forms and brighter Mediterranean colours. As an Italian, albeit one transplanted to England at an early age, I knew where my instinctive sympathies lay – with buildings like Corb’s Villa Savoye, Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Hitch-hiking to Italy every summer, I would usually sleep under the stars. On one trip, I took a detour to see Corb’s socially and architecturally radical Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. Night fell, and I gave up my search and instead found a field to sleep in. I woke up to see the building itself looming over me, with its residents peering curiously down at me from their windows and balconies. A few years later, I met Charlotte Perriand, the designer who worked closely with Corb on many of his interiors, at Jean Prouvé’s studio; when I expressed interest in their work together, she insisted on taking me in her car to visit the nearby Priory of Sainte Marie de la Tourette.
Jean Prouvé with Charlotte Perriand, who designed interiors and furniture with Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier (and once gave me a guided tour of Corb’s Priory of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette near Lyon).
Mies van der Rohe’s buildings were tightly controlled, complete works of art, which expressed their structure, but also took incredible care over scale and harmony. Nothing could be added or taken away. My good friend Peter Palumbo, who acquired Mies’ Farnsworth House in Illinois in 1972, once invited me to spend a night there together with my son Roo. I will never forget the magic of sleeping next to Roo in this perfectly realised jewel, barely able to close my eyes in my excitement, both of us marvelling at the poise and precision of the building, and the dialogue it establishes with the wild fields that surround it.
These mid-century modernists carved toeholds in the ice and showed a path, but did not complete the journey – Le Corbusier acknowledges as much in the title of his best-known work, Vers Une Architecture (75 years later, this title must have influenced the title of the Urban Task Force’s report, Towards an Urban Renaissance, produced under my chairmanship). My generation of architects, and the generation who taught me at the AA and elsewhere, used these toeholds to explore new pathways. We wanted a new architectural language that could flourish and add impetus to modernism, without being stifled or drowned out by this forceful collection of architectural and intellectual revolutionaries.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s exquisite Farnsworth House, built in Plano, Illinois, in 1951. The house is unequalled in its lightness, transparency and simplicity, seeming to float above the ground. The night I spent there is one of my most magical architectural experiences.
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist Buildings in St James’s, London. The stone-clad buildings and piazza are emphatically but quietly modernist, engaging in a careful dialogue with the surrounding gentlemen’s clubs and historic buildings.
By the mid-1950s, the modernist edifice was starting to crack. A new generation was stepping away from a rigidly utopian attitude, sensing that modernism was itself becoming a codified style (the much-criticised ‘international style’). Reyner Banham, who later became a great friend, began to unpick the idea of a modernist style, divorced from function and from the zeitgeist. In Italy, my cousin Ernesto Rogers was imbuing his modernist towers with a sense of context and historical continuity, and in England Alison and Peter Smithson were mounting their own challenge to the clean-lined utopianism of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.
The Smithsons’ two best-known London schemes could hardly be more different. The 1964 Economist Building in St James’s is one of London’s greatest modern buildings, standing in an elegant piazza, a delicate insertion into a historically rich context. Robin Hood Gardens, their housing scheme in Poplar completed in 1972, was in an uncompromising location alongside the urban motorway that leads to the Blackwall Tunnel. There, in the heart of east London, they introduced the radical concept of ‘streets in the air’ – designed to replicate the street life of east London, rather than the dark, dingy internal corridors then common in blocks of flats (their earlier unbuilt scheme for Golden Lane, a social housing scheme on the edge of the City of London, adopted the same language).
Cedric Price, whose radical ideas and projects inspired my architecture, and those of a generation of architects.
Hunstanton School in Norfolk, which the Smithsons completed in 1954, was a huge breakthrough. It was a rough building, owing plan and section to Mies van der Rohe, but taking a harsher, deformalised, more personal and reductive approach. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but looking back I can see the link between the honesty of Hunstanton, the Californian Case Study Houses’ celebration of standardised factory-produced components, and the architectural language that Norman Foster, Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman and I would later develop as Team 4.
Together with other members of MARS (the Modern Architecture Research Group – a younger and more radical English version of the modernist Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) – the Smithsons attacked the increasingly formalised international style adopted by the old guard, but also tore into the new contextualism espoused by Ernesto; there was heated correspondence between Ernesto and Reyner Banham, and one of my essays at the AA provoked a frosty response from Peter Smithson for discussing the role of history in modern architecture.
Another challenge to modernism was emerging from the conceptual thinking of Peter Cook, who would become one of the founders of Archigram, and Cedric Price. Cedric was a subtle, radical and considerable thinker, who overlapped with me at the AA. He saw architecture as a way of responding to the rapid changes of a post-industrial society, teaching a generation to challenge the brief and question what clients really wanted, while trying to find new ways to bring delight, learning, arts and culture to everyone’s doorstep. He devised the Fun Palace in the early 1960s with theatre director Joan Littlewood (who had scandalised the establishment by staging the First World War satire Oh! What A Lovely War at Stratford East), a mobile home for arts and sciences constructed of moveable and modular plug-ins. Cedric’s Thinkbelt project for the declining Potteries area would be a university on wheels, travelling along disused railway lines. Peter Cook’s Archigram projects also had a futuristic optimism, in love with the potential of technology and the fast-changing shape of the future, though they had less interest in social or political issues.
The Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in east London, a magnificent housing scheme completed in 1972 that has been allowed to deteriorate and is now scheduled for demolition.
The Smithsons’ unrealised 1952 design for Golden Lane, central London, showing the sociability and spaciousness of their ‘streets in the air’.
Alison and Peter Smithson at work.
Architectural Association – Meeting the Modern in Bedford Square
When I arrived at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1954, after a year at Epsom Art School (where I argued about philosophy as much as I studied art), it was the only school of modernist architecture in the UK, and the most important in
