Well Done God

This statement of belief and intention was made in 1954 by two young architects, the husband-and-wife partnership of Alison and Peter Smithson,18 and it echoed the manifestoes of the previous generation’s avant garde while at the same time announcing that a new generation was still not satisfied with such progress as had been made. The Smithsons have acknowledged their debt to the Modern Movement as a whole, to its painters, sculptors, writers, composers, philosophers and scientists: to Picasso, Klee, Mondrian, Brancusi, Joyce, Le Corbusier, Schönberg, Bergson, and Einstein. But they have also pointed out that ‘Modern Architecture’ is now a historical term which describes a certain period in architectural development.

Though the Smithsons originally came from County Durham, they live and work in London.

‘The English don’t ever seem to have set out to build a city as such,’ they say, ‘let alone formed the concept of a city as a work of art, which is of course what we see it as potentially; a collective work of art, that is. And if a city is not a work of art then really it’s a nothing, it’s a load of old buildings with cars in between. . . . [But] if a city is this kind of work of art you live in, then the living there itself takes on a marvellous sort of extra quality: you are suddenly made aware of very ordinary things like entering or moving or being quiet, things which suddenly become positive and not residual. That’s the trouble with Londoners: they see the city merely as a mechanism with which you can tinker to make it all right: they don’t see it as a work of art, a live thing, a living organism, which could make life marvellous. You don’t have to start building London all over again: this sort of life can be achieved by symbols, just as you can transform an unpleasant room by a pleasant picture in such a way that you really don’t see the room at all.’ [...]

The Smithsons see the demolition in 1963 of Philip Hardwick’s Arch at Euston Station as a symbol of the jealousy of London, of an unhealthy domination.

‘What the hell did they do it for? Who were they? The Euston Arch was a monument to the Railway Age, to an age when for the first time for centuries the power which had traditionally resided in the Court and the south suddenly came to depend on the industrial energy of the north, on men like George Stephenson, born in a cottage at Wylam, near Newcastle, who invented the whole thing from nothing: a man who could survey a line, organise the men, design the track, the engines, the signals, the lamps, name the places, design the lettering, do it all, everything. One envies him his force: no one really has the will to operate on that scale now. These men suddenly were the power: they put up this monument in London, a simple, marvellous piece of architecture, which just sort of thundered away there, standing for what these men had done. All over London there are monuments to the others which have lasted for centuries, some of them. And since the 1914–18 war the power has come back to the south, largely because all decisions had to be made from one place then, and later London got a stranglehold on the new power, communications. And so they seized this opportunity to destroy the Arch, which was a kind of imposition on London, a reminder that what was the Empire was based on men working in the dirt up north. Obviously the Prime Minister didn’t refuse to act because he knew this consciously, but surely when he was making up his mind or not making up his mind to save it, he must have felt certain that to knock it down was somehow the right thing to do, as if to wipe out the fact that there was a time when the south wasn’t dominant. If it had been a monument to Marlborough or someone like that then they’d have found a reason for keeping it, because he was part of the southern economic power, he came from where the wealth was manipulated.’ [...]

The Smithsons have what amounts to a reverence for anything into which effort and trouble have been put. This shows particularly in the care with which they made sure that their first London building, for the Economist in St. James’s, took into account, blended with, and even flattered the eighteenth-century Boodle’s Club on an adjacent site. The Smithsons designed a group of three buildings standing on a plaza to replace the corpus of obsolete Edwardian buildings which had solidly filled the site before. On the St. James’s Street side they placed a bank building, conforming in scale and achieving great compatibility with the other buildings on that side of this most conservative of streets; behind this a tower block rises, still conforming in general to the scale of the St. James’s area though it is in fact its highest building, which houses the Economist offices; and an exact half-size copy of this tower stands behind Boodle’s and contains flats, chambers, and services for the Club. Below the plaza on which these three building stand is an underground car park and various services.

The demolition of the building next to Boodle’s left a long flank wall of the Club exposed, and it is in the architectural treatment of this that the extreme, almost loving care of the Smithsons’ solution to the problems of this site is seen at its most original. They studied Boodle’s from what they call an archaeological approach:

‘From the bones and other objects an archaeologist finds, he has to comprehend through interpretation the whole culture, what it was, what made it tick, everything he can about it. Similarly, we had to try to think what Boodle’s was to its architect, to its time, and then think what it had become, as well.’

This examination in depth revealed information that led to the solution, the blending and neutralising of the lines and proportions of Boodle’s with those of the Smithsons’ buildings. The feature which most closely links the two is a new three-storey bay window on the exposed wall of the Club, which appears to be constructionally the same as the Economist but which actually parodies its Portland stone facing by being carried out in the modern equivalent of Coade artificial stone, just as the Club imitates in Coade the masonry facings of buildings of its own period: a delightful, if rather recondite, architectural joke.

Not only does the Economist group of buildings embody almost didactically the architectural theories of its designers and fit beautifully into its surroundings, but it has also provided improved civic amenities: it is now possible to walk across the plaza, an area bounded on three sides by roads, and quite immune from traffic; it is also possible to stop and rest there on seats. Compared with what was there before, the Smithsons have added light, air, space and public amenity besides providing better accommodation for a bank, offices, and Boodle’s Club. This is in marked contrast to most developments, which live off built capital and close in every available site rather than attempt to add new values.

The Economist is a magnificent example of what can be done in urban renewal, a practical, successful demonstration of how to preserve the better buildings by re-stating them in terms of relationships with new buildings. It has obvious applications to St. James’s Street itself: the whole of the east side could be developed organically in this manner, and once, as something of an architects’ office joke, the Smithsons imposed on an air photo of the whole St. James’s area photographs of the model of the Economist on half a dozen other sites: it worked well. Such a redevelopment would make the area architecturally as aristocratic as it likes to think it is historically.

But even the redevelopment of St. James’s would solve only a small part of London’s problem.

‘At the moment they’re trying to do something to alleviate the conditions of traffic congestion which already exist, making huge investments at places like Hyde Park Corner which serve only to attract more traffic to them and make conditions worse than they were before. Whereas it would be more sensible if they were to say, Let’s leave Piccadilly as it is and concentrate on taking the traffic some distance away from it on a proper road designed for that traffic. Piccadilly would then revert to something more like its former condition. This would shunt off energy – energy meaning money and people and everything – away from the existing congestion. You find the same thing in principle right throughout the country: the local civic engineer is constantly tinkering about with his High Street, putting bus shelters up, erecting railings, concreting some areas, ripping up cobbles somewhere else, setting aside parking places, and so on. Whereas a couple of streets away it’s derelict, or of very little value, and if he was to build a new shopping street there with shops properly serviced from the rear, accessible by bus, with off-street parking, then the big multiple shops would be attracted to it and the historical High Street area could go back to its Saturday market, the camera shop, the small grocer, and so on. Maybe part of it would die, and then you could open up spaces, or some houses which had had shopfronts bashed in them could revert to being houses again.’ [...]

The Smithsons believe that the only thing capable of pulling London together, structurally, to make the scattered city more like an entity, is a network of motorways. These urban motorways would also serve to move traffic at the present centres of congestion, and bring new life to areas which are now depressed in one way or another. They have prepared a plan for such a network of new roads, on routes which exploit cheap land adjacent to railways (or if necessary over railways), previously unusable land like marshes, and the ‘backlands’ or wasted land sometimes left in odd pockets. Junctions for these roads are sited on or over railway sidings and cheap property: where land is not available exactly where it is needed, the roads merely cross without intersecting and interconnection is made elsewhere, always with the object of avoiding present areas of congestion to divert traffic away from them. Architecturally the roads are intended to present a clear pattern in themselves, and as the same principles apply throughout, it is hoped that the pattern would be apparent in spite of the many versions of junctions, takeoffs, and so on which are necessary to meet the complex conditions of an already existing city. When two roads have to cross, the junction is so designed that only one decision can be made on each approach road: the decision to turn the other way has either been made further back in the system, or will be made further on in the system. The motorways are routed to provide a series of identifying fixes, or places where a relationship to the city structure could be observed: for example, the route along the Embankment provides fixes on Westminster and the City, and the route across Hyde Park does the same for the central area. The existing raised portion of the M4 at Chiswick is a built example of what the Smithsons mean by such a road redefining places in relation to each other, such places as Osterley Park and Brentford Football Ground now being able to be seen in relationship to each other and to the road in a way which was not possible before.

Routing these roads through the ‘backlands’ is intended to regenerate old areas by increasing land values: this would happen especially round takeoffs, where increased accessibility and new facilities for garages, hotels and so on would provide new incentives to redevelopment. To serve these takeoffs, the existing street net has been organised in ‘Stop’ streets (mainly shopping streets which are also bus routes, two-way, with picking up and setting down permitted, and metered parking provided where possible) and ‘Go’ streets (often the present ‘taxi’ routes, which have been organised into a system of one-way streets feeding into the takeoffs with no stopping and no parking whatsoever). The ‘Stop’ streets, which are really those in which the route itself has no function, would then serve the buildings and the functions of the street itself: there would be frequent pedestrian crossings, lay-bys, and car park entrances. Intersections on the ‘Go’ streets would be controlled by lights, with filters wherever possible to keep the one-way system flowing.

This London road plan, the Smithsons feel, should be supplemented by a public transport survey, but in any case they envisage a rapid transit bus system to serve the whole central area: the buses would never leave the motorway network, there being alighting points at suitable takeoffs at that level about a quarter of a mile apart and also at railway stations and Green Line termini. Such a system of rationalised, subsidised mass transit facilities already works well in Philadelphia, where two lanes of the urban motorways are reserved for high-speed buses.

There is nothing unfeasible about this plan: it would be expensive, but so is the congestion existing at the moment and which becomes inexorably worse each month. But such a system of urban motorways introduces into the city an element on an entirely new scale, the Smithsons believe, a geographical scale which seems to make the old sort of building totally inappropriate and which implies a new kind of interlocking town-structure/architectural-form about which they have spent much time evolving theories.

These theories have found their most complete expression in a plan for the rebuilding of the city of Berlin made in collaboration with Peter Sigmonde, a plan which won third prize in a competition organised by that city, and was the only non-German entry to win a prize, incidentally. In this plan the function of urban motorways to unify and define a city rather than merely to relieve congestion is seen in its most convincing form. A ring of them serve a central area of access roads, upon the net of which is superimposed a pedestrian platform net some thirty feet above the ground, from which it is reached by escalators. The shape of this city is the reverse of a conventional one, having an inverted profile: that is, the centre is flat, with a single symbolic identifying fix (somewhat like a navel), with a ‘wall’ of high office buildings on the outskirts linked to both roads and the pedestrian platform. Green zones define but do not define the parts. Growth and change are built into this city concept: each sort of development has its rules by which addition and variation are controlled in an organic manner.

Such a plan was evolved from many years of continuous objective analysis of the structures created by man and the changes which take place in them in an attempt ‘to uncover a pattern of reality which includes human aspirations.’

This analysis has also led to the formation of a series of 15 Criteria for Mass Housing, criteria which have that sort of simplicity which makes them appear obvious until it is remembered that no single dwelling in the country measures up to them:

1) Does the housing liberate the inhabitants from old restrictions or straitjacket them into new ones?

2) Can the individual add identity to his house or is the architecture packaging him?

3) Will the lampshades on the ceilings, the curtains, the china dogs take away from the meaning of the architecture?

4) Is the means of construction of the same order as the standard of living envisaged in the house?

5) Are the spaces moulded exactly to their purpose or are they by-products of structural tidiness or plastic whim?

6) Is there a decently large open-air sunlit space opening directly from the house?

7) Can the weather be enjoyed? (‘The English climate is characterised by changeability: therefore a house should be capable of grasping what fine weather it can get: south windows in all rooms and easy access to sheltered patios, roof gardens or terraces which can be arranged in a moment to catch the pleasures of our climate and then closed up in a moment so that we can ignore it.’)

8) Can the extension of the dwelling (garden, patio, and so on) be appreciated from inside?

9) Is there a place in the open air where a baby can be left?

10) Where do 3–5 year olds play?

11) Can the houses be put together in such a way as to contribute something to each other?

12) Is the house as comfortable as a car of the same year?

13) Is there a place where you can clean or wash things without making a mess of the whole house?

14) Is there enough vital storage: that is, storage not of a purely residual nature like lofts, built-in fittings, and so on?

15) Is there a place for the belongings peculiar to the class of the occupant: poodles, ferrets, motorbikes, geraniums, and so on?

That these reasonable criteria are not those of every form of housing erected in Britain is a condemnation of every responsible authority or private builder.

Only in painting, sculpture and (to a lesser extent) music have the pioneers of the Modern Movement become the establishment in their respective arts. In literature and in architecture the reactionaries who use the techniques of Dickens and put up Shell Centres are still not only in the majority but even represent these arts to many people. Thus Alison and Peter Smithson are faced with a multiple problem: not only to overcome the opposition of reactionaries to a previous generation, but also to have ideas accepted which are an extension and development of those of that generation. Just to come by the requisite experience is difficult enough:

‘Really, if you talk about it strategically, dealing with London as it now exists and thinking what’s going to happen between now and 1980, say, then you speak of something we’ve simply not had any experience of. No one can say much about it because you have to be given the responsibility before you can think about it meaningfully, that is, you have to say, what is it that you could actually do?’

With so much theoretical work of obvious validity and importance done over the decade and more since their manifesto, and with one practical example of it built showing what could be done with London, is it not time that the solutions to urban renewal and mass housing put forward by the Smithsons were given urgent, even desperate, consideration? It may not be so disastrous that advances in literature fail to be consolidated: but those in architecture involve more serious and fundamental elements determining the basic quality of living, and we simply cannot afford to ignore anyone who has anything to say as practical and original as Alison and Peter Smithson.