had organized the combination of work and
family life was another demonstration of their ideas on the subject.
The one time Cato Lodge figured most prominently was in The Shift,
as an example of the Smithsons’ idea of the art of dressing and
how festivities and celebrations produced ‘signs of occupancy’.
Louisa Hutton has noted how Alison and Peter Smithon switched
roles here, from architects to inhabitants, since – according to
Hutton – the dressing itself was a privilege of the inhabitant in
the Smithson view, while the framework accommodating the acts
of appropriation was to be provided for by the architect.77
Cato Lodge also served as the office of the Smithsons,

75 Ibid.
the lower two floors were converted into office spaces by a
76 Ibid.
77 Louisa Hutton, ‘Godparents’ clever repositioning of stairs and entrances. The formal entry
Gifts’, in: Pamela Johnston (ed.),
‘Architecture is not made with the
was reconstructed at the front by way of an added porch, which
Brain’: The Labour of Alison and provided a new flight of steps leading down to the drawing
Peter Smithson, Architectural As-
sociation, London, 2005, p. 60. rooms below as well as steps going up to the bel-etage with the
315 At Home
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reception room and Alison and Peter’s studio space in the front
room. At the rear a second, more informal entrance was situated,
which together with the turned around stairs provided a private
entry to the two upper floors of the family.78
And just as Upper Lawn became a place for writing and reflection,
Cato Lodge too, brought a new impetus to Alison’s writing in
particular, since the house offered her the opportunity to have
a tiny cabinet room as a space of her own that was also the
‘Archive’. Hutton has pointed out how the archive room occupied
a rather specific and most strategic place: ‘a small cupboard-of-
a-room just beyond the treshold of office-to-house’, as she put it.79
Alison’s archive room was thus situated between the private life
of the family and the working time of the office. Smithson would
sit here, her chair facing the garden and her back turned toward
the door, not to be disturbed but still conveniently in touch with
the two different realms of the house. Here, she started to (re-)
write the history of Team 10, the mat-building essay, where she
would make preparations for the publication of the Royaumont
meeting, where she would compile the AA school seminar and
publication The Emergence of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M., and much
later the Team 10 Meetings book, just as all those other typoscripts
of the so-called ‘sensibility primers,’ AS in DS and so on.
Those walled enclaves, of Upper Lawn and Cato Lodge, but also
of the habitats of Saint Jerome, of Patio and Pavilion and the
House of the Future, provided not just protection to the creative
78 For a documentation of the activity of the inhabitants, designing, writing or even the sewing
Smithsons’ own houses see: Dirk
van den Heuvel, Max Risselada
of clothes (remember the Houes of the Future kitchen had a
(eds.), Alison and Peter Smithson special place for the sewing machine). This creative activity also
– from the House of the Future to
a house of today, 010 Publishers, concerned ideas and values, ideas and values to be salvaged
Rotterdam, 2004, pp. 136-165.
and saved, to offer the possibility of future revitalization and
79 Louisa Hutton, ‘Godparents’
Gifts’, in: Pamela Johnston (ed.), reactivation. This remained slightly implicit in Saint Jerome and
‘Architecture is not made with the
Brain’: The Labour of Alison and the lectures on the idea of a fragment of an enclave; it was only
Peter Smithson, Architectural As-
sociation, London, 2005, p. 55. foregrounded in the retrospective comments on the Independent
80 Alison and Peter Smithson, Group years. Concerning the Patio and Pavilion exhibit the
‘The “As Found” and the
“Found”’, in: Robbins, 1990, p. 201. Smithsons claimed in their ‘As Found’ statement of 1990, that the
This notion of offering other
values and pleasures was not
exhibit was about ‘taking position in the acquisitive society as it
mentioned as such at the time of begun its run by offering in gîte a reminder of other values, other
the 1956 event. On the contrary,
the Smithsons also stated at vari- pleasures’.80
ous occasions that they were not
involved in the actual ‘dressing’
of the exhibit, since they were
‘camping’ on their way to the
Another example of the enclave as a strategy for salvation
CIAM conference in Dubrov- comes from Alison Smithson’s teachings as pointed out by
nik together with William and
Gill Howell. Max Risselada. In her design classes at Delft and Munich
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she used the allegory of Noah’s Ark as a design assignment.
She discussed the Ark and its inhabitants, Noah’s family and
all the couples of animal species on board, as a metaphor for
the collectivity of housing. The Ark was nothing less but ‘a
withdrawal to survive, or the idyll in extreme’.81
The notion of re-activiation – or regeneration, revitalization –

holds a strong presence in the Smithsons’ thinking.
Books – produced in those enclaves of retreat – are very
important here, as ‘cultural parcels’ that can travel through time
spanning centuries. This notion is also present in their idea of
the house and their notion of domesticity, also in the case of
the story of Jerome as told by Smithson. From the movement
between the two habitats of the saint, Alison eventually produced
a third habitat: the cave in Bethlehem, in which Jerome is said
to have lived the larger part of his life until he died. These two
givens, the cave and the place of Bethlehem, offered Alison
the possibility to connect Saint Jerome’s story to another one
most dear to her, namely the one of Christmas and the Nativity.82
The Christmas tradition was important to Alison Smithson
because of ‘the idea of the joyous beginning’, and was therefore
an almost endless source of reflection, as evidenced by the
annual production of Christmas cards by the Smithson office,
the exhibition ‘24 Doors to Christmas’ in the Cambridge Kettle’s
Yard gallery in 1979, and three compilations documenting the
Western tradition, Calendar of Christmas, The Christmas Tree
and An Anthology of Christmas.83 In some of Peter Smithson’s
texts on inhabitation Christmas re-appeared as well, almost as
81 Max Risselada, ‘Another a benchmark of collective domestic celebration and ‘signs of
Shift’, in: Van den Heuvel, Ris-
selada, 2004, pp. 51-58; this text occupancy’ again: especially how the house accommodated room
is largely based on unpublished
lectures by Alison Smithson. for Christmas decorations and their display, not just during the
82 According to Alison Smithson season itself, but also - perhaps equally important so – in terms
Saint Jerome intervened in the
debate on the exact date of of storage space when the Christmas season was over again.84
Christ’s birth supporting the
one of December 25, as op-
posed to the one of January 6; With regard to Saint Jerome and his third habitat Alison Smithson
in her Saint Jerome essay, 1990,
paragraph ‘Saint Jerome and the concluded her hagiography of the saint by stating that the third
“Grotto”’, unpaginated.
83 Smithson Family Archive.
habitat of the cave presented the best of both worlds of desert
84 Peter Smithson, ‘In Praise of and of study, that it accomplished the ‘encapsulation of Desert
Cupboard Doors’ and ‘Put-away
Villa: Some Speculations Arising within the Study’. And to Smithson this provided the basis for
From the Axonometric Drawings her assumption that it was possible to ‘live closer to the idyll as
of the Things Stored’, in: Van den
Heuvel, Risselada, 2004, pp. 217- represented in the Renaissance by Saint Jerome’s two habitats’
218 and 221-222.
85 Alison Smithson, Saint
by way of the creation of ‘fragments of enclaves that protect our
Jerome, 1990; also in: Alison and inhabitation’.85
Peter Smithson, Changing the Art
of Inhabitation, 1994, pp. 33-35.
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To Put Away
As noted the archive room occupied a special place in Cato

Lodge, the Smithsons home-cum-office in South Kensington.
The notions of domesticity, writing, and historiography collide
here, once again. The archive room was not so much a storage
space to file the documents of finished projects, it was also a
place for writing and publishing, that is reflection, production
and work. Shelves from floor to ceiling completely covered the
one wall with the fireplace; on the shelves boxes with slides,
negatives, maps of places visited, folders with the published
and unpublished manuscripts, but mostly box files with colour
coded backs of green, brown, red, and gold paperboards: for
the built projects, the unbuilt projects, the ongoing projects for
Tecta, and the tear sheets of publications. There was one silver
coloured box called ‘Magic’. It contained the unfinished thoughts
and aphorisms, intuitions that needed more definition or just
riddle-like word games – scribbled on scraps of paper, the back
of an envelope, or the occasional napkin. Throughout the archive
in various files one would find sheets and notes with ‘File under
Magic’ written on them – the thoughts had then, moved from one
box to the other.
To a large extent this magic box represents the Smithsons

working method of finding processes and their creative
thinking. It is part of the Smithsons’ favourite game, the game
of associations, an endless recombining and re-arranging from
which new thoughts and designs would occur. The archive room
is only one of the instruments necessary to play this game to
the full, just as their own two homes, Cato Lodge and the Upper
Lawn pavilion. During their lifetime they would set up various
environments to play the game – among the first examples the
exhibits they realized together with their friends, Nigel Henderson
and Eduardo Paolozzi. In a late homage to their friend, the ‘old
magician’ and ‘image finder’ Nigel Henderson, Alison Smithson
recreated the game of associations with her design for a small
Wunderkammer für Nigel. It is part of the series of the so-called
Cornell Boxes from 1989 produced for Axel Bruchhäuser. It was
designed by Alison after visiting a show on the work of the
American visual artist Joseph Cornell, who throughout his life
made boxes for displaying all sorts of everyday items. The boxes
by Smithson are another example of the celebration of the art of
inhabitation that was so central to her and Peter’s work; boxes
for the purpose of storing all sorts of small things, displaying or
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simply having close at hand a variety of personal trinkets, from
jewellery to magazine cut-outs. To this end each box contains
one or more other boxes, or a number of little shelves. The most
elaborate version is the homage to Henderson resurrecting his
wit in one more game of surrealist association between such
items as a food parcel, postcards, letters and of course Henderson
photographs. A mirror and turning cardholders complete this aid
to play the game of associations.
In its turn, the archive room itself might be considered such a

Wunderkammer, or magic box that is contained in the archive;
an instrument or machine for associative thinking, quite like the
Parallel of Life and Art installation or their Patio and Pavilion.
Such ‘machines’ could also be other furniture pieces, like the
Struwwelpeter Wall Cabinet for Bruchhaüser, or the Waterlily/
Fish Desk, but also childrens’ stories, or a garden or a garden
path, a bridge, a gateway, and so forth and so on. Ultimately,
the Smithsons idea of the house, including the city which is
always part of the idea the house in the case of the Smithsons,
also revolves around this idea of regeneration by way of
association.
To the Smithsons then, domestic order is not just about

architecture as the built structure and its principles of ordering,
it also concerns the order of things, in and around the house, and
how this corresponds to a way of life. The house is a dynamic
constellation made up by the very collection of things in and
around the house and the house itself. As such it provides
a framework for the routines and events of everyday life.
The relationships between container and contained, between
the parts and the whole are consistently renegotiated in
the various designs as to provide the right environment for
regeneration. We saw this in Alison’s account of Jerome’s life, and
how it included descriptions of the saint’s habitats in such terms,
‘Concealment and Display: quite like the earlier text of hers on Beatrix Potter’s children
Meditations on Braun’, in: stories and the interiors of the tales of Peter Rabbit, but also in
Architectural Design, July 1966,
pp. 362-363; Alison Smithson, the articles on appliances and furniture for Architectural Design,
‘Caravan, Embryo Appliance
House’, in: Architectural Design, or as in the Herioc Period.86 The desert and the study as allegorical
September 1959, p. 348; Alison
and Peter Smithson, ‘The Appli- models not only concerned the various re-inventions of the country
ance House’, in: Design, no 113, and the city, the ‘place-apart-from-society’ was to Smithson also
1958, pp. 43-47; Alison Smithson,
‘The Future of Furniture’, in: Inte- an incubator (or ‘energiser of the man-made’ as she put it) in
rior Design, April 1958, pp. 175-178;
the latter ones were also publis- relation to ‘the furniture of the habitat and its objects, clothing,
hed together in Architectural
Design, April 1958. equipment’.87 Jerome’s habitats were the representation of a
87 Ibid. ‘timeless ideal’ in Smithson’s words. Especially, the Renaissance
319 At Home
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depictions of the study demonstrated to her how it contained:
‘all conveniences ... cooled water, shapely wash bowl, fresh towel,
growing flowers, birds and animals as man’s companions, books,
writing materials, cupboards, oriental carpet, warm clothes, wine.’ 88
Jerome’s study equated ‘the machine for living in’ and concerned
nothing less but ‘raising the minimal cell to an art’.89
Gathering things, as useful objects but also symbols, was as

important to the ‘art of inhabitation’ as was the organization
of territories. We find it throughout the Smithsons’ writings.
In Changing the Art of Inhabitation they described the
Patio and Pavilion as:
‘a kind of symbolic habitat in which are found responses, in some
form or other, to the basic human needs – a view of the sky, a piece
of ground, privacy, the presence of nature and of animals when we
need them – to the basic human urges – to extend and control, to
move. The actual form is very simple, a “patio”, or enclosed space,
in which sits a “pavilion”. The patio and pavilion are furnished
with objects which are symbols for the things we need: for example,
a wheel image for movement and for machines.’ 90
In the ‘This is Tomorrow’ catalogue we read that those objects

and symbols included among others:
‘the rocks & natural objects for stability & the decoration of
man made space
the light box – for the hearth & family
artifacts & pin-ups – for his irrational urges.’ 91
And in the same vein we read, as a caption to a picture of the

Patio and Pavilion exhibit as published in Urban Structuring:
‘We accept as basic the individual urge to identify himself with
his surroundings – with familiar objects and familiar symbols.’ 92
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid. To retrace the way the Smithsons proposed to order the things in
Changing the Art of Inhabitation, and around the house then is to follow their ideas on inhabitation
1994, p. 109.
and how an architectural order and its principles were also derived
91 This is Tomorrow, 1956; one
may consider to what extent a from this aspect of inhabitation. The As Found returns here, just as
sexist prejudice comes through
here, regarding ‘his urges’; on the New Brutalism, since as already argued for, it was at the event of
the other hand the whole text is the Patio and Pavilion exhibit that the As Found idea was transposed
written in sexually neutral terms
as far as language can be neutral to the realm of inhabitation. We also encounter here, the Smithsons’
of course, for instance, ‘family’
is mentioned as plain family, not early involvement in Pop and their admiration for Charles and
‘his’ family.
Ray Eames. We see here, how they consistently reconsidered the
Urban Structuring, 1967, p. 21. manifold interrelationships between technology, consumer culture,
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family life and the architecture of inhabitation, in such terms as
select and arrange, concealment and display, decorations, dressing
and layering, and ultimately in terms of glut and ‘put-away’ culture.93
After Alison died, Peter Smithson started to work on a final idea

house: the Put-away House or Put-away Villa (1993-2000). The house
is set in a spacious garden with a generous drive for the car added.
All living spaces face the garden. Breakfast is laid in the morning
sun while the living room catches the afternoon sun. The unusual
shape of the roof results from the central position of the roof garden,
allowing the generous application of skylights, as to ensure that
all bedrooms catch light from the north as well as from the south.
Although both the use of materials and intended construction were
not explicitly given, the house’s architectural language is closely
related to that of the Bath University buildings: heavy, almost
lumpish architecture, anticipating weathering and ageing.
The idea of such a Put-away House had been described by

Alison Smithson as early as 1958 in her article ‘The Future of
Furniture’, in which she mentioned that ‘the ‘Appliance House’
is a move away from a furniture-appliance chaos towards a put-
away house’.94 The quotation explains the connection between
the Smithsons’ interest in the idea of an Appliance House as
embodied by their House of the Future of 1956, and the much later
design for the Put-away House and the problem of glut in a consumer
society as Peter Smithson would define it in the 1980s and 90s.
The Put-away House as designed by Peter revolves around the

idea of conveniently storing one’s belongings in a central box room,
thus enabling the living spaces to be free from unnecessary clutter.
In various aphoristic comments on the house Peter Smithson said:
‘To put away is of course an instinct in oneself ... for me to be able
to see one thing at a time, the territory has to be clear.’
93 For a more extensive discus-
sion of this I refer to our publi-
cation on the Smithson houses: And:
Van den Heuvel, Risselada, 2004,
in particular my own essay ‘Pic- ‘In the Put-away Villa as shown in the drawings the living space is
king up, Turning over and Putting
with...’.
clear; the pieces of furniture remain themselves. Thus the maximum
94 Alison Smithson, ‘The Future of space is available for the human drama: there is the sense of
of Furniture’, 1958.
being protected in order to act.
95 Taken from notes by Peter
Smithson, subsequently titled The space is, as Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel Flush
‘Response to the Glut’, and ‘Pu-
taway Villa: Some Speculations observed in Florence ... “bare. All those draped objects of (his)
Arising From the Axonometric
Drawings of the Things Stored’,
cloistered and secluded days had vanished. The bed was a bed;
and ‘Put-away Addendum’; the wash-stand was a wash-stand. Everything was itself and not
published in Van den Heuvel, Ris-
selada, 2004, pp. 219-223. another thing.”’ 95
321 At Home
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The central position of the box room, with the rooms built
around it, ensures the elimination of almost all corridors and
hallways apart from the spacious staircase. Apart from the central
box room, the house is planned quite traditionally: the kitchen and
the living room on the ground floor, bedrooms and bathrooms on
the first floor, and laundry room in the attic, which gives access
to the roof garden. Smithson speaks of the re-invention of the
‘Edwardian (Wilhelmine) middle-class house ... with its flower-
arranging room, cutlery cleaning pantry and so on ... the servant
rooms of the living rooms’.96
How to deal with storage, why storage space is needed and

needs proper attention was already addressed by Smithson in
his aphoristic text ‘In Praise of Cupboard Doors’ of 1980 and his
design for a House with Two Gantries of 1977.
Of the House with Two Gantries, the things and the way of life
it contained, Peter Smithson said:
‘This particular house is intended for a man like myself who
sometimes wishes to put things away that he is not at the
moment using. A man in a family who get things out for festivals
and home-comings and want to put them away afterwards.
This house allows them to do just that ... move things easily
from room to room or into the storage loft with one of their
gantries; and they can decorate the street facade, and clean their
windows, from their other gantry. They can decorate the back of
the house as well – and clean its windows – from the little balconies
off the bedrooms.
The man can even make speeches, indoors from a balcony in his
main room and outdoors from his back-porch roof (he is a bit of
a show-off with his grand house). The house with two gantries is
an infill house on a street, or a canal in an old metropolitan city ...
Berlin, London, Amsterdam, or even Venice.’ 97
In the text ‘In Praise of Cupboard Doors’ we read:

‘Cupboards are necessary since they bring simplicty of retrieval
and ease of handling of miscellaneous contents.
Cupboard doors are necessary since these miscellaneous
contents to the right level of attention amongst the thousands
96 Ibid., p. 221. of things that surround us inside and outside the house.’ 98
2001, p. 420. The cupboard and cupboard doors then are defined as an
98 Peter Smithson, ‘In Praise organizing principle or device, for life inside the house, but
of Cupboard Doors’, in: Van den
Heuvel, Risselada, 2004, p. 217. also outside since Smithson states that what the cupboard
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is to the house, ‘so the house is to the town’, just as whole
rooms can be cupboards, and cars are cupboards too. Picture
frames are cupboards of a kind as well, according to Smithson.
The importance of cupboards are ultimately summed up by
the fact that the ‘Host in the Roman Church is kept in a cupboard’,
while the Protestants keep their ‘bibles in library cupboards’.99
The storing away and the storage space needed for all this is the
natural counterpart of getting the things out again, the opening
of doors and going out. This is part of domestic ritual as it is part
of seasonal festivities, it also entails pleasure, just as it involves
shame and trauma:
‘Behind cupboard doors there can be secrets ... concealed future
pleasures. And the pleasures of anticipation are the sharpest of all:
sweets for children, birthday presents, Christmas things.
Behind cupboard doors dangerous things can be hidden away.
Behind cupboard doors things can be stored in number,
so that prudence does not appear to be gluttony.’ 100
To sum up, as formulated here by Peter, for the Smithsons to

‘put away’ is to enable to see and think clearly, to act properly,
in domestic, everyday life but equally so as an architect as they
seem to imply. Apparently, the modernist ideal of transparency, to
see things for what they are and ‘not another thing’, also requires
some sort of suppression according to the Smithsons. And since
the psychoanalytical subtext is perhaps all too obvious, one might
add here, that eventually to put away, to suppress, is also to enable
to dream. To put things away is necessary to regenerate that what
was lost, what belongs to the past, or what one conventionally
thinks of as belonging to the past, whereas it was there all the
time, like all those bourgeois notions that immediately come to
the fore when rethinking the issues of storage, closets, ritual
and convention in the architecture of inhabitation. Enric Miralles
commented on this in the most elegant and poetic way when
he made a special montage out of Alison’s writing desk, the
Waterlily/Fish Desk of 1988, and Francisco Goya’s famous etching
‘The Sleep of Reason’. Miralles called the desk a ‘machine of
transformations’ that works only because of the ‘confusion’ of
things and ideas, of ‘what is and of what one remembers’.101
99 Ibid., p. 218.
Memory brings us back to the archive room in Cato Lodge, the
100 Ibid., p. 217. boxes filed there and which to open first, since a piece of writing
101 Enric Miralles, ‘On the Trun- like this is, is necessarily limited, an all-inclusive musée imaginaire
ding Turk’, in: Oase, nr. 51, 1999,
pp. 14-17. kind of approach, or Banham’s idea of a ‘total recall’ seems quite
323 At Home
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impossible. How to select and (re-)arrange, what kind of ‘picking
up, turning over and putting with’ might be proposed here as
a conclusion? Naturally, there is an also most endless list of
questions to be compiled, but three of those ‘boxes’ seem most
important: one concerns the archive itself, the other concerns the
language of architecture, and the final one the issue of inhabitation
and the places of the house and the city.
The first thing is to see the archive of the Smithsons and their
writing practice as a specific model for the workings of history and
memory. Memory and history are then, not dead things of the past,
they are always part of the here and now as sources for cultural
regeneration, the formation of social identities, as well as new
knowledge and new practices. The archive, storage space as such,
memory in more general terms, they exist as a state of slumbering
perhaps, by definition they are of an immanent or virtual nature
(to refer to French theory). Yet, even when things from the past
are put away, and we are not aware of them all the time, it doesn’t
mean they are gone, of course. They only operate most effectively
by remaining within the realm of the subconscious. This is all
implied by the very notions of regeneration and re-activation.
The archive, its collection and how it is organized, how it is
accessed and opened up – its very architecture so to speak –
is in that sense a mnemonic device, not just preserving the past,
neither ‘remembering’ it, but producing it in the first place.
What becomes most evident – and this is why the Smithsons’
example also receives much criticism I suppose – is the active
management of their own archive and the recording of the events
of CIAM, Team 10 and the Independent Group. The Smithsons
remind us that there is an inevitable aspect of individual and
institutional responsibility involved; there is a moral issue at
stake here, as well, in terms of how the archive is maintained,
kept, passed on, and then re-actived again. It boils down to a
proper form of husbandry one might say, gardening perhaps
(and every garden needs a shed).
The second thing concerns the unresolved issue of the missing

language of architecture for a modern society or culture of
modernity as formulated by John Summerson. Since architecture
is part of our collective identity and culture, not just as an
appendage, but as (partly) constituting these, this question
won’t go away. The case of Alison and Peter Smithson remains
of a special and lasting interest here, as a micro-history of its
own, since their career and lives coincided with the establishment
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of the post-war welfare state and its demise from the mid-1970s
onward. From today’s perspective it situates them in between
the heroic generation of modern architects who sought to deliver
a unified, new style for the Zeitgeist, and the postmodernist
moderns so to speak, architects such as Bernard Tschumi and
Rem Koolhaas, who following Jencks seemed to have given up
on any socio-utopian ambition for architecture alltogether. With
regard to this particular issue of a common language, one of the
most important propositions by the Smithsons is the idea that a
proper language of architecture doesn’t have to be wholly new,
or be based on the image of the new, neither does it have to be
restricted to a project for autonomy, or the historicist position.
The language of architecture too, just like the archive, is an
accumulation of past experience to be re-activated within the
specific architectural project. Through such re-activation the
language of architecture is extended and renewed.
The third and final thing to be mentioned here, is the issue of

inhabitation and the places of the house and the city. Behind the
Brutalist project to revitalize the language of modern architecture
there is also a project to reconnect the modern house with a life
based on work to overcome the capitalist division of labour. This
goes back to Alison and Peter Smithson’s own upbringing and
their parents, and how Arts and Crafts morals were a life example
to the Smithsons. Yet, first and foremost it ties in with the problem
of the Functional City and the planning of the suburbs and New
Towns of the post-war decades as monotonous, mono-functional
schemes under late-capitalist conditions of consumption and
social reproduction. The Smithsons’s Soho House of 1952, the
design for which the name New Brutalism was put on paper for
the first time, was not an industrially produced house for the
masses, it was a private, domestic workshop of a ‘warehouse
aesthetic’. Here, work and living and their patterns defined each
other mutually, a regenerative process in service of a way of living
beyond the one of the consumerist welfare state. This question
too, how work and living are to be combined, production and
consumption, remains unresolved today. In the light of the new
information technologies, their miniaturization and the new
social media, which penetrate our everyday lives and houses,
the concomitant environmental issues and social urgencies,
it is as if Independent Group days and the Team 10 debates are
more topical than ever before.
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IMAGES
The design production of Alison and Peter Smithson is

well documented, not in the least by themselves. The most
comprehensive overview can be found in the two volumes
published by the New York Monacelli Press in 2001 and 2005:
The Charged Void: Architecture and The Charged Void: Urbanism.
Overviews compiled by others include Helena Webster (1997),
Marco Vidotto (1991 and 1997), David Dunster (1982) and
Jeremy Baker (1966). The Smithsons house designs are
documented in our book Alison and Peter Smithson – from the
House of the Future to a house of today (010 Publishers, Rotterdam,
2004). Their designs related to the Team 10 discourse are included
in our book Team 10 in search of a Utopia of the Present 1953-81
(NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005). The illustrations included
here are indeed what they are, illustrations of the textual argument
as a reminder of the otherwise already documented. They are
organized in an apparently simple way: following the order of
Georges Perec’s novel Espèces d’espaces the first space is the
space of the empty white sheet, the words and text follow next,
then the writing table, the room and its furniture, built-in or free-
standing, the house, the street, district, city, networks, and so
forth and so on. The ultimate space is the sky. There are various
difficulties involved when trying such an arrangement. First, the
space of photographs and drawings are much more inclusive
than the one of text or literature, which was Perec’s medium
of course, or so it seems. So, in one image we often find many
categories present. Second, the Smithsons were keen to focus
on the spaces between other spaces. These then, are treated as
a category of their own, and are inserted between the other spaces,
which seems only logical.
327
327 Images
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‘House in Soho. Alison and Peter Smithson’, first mention of the term ‘New Brutalism’ in print,
in: Architectural Design, December 1953
329 Images
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Alison Smithson, ‘New Brutalism’, first page of the two-page unpublished typoscript dated 7 March 1955
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Alison Smithson, ‘Saint Jerome. The Desert ... The Study’, 1990
331 Images
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The Heroid Period of Modern Architecture, cover of the 1981 Rizzoli edition with Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe;
originally published as a special issue of Architectural Design, December 1965
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Alison Smithson writing in the Upper Lawn garden, June 1964;
according to grandson Hugo Target the desk was originally Peter’s wash stand from his time in Burma
333 Images
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Alison Smithson, Waterlily or Fish Desk for TECTA / Axel Bruchhäuser, 1986-1989
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Alison Smithson, Collector’s Table for TECTA / Axel Bruchhäuser, 1986-1989
335 Images
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House of the Future, Ideal Home Show, 1956; living room with table and trolley set for dinner
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Alison Smithson, ‘Kleine Wunderkabinet für Nigel’,
as part of the Cornell Boxes series for TECTA / Axel Bruchhäuser, drawing July 1989
337 Images
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Alison Smithson, Struwwelpeter Wall Cabinet for TECTA / Axel Bruchhäuser, 1986-1989
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House of the Future, Ideal Home Show, 1956; bath tub shaped to hold the human body
339 Images
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Cato Lodge, Alison Smithson’s archive and writing room
photo: Sandra Lousada
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Student room, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 1967-1970
341 Images
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Cato Lodge, drawing room of Alison and Peter Smithson
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Alison and Peter Smithson at Cato Lodge in their drawing room
343 Images
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Economist, London, 1959-1964, bank room interior
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Riverside Apartments, Millbank London, 1976-1977, isometric drawing of interior rooms.
The pasted figures are sometimes called Japanese, sometimes Chinese, while ‘Delicate inhabitation’ is one of its captions
345 Images
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House of the Future, Ideal Home Show, 1956; kitchen cabinets
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Sugden House, 1956, kitchen counter
photo: David Grandorge
347 Images
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2 Priory Walk, London, kitchen on the upper floor with display of the As Found and re-used marble slate for table
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Patio and Pavilion, This is Tomorrow, 1956, together with Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi;
interior of shed with ‘Head of a Man’ photocollage by Nigel Henderson
349 Images
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Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, 1949-1954, view into one of the two inner courts
photo: Nigel Henderson
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Patio and Pavilion, This is Tomorrow, 1956, together with Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi; drawing of empty structure
351 Images
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Peter Smithson, Put Away House, 1993-2000; axonometric of ground floor spaces and storage room
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‘An idea for the standard house with extra ground-floor room with its own entrance and atmosphere:
studio, drawing room, study, surgery ...’ Alison Smithson, Cubicle or Cupboard House, 1956-1957
353 Images
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Peter Smithson, Retirement House in Kent, 1959; idea sketch dated 12 June 1954
dvdh10PRINT.indd 354 21-04-13 16:57

House of the Future, Ideal Home Show, 1956
355 Images
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Peter Smithson, House with Two Gantries, 1977
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Soho House, Colville Place, London, 1952
357 Images
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New Model House or Burleigh Lane Houses, Street, 1965-1966
dvdh10PRINT.indd 358 21-04-13 16:57

Solar Pavilion, Upper Lawn, 1959-1962
359 Images
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Sugden House, Watford, 1955-1956
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Paolozzi Studio House, Hawkhurst, Kent, 1959
361 Images
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New Model House or Burleigh Lane Houses, Street, 1965-1966, private garden space
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Robin Hood Gardens, 1966-1972; collage showing relation between cityscape, street-in-the-air and flats
363 Images
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Terraced Crescent Housing, panel of Valley Section grid, 1955, for CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik
dvdh10PRINT.indd 364 21-04-13 16:57

Urban Re-identification Grid, 1953 for CIAM 9 at Aix-en-Provence, with photos by Nigel Henderson
365 Images
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Portico Row houses, 1957; with indication of places to play for specific age groups
dvdh10PRINT.indd 366 21-04-13 16:57

Children playing in the Robin Hood Garden street-in-the-air, 1972
367 Images
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Economist, London, 1959-1964
photo: Michael Carapetian
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Economist Plaza, drawing by Gordon Cullen, from his article in the Architectural Review, February 1965
369 Images
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House of the Future, Ideal Home Show, 1956; proposal for urban lay-out
dvdh10PRINT.indd 370 21-04-13 16:57

Kuwait City, 1968-1970; model of mat-building with souk gallerias and office buildings
371 Images
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Citizens’s Cambridge, 1962; proposal for replanning of the inner city including by-pass
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Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, London, 1966-1972, landscape of inner court
373 Images
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Garden Building or dormitory for St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 1967-1970
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Solar Pavilion, Upper Lawn, 1959-1962
375 Images
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Losey House, Minffordd, Wales, 1959-1960, the site
dvdh10PRINT.indd 376 21-04-13 16:57

Draft statement for CIAM 10 with Patrick Geddes’ Valley Section
377 Images
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‘Cluster CIty. A New Shape for the Community’, in the Architectural Review, 1957,
opening page with fragment of Nicholas Poussin painting ‘Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion’
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Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, 1949-1954, view from the street with annexes and ha-ha in front
photo: John Maltby
379 Images
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Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, London, 1966-1972, analysis of vistas and routes
dvdh10PRINT.indd 380 21-04-13 16:57

Parallel of Life and Art, 1956, installation at the ICA in London, together with Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi
381 Images
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Peter Smithson, Bath: Walks within the Walls, Adams & Dart, Bath, 1971, originally published in Architectural Design
dvdh10PRINT.indd 382 21-04-13 16:57

Urban Structuring, 1967
383 Images
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Hauptstadt Berlin, 1957-1958, competition entry together with Peter Sigmond
dvdh10PRINT.indd 384 21-04-13 16:57

Route Building, Soho, as part of New Ways for London competition, or London Roads Study, 1959,
together with Cristopher Dean and Brian Richards
385 Images
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‘New district formation suggested by existing rail system plus new road network’ Greenways and Landcastles, London, 1962
dvdh10PRINT.indd 386 21-04-13 16:57

Cluster City diagram
387 Images
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‘Mobility. Road Systems’, in Architectural Design, October 1958
dvdh10PRINT.indd 388 21-04-13 16:57

Alison Smithson, AS in DS. An Eye on the Road, 1983
389 Images
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‘Vertical tube of unbreathed private air’ House of the Future, Ideal Home Show, 1956
dvdh10PRINT.indd 390 21-04-13 16:57

Golden Lane, 1952, ‘street-in-the-air’ collage with supposed Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio
391 Images
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View up into the trees from Axel’s porch, Hexenhaus, Bad Karlshafen, 1986
dvdh10PRINT.indd 392 21-04-13 16:57

‘Sky over the motorway. The motorway opens the city to the sky ... through the sky we sense the nature of the city’
Peter Smithson, ‘Sky’, in ILA&UD Annual Report 1994-1995, ‘Reading and Design of the Territory’,
republished in Italienische Gedanken, weitergedacht
393 Images
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SOURCES AND REFERENCES
Archives
The largest collection of original materials can be found at

Harvard University: the Alison and Peter Smithson Archive at
GSD Special Collections in the Frances Loeb Library, due to a
gift of Peter Smithson. It neatly sits next to the Josep Lluis Sert
Collection and the CIAM Collection based on gifts of Sert and
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. The inventory can be accessed online via
the Loeb Library web pages.
Personal archives include the Smithson Family Archive in

Stamford, UK and Axel Bruchhäuser’s collection at TECTA,
Lauenförde, Germany.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris holds a wonderful collection of the

most famous of the Smithsons’ drawings and diagrams of their
ideas on the city, mostly from the 1950s, including the UR-grid of
1953 made for the CIAM conference in Aix-en-Provence.
CCA in Montreal holds the drawings of the House of the Future.

DAM in Frankfurt holds a great set of drawings of the many
Smithson projects for Berlin, including their Hauptstadt Berlin
competition proposal.
The RIBA Drawings Collections holds a handful of specific items,

such as drawings of the Economist, beautiful silver panels of the
InterDesign 2000 furniture series and the handsome model of the
Smithsons’ competition entry for Coventry Cathedral.
The NAi Archive in Rotterdam (per 1 January 2013 part of

The New Institute) holds the Smithson correspondence regarding
CIAM and Team 10, just as it holds the Bakema Archive, including
Jaap Bakema’s papers of CIAM and Team 10 days.
GTA/ETH Zürich has of course an extensive archive of the post-

war years of CIAM.
Tate Britain holds materials of the Independent Group, including

the archive of Nigel Henderson.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 395 21-04-13 16:57

Bibliographies
There are various extensive bibliographies of the Smithsons’

writings available:
Max Risselada (ed.), Alison & Peter Smithson. A Critical Anthology,

Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, 2011;
Max Risselada, Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.). Team 10. In Search of
a Utopia of the Present 1953-81, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005;
Dirk van den Heuvel, Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and Peter
Smithson – from the House of the Future to a house of today,
010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004;
Helena Webster (ed.), Modernism without Rhetoric. Essays

on the Work of Alison and Peter Smithson, Academy Editions,
London, 1997;
Julia Bloomfield, ‘A Bibliography of Alison and Peter Smithson’,

in: Oppositions, nr. 2, 1974, pp. 105-123.
Literature references can also be checked by consulting the online

catalogue of GSD Special Collections, just as the RIBA Library
has an excellent online catalogue.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 396 21-04-13 16:57

The Architectural Review, December Architectural Design, August 1964,
Bibliographical References 1950, ‘Man Made America’ ‘Team 10 Work’ (guest edited by
The Architectural Review, June 1951, Alison Smithson)
‘Royal Festival Hall’ Architectural Design, December
The Architectural Review, August 1965, ‘The Heroic Period of Mod-
1951, ‘South Bank Exhibition’ ern Architecture’ (guest edited
‘COID: Progress Report’, in: The by Alison and Peter Smithson)
Architectural Review, December Veröffentlichungen zur Architek-
1951, pp. 349-352 tur, Heft nr. 3, 1966, TU Berlin,
‘COID: Progress Report: Industrial Lehrstuhl für Entwerfen und
Design 1951’, in: The Architec- Gebäudelehre, ‘Team X: Treffen
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pp. 353-359 Arena, The Architectural Association
‘House in Soho, London. Alison and Journal, vol. 81, nr. 899, February
Peter Smithson’, in: Architectur- 1966, ‘A Smithson File’ (guest
al Design, December 1953, p. 342 edited by Jeremy Baker)
‘The New Brutalism’, in: The Ar- Architectural Design, September
chitectural Review, April 1954, 1966, ‘Eames Celebration’
pp. 274-275; including statement (guest edited by Alison and
by Alison and Peter Smithson Peter Smithson)
‘School at Hunstanton’, in: The l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui,
Architectural Review, September nr. 177, January-February 1975,
1954, pp. 148-162 ‘team 10 + 20’
‘The New Brutalism’, in: Architec- Architectural Design, November
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1955, ‘Outrage’ (guest edited by and Rise of Pop, MIT Press,
Ian Nairn) Cambridge MA, 1988
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reprint 2010 by the Whitechapel OASE, nr. 51, June 1999, ‘Rearrange-
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dvdh10PRINT.indd 397 21-04-13 16:57

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in: Archis, September 1999, Primer, first re-edition; reprint Smithson, Alison, (guest editor),
pp. 34-47 of the two special issues of Architectural Design, November
Scalbert, Irénée, ‘Parallel of Life Architectural Design of 1962 and 1975, ‘Team 10 at Royaumont,
and Art’, in: Daidalos, nr. 75, 1964, without colophon, undated, 1962, a report’
‘The Everyday’, 2000, pp. 53-65 probably 1965 Smithson, Alison, ‘In pursuit of lyri-
Schrijver, Lara, Radical Games. Smithson, Alison, A Portrait of the cal appropriateness’, in: Spazio
Popping the Bubble of 1960s’ Female Mind as a Young Girl, e Società, Autumn 1976; original
Architecture, NAi Publishers, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966 typoscript 1975-1976
Rotterdam, 2009 Smithson, Alison, ‘And now Smithson, Alison, ‘The City Centre
Schumacher, Tom, ‘Contextualism: Dhamas Are Dying out in Ja- Full of Holes’, in: AA Quarterly,
Urban Ideals + Deformations’, pan’, in: Architectural Design, vol. 9, nrs. 2-3, 1977, pp. 3-23
in: Casabella, nr. 359-360, 1971, September 1966, pp. 447-448; Smithson, Alison, ‘The Smith-
pp. 79-86 reprinted in: Alison and Peter sons……Gone Swimming’, one
Scott Brown, Denise, ‘Learning Smithson, Changing the Art of page typoscript, dated July 2
from Brutalism’, in: David Rob- Inhabitation, Artemis, London, 1978; GSD Special Collections
bins (ed.), The Independent 1994, pp. 77-78 Smithson, Alison, ‘Home-Based
Group: Postwar Britain and the Smithson, Alison, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Leisure: its facilitation by
Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT Press, Places’, in: Architectural Design, the form of the home and the
Cambridge MA, 1990, pp. 203-206 December 1967, p. 573; repub- home’s relation to an immediate
Scully, Vincent, The Earth, the Tem- lished in: Dirk van den Heuvel, environment’, typoscript, 1979,
ple and the Gods. Greek Sacred Max Risselada (eds.), Alison Smithson Family Archive
Architecture, Yale University and Peter Smithson – from the Smithson, Alison, (ed.): The Emer-
Press, New Haven, 1962 House of the Future to a house gence of Team 10 out of C.I.A.M.,
Searing, Helen, ‘Case Study Hous- of today, 010 Publishers, Rotter- The Architectural Association,
es. In the Grand Modern Tradi- dam, 2004, pp. 213-214 London, 1982
tion’, in: Elizabeth A.T. Smith Smithson, Alison, (ed.): Team 10 Smithson, Alison, AS in DS. An
(ed.), Blueprints for Modern Primer, MIT Press, Cambridge Eye on the Road, Delft Univer-
Living. History and Legacy of the MA, 1968; second re-edition sity Press, 1983; republished in
Case Study Houses, MIT Press, based on the first, undated 2001 by Lars Müller Publishers,
Cambridge MA, 1989, pp. 106-129 re-edition with a new, 20 page Baden, with an afterword by
Searle, John R., The Construc- preface Christian Sumi
tion of Social Reality, Simon & Smithson, Alison, ‘The Violent Con- Smithson, Alison, ‘Heritage: Carré
Schuster / Allen Lane The Pen- sumer, or Waiting for the Good- Bleu, Paris, May 1988’, in: Spazio
guin Press, New York / London, ies’, in: Architectural Design, e Società, nr. 45, 1989, pp. 100-103
1995 May 1974, pp. 274-279
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Smithson, Alison, ‘A Comment, Smithson, Peter, ‘Density, Measure Smithson, Peter, ‘The Recovery of
Long Lost and Found Again, on and Interval’, in: David Lewis Parts of the Gothic Mind’, in:
Atelier 5 Conversation. Can (ed.), Architects’ Year Book, ILA&UD Year Book 1990-1991,
the Swiss Have Their Apple and nr. 12, Paul Elek, London, 1968; The Contemporary Town, 1992,
Shoot It?’, in: Spazio e Società, first published in Landscape, p. 53; republished in German in:
nr. 45, 1989, p. 123 Spring 1967, also in Architectural Italienische Gedanken, weiterge-
Smithson, Alison, Saint Jerome. Design, September 1967 dacht, p. 42-44
The Desert – the Study, TECTA, Smithson, Peter, ‘Walks within the Smithson, Peter, ‘Team X in Retro-
Lauenförde, 1990; republished Walls. A Study of Bath as a Built spect’, typoscript, dated 1 Oc-
in: Dirk van den Heuvel and Max Form Taken over by Other Uses’, tober, 1993, revised March 1994,
Risselada (eds.), Alison and in: Architectural Design, October October 1995, April 1999 and May
Peter Smithson – from the House 1969; reprinted as Bath: Walks 2001, 10 pages
of the Future to a house of today, within the Walls, Adams & Dart, Smithson, Peter, ‘Reflections on
2004, pp. 224-229 Bath, 1971 Hunstanton’, in: ARQ, vol. 2,
Smithson, Alison, (ed.), Team 10 Smithson, Peter, ‘Architecture as Summer 1997, pp. 32-43
Meetings 1953-1984, Delft Uni- Townbuilding – The Slow Growth Smithson, Peter, ‘In Praise of Cup-
versity Press / Rizzoli, Delft / of Another Sensibility’, typo- board Doors’, in: Dirk van den
New York, 1991 script of lecture 1972 Heuvel, Max Risselada (eds.),
Smithson, Alison, ‘The Otterlo In- Smithson, Peter, ‘Signs of Occu- Alison and Peter Smithson –
cident’, in: Città Studi, Quaderni pancy’, in: Architectural Design, from the House of the Future to
del Dipartimento di Proget- February 1972, pp. 97-99 a house of today, 010 Publishers,
tazione dell’ Architettura del Smithson, Peter, ‘Intitiators and Rotterdam, 2004, pp. 217-218
Politecnica di Milano, nr. 15, Successors’, in: Architectural Smithson, Peter, ‘Response to the
special issue on Ernesto Nathan Design, October 1973, pp. 621- Glut’, in: Dirk van den Heuvel,
Rogers, September 1993 623 Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and
Smithson, Alison, Imprint of India, Smithson, Peter, ‘Lightness of Peter Smithson – from the House
Architectural Association, Lon- Touch’, in: Architectural Design, of the Future to a house of today,
don, 1994 June 1974, pp. 377-378 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004,
Smithson, Peter, (P.D.S.), ‘House in Smithson, Peter, ‘Making the Con- pp. 219-220
Soho, London. Alison and Peter nection’, in: Architectural De- Smithson, Peter, ‘Putaway Villa:
Smithson’, in: Architectural De- sign, May 1975, pp. 271-274 Some Speculations Arising
sign, December 1953, p. 342 Smithson, Peter, ‘Oxford & Cam- From the Axonometric Draw-
Smithson, Peter, ‘Letter to Amer- bridge Walks’, in: Architectural ings of the Things Stored’, in:
ica’, in: Architectural Design, Design, June 1976 Dirk van den Heuvel, Max Ris-
March 1958, pp. 93-102 Smithson, Peter, ‘Some Thoughts selada (eds.), Alison and Peter
Smithson, Peter, ‘Theories Con- After Team X Terni’, typoscript, Smithson – from the House of
cerning the Layout of Classical eventually published as ‘Ap- the Future to a house of today,
Greek Buildings’, in: AA Journal, ropos Terni’ in: l’Architecture 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004,
February 1959, pp. 194-209 d’Aujourd’hui, nr. 189, February pp. 221-222
Smithson, Peter, ‘Education for 1977 Smithson, Peter, ‘Put-away Adden-
Town Building’ in: The Architec- Smithson, Peter, ‘Three Genera- dum’, in: Dirk van den Heuvel,
tural Association Journal, Janu- tions’, in: ILA&UD Annual Report Max Risselada (eds.), Alison and
ary 1961, p. 191 1980, 1981; republished in: Alison Peter Smithson – from the House
Smithson, Peter ‘The Rocket’, in: and Peter Smithson, Italian of the Future to a house of today,
Architectural Design, July 1965, Thoughts, 1993, pp. 8-15, and 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004,
pp. 322-323 OASE, nr. 51, ‘Re-arrangements. p. 223
Smithson, Peter, ‘Contributions to A Smithsons Celebration’, Smithson, Alison and Peter, in:
a Fragmentary Utopia’, in: Archi- June 1999, pp. 82-93 ‘Correspondence’, in: RIBA Jour-
tectural Design, February 1966, Smithson, Peter, ‘Space is the nal, February 1952, pp. 140-141
pp. 64-67 American Mediator, or the Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘An
Smithson, Peter, ‘Without Rhetoric. Blocks of Ithaca: a Speculation’, Urban Project’, in: Trevor Dan-
Some Thoughts for Berlin’, in in: The Harvard Architecture Re- natt (ed.), Architects’ Year Book,
the series Veröffentichungen zur view, Spring 1981, pp. 106-112 nr. 5, Paul Elek, London, 1953,
Architektur, Heft nr. 2, February Smithson, Peter, ‘“The Fifties”. The pp. 48-55
1966, TU Berlin, Lehrstuhl für Materials Sacred to Brutalism’, Smithson, Alison and Peter, state-
Entwerfen und Gebäudelehre dated 30 July 1986 ment as part of an anonymous
Smithson, Peter, ‘Concealment and (Reyner Banham?) editorial
Display. Meditations on Braun’, piece on ‘The New Brutalism’,
in: Architectural Design, July in: The Architectural Review,
1966 April 1954, pp. 274-275
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Smithson, Alison and Peter, state- Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Alison Smithson, Alison and Peter, The
ment as part of editorial ‘The and Peter Smithson’, in: Theo Euston Arch. and the Growth of
New Brutalism’, in: Architectural Crosby (ed.), Uppercase, nr. 3, the London, Midland & Scottish
Design, January 1955, p. 1 ‘Alison and Peter Smithson’, Railway, Thames and Hudson,
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Col- Whitefriars, London, 1960 London, 1968
lective Housing in Morocco. Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Louis Smithson, Alison und Peter,
The Work of Atbat-Afrique: Kahn’, in: Trevor Dannatt (ed.), ‘Mies van der Rohe’, in the
Bodiansky, Candilis, Woods’, in: Architects’ Year Book, nr. 8, Paul series: Veröffentlichungen zur
Architectural Design, January Elek, London, 1960, pp. 102-118 Architektur, Heft nr. 20, Novem-
1955, pp. 2-8 Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Fix: ber 1968, TU Berlin, Lehrstuhl für
Smithson, Alison and Peter ‘The Permanence and Transience’, in: Entwerfen und Gebäudelehre
Built World: Urban Re-identifi- The Architectural Review, De- Smithson, Alison and Peter, Ordi-
cation’ in: Architectural Design, cember 1960, pp. 437-439 nariness and Light. Urban theo-
June 1955, pp. 185-188 Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘New ries 1952-60, and their application
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The Model House’, unpublished in a building project 1963-70, MIT
Theme of CIAM 10’ in: Trevor manuscript dated 24 February Press, Cambridge MA, 1970
Dannatt (ed.), Architects’ Year 1965; Smithson Family Archive Smithson, Alison and Peter With-
Book, nr. 7, Paul Elek, London, Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The out Rhetoric. An Architectural
1956. pp. 28-31 Pavilion and the Route’, in: Ar- Aesthetic 1955-1972, Latimer
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘An chitectural Design, March 1965, New Dimensions, London, 1973;
Alternative to the Garden City pp. 143-146 MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1974
Idea’, in: Architectural Design, Smithson, Alison and Peter, (guest Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The
July 1956, pp. 229-231 editors), Architectural Design, Space Between’, in: Opposi-
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘But December 1965, ‘The Heroic tions, nr. 4, 1974, pp. 74-78
Today We Collect Ads’, Ark. The Period of Modern Architecture’; Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The
Journal of the Royal College of republished in 1981 by Rizzoli / Shift’, in: David Dunster (ed.),
Art, November 1956, pp. 49-50 Idea Editions, New York / Milan Alison and Peter Smithson. The
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Con- Shift, Architectural Monographs
Aesthetics of Change’ in: Trevor cealment and Display: Medita- nr. 7, Academy Editions, London,
Dannatt (ed.), Architects’ Year tions on Braun’, in: Architectural 1982
Book, nr. 8, Paul Elek, London, Design, July 1966, pp. 362-363 Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Thirty
1957, pp. 14-22 Smithson, Alison and Peter, (guest Years of Thoughts on the House
Smithson, Alison and Peter, manu- editors), Architectural Design, and Housing’, in: Denys Lasdun
script ‘Brutalism A.D.’, 23 Febru- September 1966, ‘Eames Cel- (ed.). Architecture in an Age
ary 1957; published as part of ebration’ of Scepticism. A Practitioner’s
‘Thoughts in Progress. The New Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Ban- Anthology, Heinemann, London,
Brutalism’, in: Architectural De- ham’s Bumper Book on Brutal- 1984, pp. 172-191
sign, April 1957, p. 113 ism’, in: The Architects’ Journal, Smithson, Alison and Peter, The
Smithson, Alison and Peter, 28 December 1966, pp. 1590-1591 1930’s, Alexander Verlag, Berlin
‘The New Brutalism: Alison Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Bold and TECTA Möbel, Lauenförde,
and Peter Smithson answer the Brut Bottled by the Man Ban- 1985
criticisms on the opposite page’, ham’, unpublished review, dated Smithson, Alison and Peter, Upper
in: Architectural Design, April 1 December 1966, revised 21 Lawn: Solar Pavilion, Folly, Edi-
1957, p. 113; part of otherwise April 1967; GSD Special Col- cions de la Universitat Politèc-
anonymous ‘Thoughts in Prog- lections nica de Catalunya, Barcelona,
ress. The New Brutalism’, in: Smithson, Alison and Peter, Urban 1986
Architectural Design, April 1957, Structuring. Studies of Alison and Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The
pp. 111-113 Peter Smithson, Studio Vista / Silent Architects’, in: Sigurd
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Clus- Reinhold Publishing Corpora- Lewerentz, 1885-1975. The Dilem-
ter City’, in: The Architectural tion, London / New York, 1967 ma of Classicism, Architectural
Review, November 1957, pp. 333- Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Cri- Association, London, 1988
336 teria for Mass Housing’, in: Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Dimi-
Smithson, Alison and Peter ‘Mobil- Architectural Design, September tri Pikionis’, in: Dimitri Pikionis,
ity. Road Systems’, in: Archi- 1967, pp. 393-471; also published Architect 1887-1968. A Sentimen-
tectural Design, October 1958, in the 1964 edition of the Team 10 tal Topography, Architectural
pp. 385-388 Primer Association, London, 1989
Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘Den- Smithson, Alison and Peter, un-
Appliance House’, in: Architec- sity, Interval, and Measure’, in: titled statement, in: David
tural Design, April 1958, p. 177; Landscape, Spring 1967, pp. 18-20; Robbins (ed.), The Independent
also published in: Design, nr. 113, reprinted in: Architectural De- Group. Postwar Britain and
1958, pp. 43-47 sign, September 1967, pp. 428- the Aesthetics of Plenty, 1990,
429 pp. 194-195
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Smithson, Alison and Peter, ‘The Stonard, John-Paul, ‘Eduardo Troiani, Igea, ‘Edited by Alison
“As Found” and the “Found”’, in: Paolozzi’s Psychological Atlas’, Smithson. A Censored History
David Robbins (ed.), The Inde- in: October, nr. 136, ‘New Brutal- of the “Team 10 Family”’, in:
pendent Group. Postwar Britain ism’, Spring 2011, pp. 51-62 Mark Swenarton, Igea Troiani,
and the Aesthetics of Plenty, MIT Strauven, Francis, Aldo van Eyck. Helena Webster (eds.), The
press, Cambridge MA, London, The Shape of Relativity, Architec- Politics of Making, Routledge,
1990, pp. 201-202 tura & Natura, Amsterdam, 1998; Abingdon, 2007, pp. 148-158
Smithson, Alison and Peter, Italian original Dutch edition 1994 Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline, (ed.), Patrick
Thoughts, Royal Academy of Summerson, John, Heavenly Man- Geddes in India, Humprhies,
Fine Arts, Stockholm, 1993 sions and Other Essays on Archi- London, 1947
Smithson, Alison and Peter, Chang- tecture, Cresset Press, London, Valena, Tomas, with Tom Aver-
ing the Art of Inhabitation, Arte- 1949 maete, Georg Vrachliotis (eds.),
mis, London 1994 Summerson, John, ‘The Case for a Structuralism Reloaded, Edition
Smithson, Alison und Peter, Ital- Theory of Modern Architecture’, Axel Menges, Stuttgart, 2011
ienische Gedanken. Beobach- in: RIBA Journal, June 1957, Vanstiphout, Wouter, ‘Mart Stam’s
tungen und Reflexionen zur Ar- pp. 307-313 Trousers. A Conversation be-
chitektur, Bauwelt Fundamente Summerson, John, The Classical tween Peter Smithson & Wouter
nr. 111, Vieweg, Braunschweig / Language of Architecture, MIT Vanstiphout’, in: Crimson with
Wiesbaden,1996 Press, Cambridge MA, 1963 Michael Speakes and Gerard
Smithson, Alison und Peter, Ital- Tafuri, Manfredo, Progetto e utopia: Haddes (eds.), Mart Stam’s
ienische Gedanken, weiterge- Architettura e sviluppo capitalis- Trousers: Stories from behind the
dacht, Bauwelt Fundamente tico, Bari, Laterza, 1973; Ameri- Scenes of Dutch Moral Modern-
nr. 122, Birkhäuser, Basel, 2001 can edition: Architecture and ism, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam,
Smithson, Alison and Peter, The Utopia. Design and Capitalist 1999, pp. 121-138
Charged Void: Architecture, Mo- Development, MIT Press, Cam- Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural
nacelli Press, New York, 2001 bridge MA, 1976; Dutch edition: Uncanny. Essays in the Modern
Smithson, Alison and Peter, The Ontwerp en Utopie. Architektuur Unhomely, MIT Press, Cam-
Charged Void: Urbanism, Mona- en Ontwikkeling van het Kapita- bridge MA, 1992
celli Press, New York, 2005 lisme, SUN, Nijmegen, 1978 Vidler, Anthony, Histories of the Im-
Smithson, Peter, Alison Smithson, Tafuri, Manfredo, Theories and His- mediate Present. Inventing Archi-
Jane B. Drew, E. Maxwell Fry, tory of Architecture, Harper & tectural Modernism, MIT Press,
‘Conversation on Brutalism’ in: Row, New York, 1980; original Cambridge MA, 2008
Zodiac, nr. 4, 1959, pp. 73-81 Italian edition 1976 Vidler, Anthony, ‘Another Brick in
Spellman, Catherine, Karl Unglaub Tafuri, Manfredo, The Sphere and the Wall’, in: October, nr. 136,
(eds.), Peter Smithson: Conver- the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and ‘New Brutalism’, Spring 2011,
sations with Students. A Space Architecture from Piranesi to the pp. 105-132
for Our Generation, Princeton 1970s, MIT Press, Cambridge Vidotto, Marco, A+P Smithson.
Architectural Press, New York, MA, 1987; original Italian edition Pensieri, progetti e frammenti
2005 1980 fino al 1990, Sagep editrice,
Stalder, Laurent, ‘“New Brutalism”, Tapié, Michel, Un art autre, où il Genova, 1991
“Topology” and “Image”: some s’agit de nouveaux dévidages Vidott, Marco, Alison + Peter Smith-
remarks on the architectural du réel, Gabriel-Giraud et fils, son. Obras y proyectos / Works
debates in England around 1950’, Paris, 1952 and Projects, Editorial Gustavo
in: The Journal of Architecture, Target, Hugo, Furnishing the Habi- Gili, Barcelona, 1997
nr. 3, 2008, pp. 263-281 tat: Furnishing the City. The Fur- Voelcker, John, letter to the editor
Stanek, Lukasz, Henri Lefebvre niture Design of Alison and Peter in: Architectural Design, May
on Space. Architecture, Urban Smithson, Thesis, 2010 1957, p. 219
Reserach, and the Production of Taylor, Rattray, ‘The Social Basis Walker, Lynne, (ed.), Women Ar-
Theory, University of Minnesota of Town Planning’, in: Jane B. chitects: Their Work, catalogue
Press, Minneapolis, 2011 Drew, Trevor Dannatt (eds.), RIBA, London, 1984
Steiner, Hadas, ‘Life at the Tresh- Architects’ Year Book, nr. 4, 1952, Wallas, Graham, The Great Society.
old’, in: October nr. 136, Spring pp. 27-32 A Psychological Analysis, Mac-
2011, pp. 133-155 Tentori, Francesco, ‘Phoenix Bru- Millan and Co., London, 1932;
Stirling, James, ‘Regionalism and talism’, in: Zodiac, nr. 18, 1968, original edition 1914
Modern Architecture’, in: Trevor pp. 257-266 Walsh, Victoria, Nigel Henderson.
Dannatt (ed.), Architects’ Year Tournikiotis, Panayotis, The Histori- Parallel of Life and Art, Thames
Book 8, 1957, Elek Books, Lon- ography of Modern Architecture, & Hudson, London, 2001
don, pp. 62-68 MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1999 Ward, Colin, (ed.), Vandalism, Van
Toynbee-Clarke, George, ‘Lives re- Nostrand Reinhold, New York,
membered’, The Times, Wednes- 1973
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Webster, Helena, (ed.) Modernism Williams, Raymond, The Country
without Rhetoric. Essays on the and the City, Oxford University
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1997 Society 1780-1950, Chatto & Win-
Welter, Volker M., Biopolis. Patrick dus, London, 1958
Geddes and the City of Life, MIT Wilson, Colin St John, The Other
Press, Cambridge MA, 2002 Tradition of Modern Architec-
Welter, Volker M., ‘In-between ture. The Uncompleted Project,
Space and Society. On Some Academy Editions, London, 1995
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Wigley, Mark, White Walls, Designer dam, 2005, pp. 216-217
Dresses. The Fashioning of Mod- Zardini, Mirko, ‘From Team X to
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Cambridge MA, 1995 nr. 95, 1997, pp. 76-97
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ledge, London, 2002, pp. 92-100
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dvdh10PRINT.indd 410 21-04-13 16:57

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For good and bad reasons the writing of the dissertation took
quite a while as my closer friends and relatives know all too
well. It also means that I owe many people, whom I met over the
years and who were willing to contribute to the realization of this
dissertation by criticism, inspiration, sharing and intellectual and
material support. It is simply impossible to mention everybody
here, just as it is also slightly awkward to reduce the vital
importance of academic and personal exchange to a list of names
as an appendix.
First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors who have been

incredibly patient with me and who never seemed to have lost
faith, or at least never showed it to me: Max Risselada, Hilde
Heynen and Dick van Gameren. I owe to Max Risselada my return
to academic life after having worked in architectural practice for
five years; as happy as that period was, I simply feel more at home
in a world with books, with the scholarly and the intellectual, as
unlikely as this may sound for an architect to say. Adrian Forty in
his Words and Buildings reminded us that there are four sorts of
architects, the architect-builder, the architect-client, the architect-
designer (which is the most commonly understood meaning of
being an architect these days), and eventually the architect-writer.
I suppose that I fit the latter category. Perhaps needless to say
but working for and with Max Risselada, and to become part of the
great TEAM MAX as some of the assistants called it, opened up
a vast horizon of international contacts, inspiration and exchange,
while working on our exhibition projects for the Design Museum
and the NAi between 1999 and 2005. Hilde Heynen, slightly
at a distance being in Leuven, was always a steady compass
regarding intellectual integrity and critical rigour, a quality
for which I admire her tremendously. Dick van Gameren’s
support I’d like to highlight as well, for enabling me to finish the
dissertation within the confines of Delft university life in the
last couple of years, not only by way of his generous intellectual
support and unwavering trust in my work but also by providing a
space at his office for work and concentration at a crucial moment.
dvdh10PRINT.indd 411 21-04-13 16:57

In hindsight, the first steps of my academic career were made
as an editor of OASE, a long time ago when I was still a student
of architecture; also my very first piece on Alison and Peter
Smithson’s work and Robin Hood Gardens was published in
the first issue I co-edited. Today, I am an editor of Footprint
and DASH. I feel grateful that I have always been part of
such editorial platforms, for the stimulating criticism and
conversations and for the collective effort to get work done.
Academic life only exists by way of a proper institutional context.

I am most indebted to Delft University of course, my biggest
and most loyal ‘sponsor’ in these years of private money and
market ideology, just as I am indebted to my colleagues at our
Department of Architecture and the Chair of Architecture and
Dwelling, a working environment which I feel has ever been as
thriving and dynamic as before, despite our daily complaints
about the red tape and teaching load. A special thank you goes
out to Jeanne Seelt. Extra financial support which made (parts
of) my research possible, came from the Dutch government
body NWO, the Delft Universiteitsfonds, the British Council,
Mondriaanfonds, Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur, and the
Netherland-America Foundation.
A very dear and special thank you goes out to the archives
I consulted and their dedicated staff, especially to Mary Daniels
and Inés Zalduendo of the GSD Special Collections, the NAi
Archives (Suzanne Mulder and Alfred Marks in particular),
to Wolfgang Voigt of the DAM in Frankfurt, to the RIBA Library
Drawings Collection, to the Archive of Art and Design of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain, the British Library,
GTA/ETH Zürich, CCA Montréal, Centre Pompidou, the Avery
Library of Columbia University, as well as to Coventry Cathedral,
the Newcastle School of Architecture, the Royal College of Arts,
the Royal Academy, Bath University, and the AA School.
As a Dutchman, I want to express my sincere gratitude to my

colleages in England who always made me feel most welcome
on the island: the much appreciated Twentieth Century Society
in the first place, in particular Alan Powers, Elain Harwood
and Catherine Croft, as well as Andrew Ballantyne,
Nicholas Bullock, Barnabas Calder, Adrian Forty, Ben Highmore,
Anne Massey, James Peto, Irenée Scalbert, Mark Swenarton
and Victoria Walsh.
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Over the years I presented my research to many people
at many occasions. Many colleagues – among whom
highly esteemed architects and critics and some close
friends – generously provided input (including their criticism!),
or enabled my research by way of organizing or joining seminars,
conferences, reading and reviewing of essays, publishing
my writings, correspondence, allowing to be interviewed,
or otherwise: Fernando Agrasar, Mathew Aitchison,
Asseel Al-Ragam, Catherine Blain, Jean-Lucien Bonillo,
Jos Bosman, Christine Boyer, Felix Burrichter,
Larry Busbea, Peter Carolin, Henry Thomas Cadbury-Brown,
Maristella Casciato, Noah Chasin, Beatriz Colomina,
Mark Crinson, Hans van Dijk, David Dunster, Henk Engel,
Peter Eisenman, Bruno Fayolle Lussac, Hal Foster,
John Gold, Sarah Goldhagen, Jeremy Gould, Maria Grever,
Deborah Hauptmann, Herman Hertzberger, Karin Jaschke,
Charles Jencks, Guillaume Jullian de la Fuente,
Tahl Kaminer, Marilena Kourniati, Esa Laaksonen,
Johan Lagae, Mary-Lou Lobsinger, Cammie MacAtee,
Claude Massu, Robert Maxwell, Mary McLeod, Luca Molinari,
Josep Maria Montaner, Ákos Moravánszky, Eric Mumford,
Joan Ockman, Arjen Oosterman, Rémi Papillault,
Steve Parnell, Annie Pedret, Mark Rappolt, Joseph Rykwert,
Felicity Scott, Axel Sowa, Laurent Stalder, Łukasz Stanek,
Hadas Steiner, Nancy Stieber, Martino Stierli,
Francis Strauven, Ed Taverne, Georges Teyssot,
Roemer van Toorn, Sophie Trelcat, Clelia Tuscano,
Tomáš Valena, Georg Vrachliotis, Madelon Vriesendorp,
Tom Weaver, Volker Welter, Graham Whitham, Elia Zenghelis
and Claire Zimmerman.
For sharing their personal experience and reading parts of

my work I’d like to thank most gratefully Alan Colquhoun and
Kenneth Frampton, and Robin Middleton in particular, who
helped me with his criticism in the final phase of the editing.
Other members of the extended family so to speak and who
helped in various ways include the ‘three kings of TECTA’:
Axel Bruchhäuser, Christian Drescher, and Karlchen,
Lorenzo Wong, Sandra Lousada and Brian Richards,
Judy Chung and Sze Tsung Leong, Louisa Hutton and
Matthias Sauerbruch, Roger Rigby, Peter Sigmond,
Ron Simpson, Derek and Jean Sugden, Adam Voelcker,
Val and Aïcha Woods and Christopher Woodward.
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Some special friends and colleagues I would like to mention
at this point, who I think of as ‘partners-in-crime’ in past
projects and hopefully, future projects too: Madeleine Steigenga,
Jaap van Triest, D’Laine Camp, Christoph Grafe, Tom Avermaete,
Lara Schrijver, Suzanne Frank, Nelson Mota, and Guus Beumer
and Herman Verkerk. Neil Bingham deserves a special mention
here, at first a great and knowledgeable help as curator at the
RIBA Drawings Collection (then still at Portman Square), but
soon a dear and most hospitable friend with whom it is great to
drive out of London to visit either Brutalist Birmingham, the grand
gardens of Stowe, or Arts and Crafts haunts like the Watts Chapel.
My special gratitude goes out to the Smithson family, to Simon,

Samantha and Soraya. Without the Christmas cards and their trust
the pursuit of this dissertation would never have been possible.
For sure, the ones who are most relieved and happiest that the
dissertation is finally completed, are Egbert and my parents
Sophia and Henk van den Heuvel. Because of their enduring
patience, their love and support, this dissertation is dedicated
to them.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Dirk van den Heuvel (born 17 July 1968, Apeldoorn) received his
VWO diploma from the Stedelijk Gymnasium, ’s Hertogenbosch.
He received his graduation as bouwkundig ingenieur and architect
from the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. Before returning to
the Delft Faculty of Architecture in November 1999 to pursue an
academic career, he worked for various firms: Steigenga Smit
Architecten in Amsterdam, Neutelings Riedijk Architecten in
Rotterdam and De Nijl Architecten in Rotterdam. Dirk van den
Heuvel has worked in various capacities at the Delft University,
first as Assistent-in-Opleiding, as Researcher (2004), Assistant
Professor (2007), and since October 2008 as Associate Professor.
Dirk van den Heuvel is an editor of the publication series DASH

– Delft Architectural Studies on Housing (nai010 Publishers,
Rotterdam), and he is an editor of the online journal for
architecture theory Footprint (TU Delft and Techne Publishers,
Amsterdam); from 1993 to 1999 he was an editor of the journal
OASE (SUN Publishers, currently nai010 Publishers, Rotterdam).
Together with Max Risselada he published two books, which

accompanied the exhibitions of the same name: Alison and Peter
Smithson – from the House of the Future to a house of today
(010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2004); and Team 10. In Search of a
Utopia of the Present 1953-1981 (NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005).
He has published his research on Alison and Peter Smithson and
post-war modern architecture in numerous international journals,
among others AA Files, l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Archis,
Volume. He presented his research at various universities and
international conferences, among others ETH Zürich, KU Leuven,
NAi Rotterdam, Princeton University, Columbia University NY,
Docomomo, SAH, EAHN, V&A Museum and ICA London,
Twentieth Century Society, Alvar Aalto Academy Helsinki,
Akademie der Künste Berlin.
415 Biographical Note
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367,6 totale breedte 27,6 rug

Dirk van den Heuvel

Dirk van den Heuvel

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involving the house, the city and the everyday

(plus a couple of other things)

door Dirk van den Heuvel

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Rector Magnificus, voorzitter

Prof. Ir. M. Riedijk Technische Universiteit Delft, reservelid

4 Dirk van den Heuvel

dvdh10PRINT.indd 4 21-04-13 16:56

of the dissertation by Dirk van den Heuvel, ‘Alison and Peter

02 The bridge between our ideas and the outside world is

03 In language, one of the media of the architecture discourse

04 We are in need of an open, speculative historiography –

05 Conventionally, the house and the everyday are considered to

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08 Alison and Peter Smithson redefined the art of inhabitation

09 The truly unresolved paradox of the Smithsons’ work concerns

10 It would fit the ambitions of our university to trade the T of

These propositions are regarded as opposable and defendable,

6 Dirk van den Heuvel

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01 Niemand weet precies hoe een idee in de wereld komt. Om de

02 De taal vormt de brug tussen onze ideeën en de buitenwereld,

03 Aangezien de taal een van de media van het architectonisch

04 We hebben een open, speculatieve geschiedschrijving nodig

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06 Het alledaagse als bron van inventie voor de architectuur en

07 Gedurende de moderne tijd is het huis keer op keer opnieuw

08 Alison en Peter Smithson hebben de kunst van het wonen

09 De werkelijk onopgeloste paradox in het werk van de Smithsons

10 Het past binnen de ambities van onze universiteit om de T van

Deze stellingen worden opponeerbaar en verdedigbaar geacht

8 Dirk van den Heuvel

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dvdh10PRINT.indd 9 21-04-13 16:56

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25 The Smithson-ness of the Smithsons

57 ‘The Simple Life, Well Done’

105 Competing Traditions

157 The New Brutalist Game of Associations

195 Another Sensibility

241 The Great Society

395 Sources and References

415 Biographical Note

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Doeschka Meijsing wrote about the curious problem of the author

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In his masterful novel The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst

14 Dirk van den Heuvel

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