MEDIACIÓN DIALÓGICA INTERGENERACIONAL EN LAS TIC

Alison and Peter Smithson (A+PS) are unusual in that they have produced seminal work in all three of the classic grounds of ‘high’ architectural output: exhibitions, books and, of course, their relatively few but hugely influential and often controversial buildings. The close but varied relationship between their books, exhibitions and their built work has been much debated. For example, their Brutalist housing scheme in London’s East End, Robin Hood Gardens, was criticised for failing to meet their own criteria for urban patterns of connections; while their attempts to define in their writing a ‘a canon of conglomerate ordering’, then expressed in their buildings at Bath University, was deemed as meeting their written criteria but failing to meet the architectural standards of their other projects. (‘Time will tell,’ says Peter Smithson.) Despite such criticism – indeed, perhaps because of their uncompromising attempts to express and pursue their ideas and beliefs – they remain among the most respected of all UK architects. Kester Rattenbury asked Peter Smithson about the interaction of the different components of their architectural work.

Peter Smithson: What Alison and I write is for oneself. You write about the insights you have. You think, ‘Well, maybe, if they’re useful to me, they might be useful to some-body else’ – but never intentionally to influence or instruct.

There is an attempt by Max Risselada to put the work – the projects and the competitions and non-built things – together, like the Eames’s history charts.¹ Nowhere does it attempt to indicate what is influencing what. People say ‘you aban-doned your principles at Robin Hood Gardens’, because it didn’t connect into a pattern as proposed in the books. But the notion was overwhelmed by two things:

the noise of the adjacent roads, which meant you had to use the building to protect what space you had; and then, when it was built, the East India Dock was still open – and the river was busy. These influenced the format of the building. There is no side-stepping from the fundamental shift towards specificity (Doorn Manifesto, 1953).

Kester Rattenbury: The simplest example usually cited for the argument about a dispa-rate polemic between the different sorts of media in which A+PS work is usually the three ‘houses’ designed in 1955–6: the ‘House of the Future’, a space-age,

plastic-moulded lifestyle exhibition in the Ideal Home show of 1956 that predicted the house and lifestyle of the 1980s; a simple house-shaped frame filled with found objects at the

‘Patio and Pavilion’ house in the hugely influential ‘This is Tomorrow’ show by the International Group at the Whitechapel Gallery; and the Sugden house in Watford. Did you find that the argument for these being diametrically opposed was justified?

No, I don’t find any. In the Patio and Pavilion exhibit we made the framework, and the boys [Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi] inhabited it. But they inhabited it in a symbolic way. What you have to remember is, the funds for the ‘This is Tomorrow’

exhibition were £400 for everybody. Therefore you had to beg the material and do what you could. The framework was constructed in the simplest way because, as far as I remember, Theo Crosby talked some plywood company into giving something.

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We’re dealing with a minimum budget to make a framework. That’s another over-whelming factor.

In the House of the Future, it was assumed that anything that’s in prototype now is likely to be available generally in 25 years. Therefore the content, the equip-ment, the clothing, etc. were already somehow in development. (Some popular paper recently did an estimate of the accuracy, and it was something like 80 per cent. Eighty per cent of the things that we thought would be available generally were ordinary things now, like deep-freeze vegetables, portable ovens, microwaves – all that stuff, which in the 1950s was in embryo.) Whereas in Patio and Pavilion, Nigel and Eduardo occupied it with symbolic objects of the things we need.

In the House of the Future … plastic being made of oil – and at that time the cost of oil had gone down every year, and it continued to do so until the oil crisis – therefore

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the notion of making a house where the matrix was plaster or something heavy, and instead of using cement as a binder you used plastic, seemed reasonable within the twenty-five years – if the price of oil had continued to fall! Certain suggestions for the inhabitation came from us, whereas in Patio and Pavilion nothing came from us. The framework was established, and we went to Dubrovnik while it was being made. There was absolutely no influence on the content. And therefore the relationship between the framework and the occupation itself was absolutely pure – by chance.

I don’t see any real conflict between the two; unless you say that in the House of the Future you’re trying to deal with what would concretely be available in twenty-five years, where the Patio and Pavilion was a kind of symbolic version. And you could say that that’s natural – because one was in an art gallery, and the other was in a popular exhibition hall.

It’s possible to argue that in fact the three houses were counterpoints – though they looked like such different things – or is it that the conditions of designing for a client are so distinct from those of designing an exhibition as to be irrelevant?

We don’t design formally in that way; each is a response to circumstance. Richard Rogers is marketing Archigram. It’s a formal language which he’s building with; and Foster is the same with Buckminster Fuller – he’s using Fuller as a formal source.

Well, we don’t do that. For better or for worse, to repeat, with us the form evolves out of circumstance.

Now that makes a huge difference, because sometimes it won’t succeed, whereas if you’re knocking off Archigram you’re likely to succeed, since there’s a wide band of vocabulary to draw off – that somebody else invented. And time has passed since the sixties. The language, which was then extraordinary – the language of the oil refinery – is acceptable. That’s why I use the word marketing: because through some process it’s becoming acceptable. You can read that upside down. You can say that the reason why Archigram didn’t ever build anything was the opposite: it wasn’t marketable. People were afraid of it.

Yet you have written of designs for exhibitions recurring in later build projects: the Patio and Pavilion frame in the folly at Fonthill, the plan of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures reappearing in the plan of a building.

Bits of Patio and Pavilion obviously came from the habitations of all of us, but particu-larly Nigel’s. His workrooms and kitchen were like that; the imagery was all over the place. The marketing of the ‘as found’ was performed by Terence Conran. And of

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course that destroys it. He literally marketed where people collected pine cones or baskets. He went to the ‘pine cone factory’ and bought twenty thousand!

It’s like the fake mirrors they have in pubs that are made in Hong Kong or some-where; advertisements for Guinness from 1910. They have no meaning any more. If you’d found one in a garage, an original, you’d think ‘how lovely’; it would move you. But if you’ve just manufactured it, it loses all meaning. Therefore, you could say that the ‘as found’ thing moved out, probably into the real art world – but then also found its way out as a product.

We’re taking part in an exhibition in Zurich in March called ‘As Found’. But we haven’t attempted to do any interpretation, and it is in a way terrifying, in handing over all the documents, that you don’t know the nature of the interpretation.

Is it possible to argue that certain sorts of issues are better suited to exhibitions or books than to buildings?

Well, what we write is an insight gained during construction and by observation – you have intentions, but things happen, and you suddenly realise that what has happened

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Nigel Henderson’s basement in Bethnal Green (assumed), with print fragments by Eduardo Paolozzi

in addition is also interesting. The construction process leads to the insights, which lead to the writing, which leads to more construction. It’s a sort of cycle.

I actually never think about what’s suitable for exhibitions – except about the format of the exhibitions, and I hate the exhibition that is just magazines stuck on the wall. That is not an exhibition, in my view. Any exhibition has to be a simulacrum of the spatial condition with which it is concerned. To give an example: in the 1940s, Charles Eames did an exhibition on Mies van der Rohe in the Museum of Modern Art, and of course he was able – because Mies had only built about two things in America at that time – to build a room which had some connection with the spaces of Mies van der Rohe. It’s possible.

But then, if you were dealing with a less concrete topic like this ‘As Found’ exhi-bition, the way they put the images together has to speak about what we were talking about earlier: in what way did that ‘as found’ thing reflect the culture? It’s fifty years ago, there’s no possible natural affinity. I was thinking yesterday about war itself.

There’s a little school on the corner, Bousefield School, where a landmine was dropped on Beatrix Potter’s house. How is it that you can train an eighteen-year-old to drop a bomb on Beatrix Potter’s house? It’s unimaginable. I mean – incredible cruelty propounded as normality. If you can’t imagine the condition of that boy who dropped the bomb, you can’t also imagine the period of ‘as found’. It’s just as removed, just as difficult to reconstruct.

You have said that there are two kinds of exhibitions: the ‘emergent’, such as ‘This is Tomorrow’, which you described as being driven by the feeling that ‘this is what it is that seems to be needed to be done’; and the ‘reflective’, a more intellectual reassess-ment of something which already exists. The books, however, seem even more varied, with a huge range of intentions – emergent, reflective, polemical, eclectic – and ranging from scrapbook to argument to manifesto to poetic, free-form narrative.

There’s only one book which is really, you might say, ‘engaged’. It’s the book about the Euston Arch. It was absolutely political – because it was Macmillan in the end who made the decision that the Arch should be destroyed, and that was interpreted as, in a way, an act of vengeance. The power of England that materially fruited in the 1880s and ’90s was because of the steam engine. And all that invention was from the North;

and the Euston Arch brought symbolically – I’m sure the architect had no intention – the new power of the North. And Macmillan represented the traditional power (although he was a working man, you might say, but he married into the traditional power framework). To knock it down destroyed George Stephenson’s memory. If it had been a monument to Napier, to a military figure, they wouldn’t have done it. That was the Arch. It was the one thing which was consciously political in our life.

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The books are also hugely inventive in their scope: their inclusiveness, their experimental nature. In many ways they prefigure the current graphic-led boom in books as projects, with people trying to reinvent what the architectural book is and what it contains. They include, for instance, fragments of stories, free-form narrative, standard headlamp codes, and they sometimes play with the form of the book itself – the original Euston Arch book was spiral bound in order that it had no set middle or covers.

Our work life together was commitment: that is, using as a model the working farm.

That and good health. Until Alison died, she never had anything wrong with her, never even taken an aspirin. We were capable of sustained effort, particularly her. The work-ing farm is a good analogy; the animals and the children and the work make a whole occupation. Other than that book, one didn’t vote, one didn’t take part in elections, one didn’t join any societies or any of those terrible things. I suppose mostly because if you could join anything it means fully participating, fully engaging. The whole business of Team 10 was like that: it was a life. You’ll notice that our children were not born during Team 10 meetings.

Alison is often quoted as saying, ‘A book is like a small building for us’, and, ‘An architect who cannot build is like a man without arms, almost without identity.’

Those are good quotes. Our model was Le Corbusier, of course: that is, working in all media. For example, during the ’70s, really we hadn’t any major constructions from fin-ishing Robin Hood Gardens and St Hilda’s till the first little building at Bath. We prob-ably did half a dozen competitions, books written, films made – all preparing yourself in some way.

The one occasion where I was personally affronted by criticism was when the Economist Building was finished, and in one of the Sunday papers a reviewer called Iain Nairn said: these architects have not built anything for ten years, and the building shows it. Now that ten years was filled with conscious preparation – and unconscious preparation. For instance, examining the way metals behaved in high pollution in American buildings – the metals of the Economist Building are all stove-enamelled finish on top of the metal in order that it shouldn’t corrode. By the late ’50s, the early buildings of Mies and Skidmore Owings and Merrill were all heavily corroded – I give you that as an example. In my view the Economist Building represented the outcome of ten years of speculation and investigation. The reviewer was not competent to see that. Like I said, that Archigram was unmarketable; the Economist Building was unmarketable. It had things in it, observations, that were strange. It had disciplines that Iain Nairn could not understand.

When Skidmore did the alterations, and converted some of the spaces into

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American spaces, they didn’t know what they were destroying, because those fiddly English spaces that we worked were something different to American spaces. They were European.

The variety of work must have both shaped your careers and, in a way, made you more liable to criticism. How did this position affect you?

Alberti also wrote books about cooking. I assume, because he was a courtier, a church civil servant, he felt he had a moral right to write about anything: composition, perspective, being keen on Brunelleschi. Therefore, in any one decade, probably since the middle of the nineteenth century, there’s been a book about Alberti.

Because people like reading; they don’t like looking at buildings. There have certainly been five books about Alberti in the last ten years.

Alberti comes into it because he was a very diversified writer. And maybe there is a common factor. I don’t know enough about him. Did he have a long life, for exam-ple? Say five realised buildings. Only one drawing exists. You could say Le Corbusier was a prolific writer – but the books were absolutely contained within the discipline – even to the wallpaper. There were no books on cooking or childcare and rearing … . We’re encouraging architects to write books on bringing up children.

As an apropos of that, somebody came round and asked whether he could make a reprint of the children’s book we did for Peter Cook when he was at the ArtNet gallery. It was called ‘The Story of the Tram Rats’, a handwritten book, with text by the children and illustrations by the children, and a bit of text. To be prolix in this way – maybe like the Euston Arch, it was circumstantial; the Tram Rats were the traditional, never-ending, children-at-bedtime stories. There were readings of it at ArtNet, with recorded tram noises as the background.

And that leads you to the end where you can see that from the kind of family that Alison and I have, it’s got its own rules, separate to society, where the bond is so strong that it makes outside things unreal. I mean, like the Party in the ’30s, it is a com-pletely separate world. The politics of the world outside had no meaning whatsoever.

It’s a kind of conspiracy. Therefore, in a way you’re immune to criticism.

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1 Max Risselada, ‘Chronology’, OASE 51 (June 1999). A collection of images of diagram-matic and built projects, large building proposals and urban studies, accompanied only by identifying captions.

Chapter 7

Diagrams