Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Alison heard about the man she would marry long before she clapped eyes on him. Peter Smithson, the only child of a travelling salesman from Stockton-on-Tees, had joined the School of Architecture in 1939, but in 1942 had left Newcastle to serve with the Royal Engineers and Queen Victoria’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners in Burma. Most of the architecture students, however, already knew of him by reputation as a group of them had found some models in a storeroom: cardboard constructions of extremely white, extremely modern buildings in the style of Le Corbusier, whose name was then something of a dirty word. Who had made these models? They asked Gordon Ryder,* their tutor, who told them that they were by Peter Smithson. It was clear from the look on his face that he couldn’t wait for the model-builder’s return.

  Alison, aged sixteen

  (The Smithson Family Collection.)

  In 1945 Smithson did return, first as a student and then, after he had completed his degree, as a studio assistant. Like many of those who had served in the war, he took his studies more seriously second time around, and was struck both by what he thought of as the élan of the younger students and their determination to enjoy themselves. What drew him to Alison? ‘She was a one-off,’ he said later. ‘Like many of the girls at university she was original in a way that the boys just weren’t.’ He, too, was struck by her clothes – her long coats especially. Thanks to the wartime diet she was also extremely skinny: ‘She looked like Popeye’s girlfriend. Her nickname was Chippendale because her legs were so thin.’

  But it was Alison who made all the running. She seems to have decided that Peter was what she wanted, and when she graduated in 1949 she followed him to London, where they joined the schools division of the London County Council Architects’ Department and lived in a Bloomsbury flat – two rooms, kitchen, shared bathroom – which they rented from Theo Crosby, the architectural writer, who lived upstairs.* They were married, to the surprise of many of their friends, in August of the same year, in Regent Square, St Pancras; Alison wore a home-made dress and carried a bouquet of wax orange blossom. No doubt they chose the Presbyterian church for its convenience rather than its symbolism (they would eat their wedding breakfast at home in Doughty Street), but the imagery cannot have been lost on them. On the afternoon of 9 February 1945 it had been hit by a German bomb, and though it still stood, or just about, the structure was deemed unsafe and services had to be conducted in a nearby lecture hall. They were a young couple who wanted to build the future. Where better to seal their union than amid the wreckage of the past?

  18 August 1949

  (The Smithson Family Collection.)

  Newly married couples have a certain energy, and the Smithsons were no exception. They began working together immediately, entering a competition to design a new secondary modern in Hunstanton, and to general amazement – Peter was still only twenty-six, and Alison just twenty-one – they won it. Most architects then, as now, expected to wait for middle age before getting a break; it’s for this reason that the epithet ‘young’ is habitually applied to any architect under fifty. But the Smithsons had got lucky. The competition had just one assessor: Denis Clark Hall, an architect who specialised in school design and who had himself won a major competition at the age of just twenty. The commission would prove to be a significant one: on the back of it, they would be able to set up their own practice. But it would be life-changing in another way too. There was a severe shortage of materials in post-war Britain. In most instances, prefabrication was the order of the day and would be for years to come. The Smithsons, though, were blessed with a contractor, F. W. Shanks, who seemed not to care about profit – perhaps because (this was Peter’s theory) the company was in effect building the school for the children of its workmen. From the outset, it was clear to its architects that no corners would be cut: they could have all the glass and steel they required – the school would utilise the county’s entire allocation of steel until 1953. Even better, the Education Committee was taking strangely little interest in the plans. Their design, so radical it would in time join the beach and the pier on postcards of Sunny Hunny’s meagre attractions, would not be compromised. It would win them a place in architectural history.

  Pevsner calls the school, which is now Grade II* listed, ‘the paramount example among the innumerable interesting postwar schools of England of a rigidly formal, symmetrical layout’, and it’s certainly the case that the building’s arrangement is easily described, consisting as it does of a single oblong with three internal courtyards – the middle of which is roofed so as to provide the school with a hall – and ten open staircases rising to the classrooms, which are arranged in pairs on the first floor. To twenty-first-century eyes, a first glimpse brings some disappointment: for a modernist masterpiece, it is surprisingly dinky.* Move closer, though, and you will find that its precision beats a contemplative rhythm: the tick of the glazed panels, the tock of the gyratory corridors. And there is something at once triumphant and tongue-in-cheek about its Braithwaite water tank, raised high on an open frame so that it resembles, especially at dusk, the pit-head machinery that both Alison and Peter would have known from their childhoods. It is this tower, asymmetric and industrial, that gives the school its distinctive silhouette. Like a fading scar on a beautiful face, it is a flaw, deliberate and brazen, that only accentuates its abiding grace.

  Smithdon High School

  (John Maltby/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.)

  It took four long years to build what is now known as Smithdon High School, and when the scaffolding finally came down, there was the most tremendous fuss. Local people hated it. They worried that passers-by would be able to see up the skirts of female students, and there were concerns – these, admittedly, were more well-founded – about how cold the building, a veritable greenhouse, would be in winter, and how hot in summer.* Mostly, though, it was the building’s appearance that was disliked. It wasn’t only the feeling that this gleaming edifice had been beamed down from another planet; inside, its exposed ceilings and drainage pipes – the architectural ‘honesty’ to which the Smithsons would adhere for the rest of their working lives – seemed cold and standoffish, as if its architects had entirely forgotten that it would be inhabited mainly by children.

  Was this unfair? Not entirely. Of course the Smithsons didn’t forget who the building was for. They gave it the requisite cloakrooms, hall, craft room and, in a separate block, gymnasium. But there must have been moments when they wished their school could be allowed just to stand among its playing fields, pristine and untouched. Alison, who was responsible for Hunstanton’s landscaping, gave the grounds a ha-ha, a detail strongly suggestive of a certain kind of isolated splendour, and when the time came for the building to be photographed for the architectural journals she and Peter removed every last stick of furniture from its interior, thus returning it, in the words of one architectural writer, to a ‘protean, didactic state’.* Peter wrote of it insistently as a building that had ‘two lives’. The first, by day, was bustling and noisy, a scramble of scuffed shoes and satchels. The second, entirely nocturnal, was almost silent, when the structure became once again an idea.

  Naturally, there was an entirely different kind of fuss in the architectural press. Alison and Peter were careful, in their own accounts of their design, to emphasise the school’s Palladian formality. Yes, they had built what was ‘probably the most truly modern building in Britain’,† but it also had ‘a clear English precedent’ in the form of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, the magnificent Elizabethan country house designed by their namesake Robert Smythson. Others begged to differ, most notably Philip Johnson, the man who had been instrumental in bringing Mies van der Rohe to America, and who is probably most famous for his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, a brief but endlessly beguiling essay in minimalism. In Architectural Review, Johnson saluted the Smithsons for mastering the language of Mies and praised their building’s engineering for its amazing lightness. It was true that in using a frame system the arc
hitects had given themselves a problem where the frames met at right angles – ‘definitely not elegant!’ – but overall he was reluctant to ‘cavil in the face of so much distinction’. This must have been thrilling for the Smithsons, whatever they said about its Englishness. They feared and loathed the parochial – in the summer of 1951 they had gone on holiday to Greece with the sole aim of avoiding the Festival of Britain, the architecture of which they considered singularly provincial* – and now here was a famous American architect speaking of them as the children of Mies, a titan of modernism in Europe and America. Englishness be damned!

  But in another sense such an anointment, however glorious, had come too late. Even as their school was being built the Smithsons were in the process of forsaking Mies for an altogether sterner master; in 1951, they had attended a meeting of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, at which Le Corbusier had spoken, and it was his theories that excited them now. As Johnson mournfully acknowledged in his review, these two young architects had become part of the movement ‘they call the New Brutalism’, – a phrase that was ‘already being picked up by the Smithsons’ contemporaries to defend atrocities’. The ‘inherent elegance’ of their school was, he hinted, unlikely to be on display in their next work. For the rage now was not for steel and glass. The rage now was for brick and concrete and timber.

  Brutalism. What a word. Unlovely and unloved, it began its life as a bilingual pun on the English word ‘brutal’ and the French ‘beton brut’, a term used to described the coarse, irregular concrete finish of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (it has an echo, too, of art brut, Jean Dubuffet’s term for what has come to be known as outsider art) – and its coinage is most often attributed to the critic Reyner Banham, whose essay on the New Brutalism appeared in Architectural Review in 1955. Banham, invitations to whose Sunday morning ‘at homes’ in Primrose Hill were much sought after in London design circles, was the nearest thing architecture then had to a hipster. He was also, alas, an almost unreadably bad writer. But we can sum up his arguments thus: a Brutalist building is a straightforward, bloody-minded building, whose form and function can be understood by the passer-by in little more than a single glance.*

  Except that it wasn’t Banham who first used the word in print, for all that it reeks of testosterone. It was Alison and Peter Smithson. In 1953 they wrote a short piece about a house that they had planned to construct on a bomb site in Soho (it had not happened because they had been unable to buy the plot of land), which was published alongside their original drawings in Architectural Design. This house, which would have had a flat corrugated-iron roof, was intended, wherever practicable, to have no internal finishes whatsoever. The concrete beams that comprised its structure, moreover, would be incorporated uncompromisingly into its façade. Highlighting a specification that Alison and Peter had written – ‘The Constructor should aim at a high standard of basic construction as in a small warehouse’ – they added, almost casually: ‘Had this been built, it would have been the first exponent of the “new brutalism” in England.’ (There was perhaps an in-joke at play here too: Peter had christened himself Brutus at college, a name Alison always loathed.)

  By 1955, then, the Smithsons were in an enviable position: whether by accident or design, they were at the forefront of a nascent movement. Their school was much debated, their ideas much talked about (architecture does love theory; therein lies its downfall). They were increasingly well-connected. Thanks to their involvement with Team X, an off-shoot of CIAM,* they had struck up friendships with several European architects. At the Central School of Art and Design, where he was teaching, Peter had met the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and the photographer Nigel Henderson, who were both members of the Independent Group, a coalition of artists whose interests lay in the relationship between modernism and mass culture. The Smithsons duly joined them, with the result that they were among the contributors to Parallel of Life and Art, a 1953 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts of images from ordinary life, nature, art and architecture that was designed to make people look again at the everyday. In short, the Smithsons could not have been more fashionable if they had tried.

  And yet, none of this helped them to get anything built. Hunstanton soon began to look like a one-off, a false dawn. Over and over, they had failed to win the competitions they entered: for a new cathedral for Coventry; for new buildings at Sheffield University; for new housing – it would incorporate, famously, the idea of ‘streets in the sky’ – in Golden Lane in the City of London.*

  Luck played its part in this, of course – and sometimes it was simply the case that another architect came up with a better design; Basil Spence deserved to win the competition to rebuild Coventry Cathedral for the simple reason that he was the only entrant of two hundred to grasp the importance of keeping the ruins of the old cathedral intact (the fragment symbolising sacrifice, the new building, resurrection). There was also the matter of logistics. Alison had her first baby, a son called Simon, in 1955, and she was determined to keep the office manageably small, the better that she might combine work and motherhood; she had returned to her desk a week after giving birth, periodically dashing upstairs to breastfeed (a series of lodgers did all the baby-sitting). But she and Peter were increasingly convinced that, at bottom, the drought was personal – that competition judges and planning officers had only to see their names on a drawing to lose interest. It had been a political statement, of sorts, to call their partnership ‘Alison and Peter Smithson’, and Alison now suggested, only half-jokingly, that they should start using only Peter’s name, or even a pseudonym.

  This dry spell would continue for the rest of the Fifties. But it wasn’t only their designs that caused people to baulk. Somewhere along the way the Smithsons gained a reputation for being difficult. Specifically, Alison gained a reputation for being difficult. ‘The problem was that she could upset clients,’ says a former assistant. ‘It wasn’t just the case that she thought she was right; the client should do what she said too. That didn’t go down well.’ Another architect: ‘Alison whined. She was relentless. Her voice was relentless. She had a chip on her shoulder.’ And another: ‘I found her difficult. She had a beastly temper, and she could be horrid to people.’ And here is Jane Drew: ‘I thought her voice always had a moan in it somewhere.’ I take all of these comments with a pinch of salt; visible women in male-dominated professions are often characterised as shrill, bossy, chippy, stubborn and complaining, even by other visible women. On the other hand, Alison could be exasperating. Even those who loved her will tell you so.

  Excluded from the work of rebuilding Britain, the Smithsons began to turn their ambition inwards, their projects tending now to be private rather than public, domestic rather than commercial – something which may have suited Alison (though she would sooner have shopped for a set of antimacassars than admitted this in public). After all, home was her great preoccupation: its rhythms and its rituals. Sunday colour supplements were still some years in the future – the Sunday Times would not launch its magazine until 1962 – and yet her lifestyle could have come straight from the pages of one. It wasn’t only her furniture, though that was plenty striking enough in the days when most modern people longed for nothing more than an Ercol dining table. (The Smithsons’ sitting room was a museum of modern chairs: Thonet rocker, Bertoia wire chair, Rietvald Zig-Zag chair, several aluminium chairs by the Eames, and not a cushion in sight.) It was in the food she cooked, the clothes she wore, even the way her marriage worked. She and Peter had a determinedly egalitarian relationship, with the exception of the car, which he always drove (they owned a Citroën DS, a vehicle that fascinated them so much Alison went on to write a book about it).* In the office, their thinking went along the lines that ‘an experience shared was an experience solidified’. It was the Smithsons ‘versus the world . . . impossible to have a conspiracy of one’. This doesn’t mean every aspect of every design was a total col
laboration. The vast Smithson archive makes it fairly clear who sketched what, and sometimes it’s only Alison’s name (or Peter’s) on a drawing. But it was as complete a partnership as it is possible to imagine; the Smithsons were like Charles and Ray Eames without the jokes and the home movies. ‘We had to be equal, equal, equal,’ said Alison.