and a former head of the school, had a discursive style, a cosmopolitan and humanistic outlook, and a belief in architecture as a potent force for social and economic change. He invited architects from across Europe, including Ernesto as well as Bauhaus refugees from Nazi Germany and Constructivist exiles from Soviet Russia, to teach and lecture at the school.
The students were almost as impressive as the teachers. Philip Powell and Jacko Moya, designers of the Festival of Britain’s Skylon and the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, had left a few years before I arrived, and the year above me included Peter Ahrends, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek, who would go on to design the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Keble College, Oxford, extension. One of the finest talents was Ed Reynolds, whose radical forms were far ahead of their time, but who never had the chance to develop his talents, as he died of cancer at the age of thirty-two. They were in their final year when I arrived and were already developing groundbreaking plans for social housing, reflecting the generally leftist and socially engaged atmosphere at the school. Intellectual and political debate was the lifeblood of the AA. Many nights at Epsom Art School had been spent debating how to change the world with Brian Taylor, a good friend and brilliant artist, my girlfriend Georgie Cheesman, and her sister Wendy. So this ambience of debate and discussion at the AA’s Bedford Square premises seemed like a natural progression.
Georgie Cheesman (later Wolton), my first great love. We met at Epsom Art School and studied together at the AA, where she helped rescue many of my drawings.
Georgie and I had met at Epsom, where we became inseparable. She started at the AA the year after I did, despite opposition from her father, a Lloyd’s insurance underwriter who absolutely loathed me, threatening to sue me and chasing me out of his house on multiple occasions. She was a great intellectual influence, and her help with my drawings was probably the only thing that stopped me from being thrown out of the AA (and was not the last time she would rescue my career). She was vivacious and intelligent, with a wild spark. After highs and lows, we separated at the end of my third year at the AA but stayed friends; she worked briefly at Team 4, and later on the landscaping outside the River Café and on the roof terrace at Royal Avenue.
My initial reports at the AA were dreadful. My drawing had failed to improve, and my ability to express myself in writing was poor. I had to repeat my fourth year. Reports from Michael Pattrick, head of the school, acknowledged my enthusiasm, but gave me little basis for believing that I could succeed as an architect. He even suggested that I move to furniture design – ignoring the fact that draughtsmanship was as important for a furniture designer as it was for an architect, if not more so.
But by my last year, something changed, or several things did. Peter Smithson was my tutor, and became very supportive (once he had got over my endorsements of Ernesto’s belief in historical continuity), alongside other excellent teachers like Alan Colquhoun and John Killick. There was also the sense that the post-war cultural freeze was finally thawing. We were inspired by This is Tomorrow, the 1956 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition that featured the Smithsons, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. My drawing had improved too, with Georgie’s help, and I wrote my first essay on the future of cities.
My final-year project, which appealed to Peter’s social instincts, was a school for children with special educational needs in Wales, which used locally grown timber, and was designed so that the children could participate in building. The school reflected a budding interest in social architecture, in the process as well as the result of construction. Smithson’s report on my scheme referred to my ‘capacity for worrying about the effect the building will have on people and a concern for shape on the inside’, and awarded me the final-year prize.
Meeting Su Brumwell
I met Su Brumwell in Milan at the end of my third year. She was beautiful, intelligent and sophisticated, and catapulted me into a milieu of left-wing politics and modern art in Britain. Su’s mother Rene was a Labour councillor from a long socialist tradition. Her father Marcus was a remarkable man. He headed an advertising agency (which he said bored him), chaired the Labour Party’s Science and Arts Committee, and had founded the Design Research Unit, the team behind the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain.
Marcus and Rene were strong supporters of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, the potter Bernard Leach, and other artists of the St Ives School. They seemed to have met every other artist who passed through England in the post-war years, from Piet Mondrian to Naum Gabo. One painting, which Mondrian gave Marcus to pay off a £37 debt, was later sold to fund the construction of Creek Vean, one of Team 4’s first projects.
The late 1950s was an exciting time, with the beginnings of the space race and huge technological advances, but also a frightening one. Su and I joined the Easter 1958 Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. It was snowing, and we planned to throw it in after one day’s marching as it was so cold. But the next day we saw the press, which was full of vicious lies about ‘hooligans’ and ‘commies’. This bore no resemblance to the very orderly civilised march we had been on, so we re-joined the march, and returned in subsequent years. I shall never forget the passion of the marchers, or the kindness of the Quaker families who gave us food, lodging and plasters for our blistered feet, any more than I will forget the venom of the press and some of the bystanders.
We moved in together in Hampstead, and we married in August 1960, while she was completing her sociology degree at the LSE. I went to work at Middlesex County Council, designing schools, drawn to work with Whitfield Lewis, a senior architect for the Alton Estate in Roehampton. Every local authority had an architecture department and some of these were huge: in 1956, the London County Council Architects Department had 3,000 employees, and was led by Leslie Martin, the architect of the Royal Festival Hall, a leading modernist thinker, and a friend of the Brumwells, who helped me maintain confidence a few years later when I was worrying whether I was cut out for architecture. A sense of social responsibility made it seem natural for the majority of young architects to work for the state rather than on the private commissions that dominate today. The focus of architectural training and practice was on public and civic buildings – schools, health centres, concert halls, new housing developments. It is time we returned to that socially driven model.
Su and I on 42nd Street in New York in 1961, the year after we married. We were photographed like celebrities by the New Haven local paper on our way to Yale.
We took a cargo boat to Israel during our honeymoon – still a young country and looking like a socialist utopia, creating orange groves out of the desert – where we worked on a kibbutz and met some of the state’s founders. We hitch-hiked back through Syria, Lebanon and Turkey to Europe, finding unbelievable kindness wherever we went, with the poorest being the kindest of all; hearing we were on honeymoon, people plied us with food and drink. It was a real cultural eye-opener. We came back through Paris, where we saw Pierre Chareau’s stunning Maison de Verre, crafted in the 1930s from glass bricks, to allow in light without revealing the view of a blank wall.
New York – The Athens of the Twentieth Century
Louis Kahn in his Yale Centre for British Art Building.
Arriving in New York was one of the greatest shocks of my life. Su and I left Southampton on an autumn day in 1961. As our ship, the Queen Elizabeth, pulled out of the port, we looked down on grey two-storey houses, and men in cloth caps cycling along the quayside of a city still scarred
