office during periods of leave, and immediately after I left the army, generally on pretty menial tasks. I did try my hand at drawing, with limited success; my drawings were hurriedly tidied away when clients visited, something that continues to this day!
I enjoyed my time at the BBPR office (a converted convent), the buzz of working with a group of committed young people creating exciting new designs in the heart of a beautiful city, and exploring the social possibilities that architecture created. I asked Ernesto whether I would be able to get into the Architectural Association, without A levels, and he told me not to worry: ‘If you are going to do architecture, it doesn’t matter where you go, just do architecture.’ But I approached the AA, and managed to persuade them that, even though I had failed my exams, my breadth of education and travelling made me sufficiently unusual to admit to their diploma course.
(From left) Luigi Figini, Le Corbusier, and BBPR partners Gian Luigi Banfi and Ernesto Rogers, photographed in 1935. Banfi, who was Jewish, died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.
Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller in front of the lightweight steel and acrylic geodesic dome he designed as the US Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal.
Joseph Paxton’s cast-iron and glass Crystal Palace, built for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, and subsequently rebuilt in South London (shown here).
2The Shock of the New
Modernism exploded into the twentieth century, embracing medicine, science, manufacture, travel, music, visual arts, literature and architecture. Shaped and driven by industrial manufacture, mainstream modernism challenged tradition in every field of human creativity, stripping back ornamentation, dissolving form and embedding constant renewal. Like previous waves of change, it represented a belief in progress, and in the potential of innovation to transform society. Karl Marx’s famous passage from The Communist Manifesto anticipates the giddy excitement of change:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
All good architecture is an expression of its age, materials and technology - from the classical columns of antiquity to the flying buttresses of the gothic cathedral. Modernism was spare, stripped down and spartan, with a clear geometric order. Its lineage can be traced back through the Bauhaus, to Adolf Loos (who in 1910 famously asserted that ornament was crime), Louis Sullivan, Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Joseph Paxton and other nineteenth-century innovators. But you can go back further, to the classical Japanese architecture that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. In the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which dates back more than 500 years, the beauty of the building lies in the expressive use of scale and natural materials – the simple tapered wooden structure, the paper walls, and tatami mats inside; the sand, stones and water outside – rather than in decorations applied to them. Though it is a product of tradition rather than a rejection of it, it also embodies the modern principles of restraint preached by Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé and Frei Otto – to do the most with the least.
Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which dates from the sixteenth century, feels thoroughly contemporary in its simplicity of manufacturing, transparency and expression, and has influenced many modernist architects.
By the mid-twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were presiding over a rebirth of architecture, and a rediscovery of the unadorned and rational simplicity of Japanese building, reinvented for the age of machines. Their styles were different; Wright’s naturalism contrasted with the more classical approaches pioneered by Mies and Corb. Inspired by modern manufacturing techniques, they saw houses in minimalist, functional terms, as ‘machines for living’; form should follow function; distracting ornamentation and historical cherry-picking should be outlawed; materials should be true to themselves; natural light, air and health should be celebrated.
Whole cities could be remodelled to replace urban squalor with rational blocks and street layouts. Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin proposed demolishing central Paris north of the Seine, replacing it with a grid of cruciform skyscrapers, connected by raised walkways separating pedestrians from cars, and topped with roof gardens. The idea was to bring the same rigour and scientific thinking to architecture that Lister and Pasteur had brought to medicine.
The tone of early modernism is uncompromising, but if you are a pioneer, you have to be uncompromising. Architects such as Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus wanted to rethink not just the shape of buildings, but the way we would live in the machine age. The Bauhaus took a total view of modern life, bringing together architects, artists, interior designers and craft workers. They felt the need to wipe the slate clean, to enable a fresh start after an orgy of decorative excess at the turn of the twentieth century. Since most critics at the time felt that what the modernist pioneers were doing was trash, should be outlawed and replaced by neoclassical and neo-Gothic pastiche, there was no space for compromise. You sometimes have to lean into the wind to make progress.
There were other currents of the modern movement too. Alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, other Chicago architects were using the steel frame, the telephone and the elevator to enable building at previously unheard of heights. In northern Europe, a Nordic modernism was developed by Alvar Aalto – more contextual, more humane, not immune to acknowledging history and the vernacular.
Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, built in Marseille, 1947 – 1952.
The flat roof is a public space, with a running track and a paddling pool for children.
The building still expresses early modernism’s confidence in the value of daylight and fresh air.
The building is constructed from raw concrete – the béton brut that gives brutalism its name – but has brightly coloured balconies, with well-proportioned rooms, and shops, clinics and restaurants on site.
A dialogue between Mediterranean and Nordic modernism can be seen in the London County Council-designed Alton Estate, in Roehampton in southwest London. One of the triumphs of post-war housing, the concrete Corbusian towers of Alton East contrast with the brick-built Alton West.
Aalto’s cool northern-European contextualism was tinged with elements
