architecture from the nineteenth century, from Brunel’s bridges to Paxton’s greenhouses, but American industrial structures were on a scale that I had never seen before. They were the undiluted and unornamented essence of functional expression. But they could also be visually exciting and even romantic, lit up at night or shrouded in smoke.
Su and I bought a Renault Dauphine, a wreck of a car with some disturbing habits. On one early journey, we were sitting in the front seats, and had picked up a hitch-hiker who was sitting in the back. We weren’t going very fast, but suddenly we realised the back seat was empty. The engine, at the back of the car, had caught fire, as it tended to do whenever you reached a certain speed (we later realised that the fuel line leaked over the exhaust pipe the more you put your foot down), and the hitch-hiker had opened the door and leapt out.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909 – 11, is one of his finest ‘Prairie School’ houses. Their horizontal lines and organic styling evoke the flatness of the Midwestern landscape.
The Eames House, designed and built by Charles and Ray Eames in Los Angeles in 1949 as part of the Case Study Houses programme, using standardised windows and doors chosen from a catalogue.
The interior with Charles and Ray Eames surrounded by furniture made to their designs, and their collections of art works and folk art.
We travelled across the country, wondering at the sense of space, but also at the poverty and intolerance that persisted in the segregated southern states, where even the smallest gas station would have separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. The discrimination was shocking, and the civil rights movement still in its infancy – it is amazing to think that it would be another 50 years before the USA would elect its first black President.
Somehow, we made it to San Francisco in the Renault without too many fires, where the Federal Housing Authority employed Su, and I took a job with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Being at SOM was an amazing experience, though I quickly came to realise that working in someone else’s architectural practice was not for me. One day, I was on the twenty-seventh floor of their offices and heard fire engines. Looking out of the window, I saw that the car had burst into flames again.
It was the Case Study Houses that drew us to California. The Houses were commissioned from 1945 to 1962 by Arts & Architecture magazine’s editor Esther McCoy as prototypes for post-war family housing, ‘conceived within the spirit of our time, using as far as is practicable many war-born techniques and materials best suited to the expression of man’s life in the modern world’. They were to reflect the spirit of the age.
The Eames House, almost improvised by Charles and Ray Eames and enhanced by their beautiful furniture, was a revelation. But it was Rudolph Schindler and Raphael Soriano who particularly made their mark on me. Schindler had been a student and colleague of Wright’s, and worked on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He took Wright’s design sensibilities and translated them from concrete blocks to a carefully considered mix of materials, including plastic panels and lightweight steel frame constructions.
Soriano was unusual in that he used absolutely standardised components – plywood, I-beams, tin roofs, cork tiling, Formica – in his 1950 Case Study House, and had started his career building cheap housing for workers. He was one of the first architects I met whose design was not just modernist in style, but seemed rooted in the possibilities of the modern industrial age. Where Mies was essentially a superb modern classicist who built scale mock-ups of his buildings and for whom structure was expressive, Soriano, who later became a close friend of mine, simply used components to structure the building; there was no artifice.
Rudolph Schindler’s 1926 Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach, California, shows the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Schindler had worked.
We raced around California, seeing as many of the Case Study Houses as possible. I had written my thesis at Yale on Schindler, so felt like an expert when I went visiting. In one, an older woman let me in, and I told her enthusiastically all about Schindler’s architecture, his wild life and his many affairs. She listened to me politely, and then said, ‘I know. I was his wife.’
We returned to New York, and considered staying there. But we were enticed back to England by the prospect of working on Creek Vean, Su’s parents’ house in Cornwall. They had commissioned designs for updating their creekside holiday home from Ernst Freud and sent them to us in New York for our views. We delivered a fairly tough critique – this was a job that required fresh thinking and a younger architect! – Marcus Brumwell suggested that we take over. We came back from California in the summer of 1963 (we were also expecting our first child by then), and Norman returned shortly afterwards.
Raphael Soriano’s Case Study House, 1950, which used standardised steel components to create an extendable and open structure, would influence Parkside, the house I built for my parents in Wimbledon.
With my mother on a site visit at Parkside in 1968. The three steel portal frames of the lodge are in the foreground; the five that would form the main house are beyond where we are standing.
Viewed from the side, you can see Parkside as a series of slices, capable of endless extension.
3The Language of Architecture
From the primitive hut to the soaring skyscraper, architecture seeks to solve problems in three dimensions. It combines scientific analysis with poetic interpretation, using technology and order to create aesthetic impact and functionality. It transforms the ordinary and the mundane by giving order, scale and rhythm to space. Renzo Piano described it as the most public and socially dangerous art: we can switch off the television or close a book, but we cannot ignore our built environment.
Parkside: Adaptability, Transparency and Colour
Parkside, the house that I built for my parents in 1968–9, was the first fluent expression of an architectural language that had been evolving since I arrived at Yale nearly ten years earlier. Its transparency, its use of colour, its industrialised construction and its flexibility set the scene for much that followed. The house, which I designed with Su and my long-term collaborators and partners John Young and the engineer Tony Hunt, is situated on the edge of Wimbledon Common, shielded from the road and the Common by a mound of earth, designed so that only the rooftop is visible.
Parkside was a considerable refinement of our architectural idiom, reflecting how new techniques and materials had transformed our design approach over a decade. It was a prototype of a flexible building type that would adapt to multiple changes in use, family structure and ownership, but was also an intensely personal project, reflecting
