from those late nights at Yale. I remember saying to Su that I didn’t expect to ever have a whole weekend free, but that it would be nice to have just one Sunday off, maybe every other month.
Where Creek Vean was exciting and tiring, Murray Mews was dispiriting. The clients had very different requirements or changed these over time: one of them, Naum Gabo’s stepson Owen Franklin (our GP), wanted a bachelor pad full of art and sculpture at the outset, but had married and had children by the time the house was finished. His needs had changed, but the building had difficulty meeting these.
The plan for Creek Vean, showing the stepped path leading down from the roadside, the two wings either side of it and the glazed gallery connecting them under the path.
Pill Creek Retreat, which we built near Creek Vean as a summer house – and a refuge for the client to escape from his architects.
Zad, Ben and Ab on the steps.
The concrete stepped path now softened by vegetation, leading down between the two wings of the house.
The kitchen-dining room, the heart of Creek Vean, looking out towards Falmouth.
Inside the gallery, a flexible space for displaying works by Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and other artists of the St Ives School.
The budgets were very low and the contractor was incompetent and keen to cut corners: everything leaked, walls weren’t square, we discovered a small river running through the sunken dining room in Owen’s house, and chimneys missed fireplaces. I remember one horrendous site visit with one of the clients. First of all he poked at a piece of what looked like asphalt, to discover it was just a copy of the Daily Mail painted black. Then we went downstairs, where the U-bend of the lavatory was visible. The owner hit it to make a point, and it broke, showering him in sewage. Charlie Chaplin couldn’t have done better. John Young, who had just joined us, prepared intricately detailed plans for tiling the bathrooms, showing how every tile would fit. These were ignored, and used to wrap fish and chips. I walked off site one day and went to sit under a tree on Hampstead Heath, and burst into tears. I wondered, not for the first or last time, whether I was really cut out to be an architect.
At Creek Vean, we were luckier with our builders; their work was excellent, though their attitude was pretty laid-back. If the weather was good, they would down tools and go fishing. This was one of the reasons, though not the only one, that it took the six of us the best part of three years to complete Creek Vean.
From Classical Temples to Friendly Robots
We couldn’t continue to work like this. Creek Vean and Murray Mews pushed us to fundamentally rethink our approach to technology and the process of construction. Technology is the raw material of architectural expression, the equivalent of words in poetry. Without a proper understanding of words there is no poetry, and architecture starts from an understanding of technology, materials, the process of construction and a sense of place. Norman and I were modernists, but were inspired by the amazing heritage of early industrial buildings, from the world’s first cast-iron bridge at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, to the incredible lightness and delicacy of Brunel and Paxton, who used iron, steel and glass – the high tech materials of their day – to create great station sheds, bridges, glass houses and crystal palaces.
In the twentieth century, technology had continued to transform our cities: it was the steel frame, the telephone and the elevator that freed buildings from the ground, enabling Chicago to build the first skyscrapers. At the same time, the Model T Ford had shown what could be achieved on production lines, and so technology had also created an economy of manufacture. Norman and I had studied the use of manufactured components in Buckminster Fuller’s work, in Soriano’s architecture and Paul Rudolph’s early designs, in the open-ended architecture of the Eames House in Los Angeles, in Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated steel structures, and in modern industrial buildings and machinery.
Though industrialisation had created countless new possibilities for building and construction, many of the buildings we saw in 1964, and see today, still use tools and techniques – bricks, mortar and timber frames – that have been used for 500 years or more. As Peter Rice, the Irish engineer who became an indispensable partner on the Pompidou Centre and so many other projects, liked to say, traditional techniques have been used so many times that you don’t give them any thought; radical architecture has to start from first principles.
I have never liked the label of ‘high tech’ architecture that is sometimes applied to people like Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw and me, but I do believe we have a similar approach in that expressing the process of construction is an important part of our architectural language, something to be celebrated as it was by Paxton and Brunel, not to be hidden away behind the romantic stylings of neoclassical and neo-Gothic façades.
All good architecture is modern in its time, reflecting both changing technology and the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist. Architectural language needs to evolve with the times, just as painting, music, fashion, even the design of cars does. It is from the interplay of function, technology and zeitgeist that good architecture emerges, with a tough beauty that contains bitterness as well as sweeter flavours.
Our experience with Creek Vean and Murray Mews had shown the limits of traditional technologies; the challenges of working with ‘wet trade’ contractors – those deploying traditional techniques of bricks and mortar on site – even when they were competent; the time taken, and the risks of constructing fixed buildings for clients whose needs changed over the years. In 1969, a few years after we had completed these projects, I wrote a manifesto arguing for change. At a time when we needed 400,000 houses a year in the UK (a curiously similar challenge to the one we still face nearly 50 years later), it made no sense that it had taken six architects four years to build four houses. We wanted to create buildings that took advantage of industrialised technology, that were general purpose not tailor-made, so that the same shell could cater for different clients’ needs or for one client’s needs changing over time.
We had to go back to the system-built structures that had inspired us, assembling components not stacking bricks, creating lightweight vessels not heavy-boned buildings. Essentially, the modern building site should be an assembly site, leaving the manufacture of components in the workshop. Using industrial components and systems, our architecture could be based on an interchangeable and adaptable kit of parts, not the creation of a perfectly formed doll’s house. It would not be frozen classical music, but jazz, allowing for improvisation, propelled and supported by a regular beat.
Buildings should not rigidly determine the way they are used, but should allow people to adapt and interact with their space, to bring their own character, to perform freely inside and out, to bring life to and complete the expression of the building. Our buildings would not be classical temples where (to use the Florentine architect Alberti’s phrase) ‘nothing could be added or taken away or altered except for the worse’, but friendly robots, non-deterministic open-ended systems that could
