Buildingsromans

For me, the Twentieth Century Architects series of short, illustrated biographies is the most useful and straightforwardly enjoyable endeavor in architectural history since the Buildings of England, the multivolume life’s work of the German-Jewish émigré art historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Like Pevsner’s tomes, which, from the 1950s through the 1980s, catalogued English architecture county by county, these monographs—assembled under the aegis of the campaigning group the Twentieth Century Society (usually C20, for short)—are accessible without being patronizing, comprehensive without being academic, visually rich without being “coffee table”: exemplary projects of popular education. As Britain’s public arts bodies have been shredded by fifteen years of austerity, the C20 books have hopped from publisher to publisher and from backer to backer and are now put out by Liverpool University Press and the quango Historic England. They number twenty-two titles by now and have been supplemented by five books in a complementary or rival series, Victorian Architects. These are a direct emulation, sharing the design and at least one of the same authors, in a touching reconciliation of once-hostile architectural-historical factions.

The subjects are seldom famous, with the architectural bureaucrats of the middle of the century prevailing over the celebrities (with a few exceptions, as we’ll see). The writing is always good and sometimes very good, as with the entries by Edmund Harris, Elain Harwood (two), Geraint Franklin (three), and Timothy Brittan-Catlin (one in each series). There is superb, rigorous description of material and mass and purpose—the passage in Neil Jackson’s 2023  Peter Womersley on the architect’s Instagram-friendly, Tange-inspired Gala Fairydean football stadium (1964) in the Scottish Borders is a case in point, explaining why its folded, minimalist structure works both as a sensible solution to a problem of span and material and as an exceptionally elegant work of pure form. Similarly, but more ambitiously, in John Allan’s Berthold Lubetkin (2024), the descriptions of that architect’s late public housing estates in East London convey with style and economy how their spatial extravagance derives from a grounding in Soviet constructivism and eighteenth-century neoclassicism and from the creative use of tiny municipal budgets. But these books’ great virtue, read in the context of the bloviating that mars so much architectural history, is in massively downplaying “paper architecture” and academic debate in favor of buildings. Because this is, after all, where things get interesting: when architecture rubs up against politics, place, experience, and historical change. Illustrations, while often including some archival images, are usually of the buildings as they currently stand, in all their flaws, whether worn down by, or resistant to, the ravages of time and fashion. Everywhere ought to have a series like this—there should be, for instance, American volumes like these on a Herman Jessor and a Roland A. Wank: those architects whose work on social buildings and infrastructure changed far more people’s lives than a Louis Kahn or a Peter Eisenman ever could.

The Twentieth Century Architects books owe their existence and much of their success to the aforementioned Elain Harwood, who initially edited the series. Harwood, who died last year, was, like Pevsner, a highly unusual presence in the sometimes still rather snobbish and tweedy world of British preservation and architectural history—working class, with a strong East Midlands accent and a love of postpunk groups like the Fall; I’ll always remember her leading walks, often dressed in Day-Glo Lycra, a font of endless information and enthusiasm. Like many intellectuals of her background, Harwood was raised on the mass-market arts publishing of the 1940s to the 1980s, from Penguin Books to the New Musical Express, and the series she founded carries a little of that democratizing, equalizing spirit.

The series thrives on studies of the scrupulous, unsung, slightly anonymous firms active from 1945 to 1979, revealing who they were, where they came from, what they were up to—Harwood’s 2012 volume on Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, designers of the Barbican housing complex in the City of London and Geraint Franklin’s 2017 study of Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis being standouts. Their concentration on the hardworking, hard-building architect and the actually existing built environment leads to some interesting effects on those occasions when great paper architects are occasionally roped into the series and into its nineteenth-century subseries. Mark Crinson’s Alison and Peter Smithson (2018) and David Frazer Lewis’s A. W. N. Pugin (2021) both attend to figures who changed the course of architecture through their propaganda for the New Brutalism and the Gothic Revival, respectively, taking what were mere fashions and beating them into fierce ideologies. Without laboring the point, these two books reveal how much of what the Smithsons and Pugin actually built was flimsy, gawky, displaying an inability to really think and build in three dimensions; Crinson’s book in particular reads like a thought experiment in which two famous designers and teachers are judged solely on their achievements in concrete, and found wanting.

The few famous names that appear in Twentieth Century Architects are also rather cut down to size. Harwood and Alan Powers’s jointly written Ernö Goldfinger (2018) and Allan’s Berthold Lubetkin take great émigré socialist modernists with grand, oversized reputations and strip them of mystique, at least up to a point. Their careers are considered as a whole, so the three decades before Goldfinger found his métier as a monumental Brutalist, or Lubetkin’s two late decades designing somewhat bleak mass housing in London’s East End, are given as much weight as their famous “icons,” like the former’s Trellick Tower (1972) and the latter’s Highpoint (1935). Oft-repeated tales are sometimes debunked and sometimes revealed to be true: It transpires that Goldfinger did not in fact infuriate Ian Fleming so much with his terrace of modernist houses on Hampstead Heath that he took revenge via James Bond, but Lubetkin really did bury the Lenin monument he designed under the construction site of the spatially astounding public housing block that was slated to be called “Lenin Court” before the Cold War got it renamed to Bevin Court (after Ernest Bevin, the firmly anticommunist Labor foreign secretary who helped found NATO). There are also forgotten stars here, like Womersley, an English architect who had the world at his feet after designing Britain’s nearest equivalents to the Case Study Houses, but who then moved to rural Scotland, where he created weird, rugged, avant-garde little buildings, before relocating to colonial Hong Kong near the end of his life.

The books can be faulted for treating a collective project as an individual one. The public bureaucracies of the time appear as the buildings’ clients—Twentieth Century Architects in particular is dominated by public housing, public theaters, and public hospitals—but not as their designers. So there is no volume on arguably the most important group of architects of postwar Britain and the largest in the world at the time—the London County Council Architects Department, which was responsible for legendary projects of the 1950s and 1960s like the Alton Estate, the Southbank Centre, and Thamesmead. Important monographs are owed to the state architects of New Towns like Stevenage, Milton Keynes, and Cumbernauld, of the London boroughs of Camden and Lambeth; the cities of Sheffield, Southampton, and Norwich; and of the counties of Hampshire and Lancashire—to name just a few that are considerably more interesting than some of the private firms that are elevated in this series, as happens in Robert Maguire & Keith Murray (2012) and Leonard Manasseh & Partners (2011), which showcase rather dour designers. For all the democratizing intent, there’s still an enduring bias toward the sort of modern architects who excelled at Oxbridge colleges and lush private houses. A focus on publicly employed architects would also bring in many more women—not a single woman has a volume to herself here, which is unsurprising since very few women built major practices under their own names until the 1990s, yet some of the most remarkable buildings of the century were designed by women in public practice, with sublime projects like Kate Macintosh’s Dawson Heights (designed, in the mid-1960s, while she was an employee of the London borough of Southwark) and Rosemary Stjernstedt’s contemporaneous Central Hill (in Lambeth). There is, however, one new entry in Victorian Architects that focuses on a group of ideologically linked figures rather than a single practice, Edmund Harris’s study of outré church designers, The Rogue Goths (2024). And there is a forthcoming book on the collectivist firm Architects Co-Partnership, so it is possible this omission will be redressed in the future.

Both Twentieth Century Architects and Victorian Architects have been at pains to sit out the style wars that have been recently revived as farce on the internet—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the stylistic perversity of so many of the British firms during the period these books were published, with an Amin Taha and a Caruso St John just as happy to borrow from classicism as modernism. So, Harwood and her fellow C20 editors included classicists a modernist might like, such as the austere monumentalists McMorran & Whitby, the Brutalist turned vernacular firm of Maguire & Murray, and the Merseyside-based practice of F. X. Velarde; the latter two firms specialized in churches, a still common but somewhat forlorn typology in the rapidly secularizing postwar Britain. There is even one book on a neo-Gothic church designer who is exactly the sort of figure a modernist would abhor, the hugely retardataire and bafflingly overrated Stephen Dykes Bower (by Anthony Symondson, 2011). More recently, there is one postmodern entry, Franklin’s paean to the talented and bizarre techno-classicist John Outram. But for all this refusal to come down on either side of twentieth-century divides, there is much of interest here on those divides and why they occurred in the first place. Harris’s The Rogue Goths vividly captures how the lurid, burly churches of his study emerged out of a search for the new, or at least the novel, within rather than against nineteenth-century eclecticism, pushing the limits of “correctness” in Gothic architecture as decreed both by the Catholic Pugin and by the Church of England.

These books are useful reminders that the Victorians were bitter style warriors, far harsher than any modernist. In Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, we can find the titular Brutalist architects making mildly disparaging remarks about the commercial, unscrupulous “supermarket” of nineteenth-century eclecticism. But in Peter Howell’s John Francis Bentley (2020), on the designer of the neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral (1903), we encounter a traditionalist architect referring to the neoclassical British Museum as “the vilest abortion on GOD’s fair face of nature” and exclaiming in a letter that Saint Peter’s in Rome was “the worst building I have seen, excepting, perhaps, the Duomo at Florence.” The authors of the Victorian Architects cycle share a knack for identifying those moments when a contemporary modernist critic looked at a revivalist work of architecture with interest—in John Francis Bentley, the Bloomsbury modernist Roger Fry is quoted, referring to the book’s subject as “a curiously isolated and singular [instance] of a man with a genius for pastiche.” In Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s fascinating 2023 study of the Baroque revivalist Edwin Rickards, an unlikely enthusiast is found in Ezra Pound, who described Rickards as “a man with a true sense of form,” even though his buildings’ “structure was the work of genius and their final encrustation the tin-horn ornament of the never sufficiently damned 1900.”

The average modern architect, both series contend, was an upper-middle-class man, usually from the provinces or from London’s suburbs; there are two or three poorer (Peter Smithson) and two or three posher (Patrick Gwynne). In terms of belief, the twentieth-century architects leaned toward Fabian socialism, the Victorians tended toward a “muscular” Christianity. The books make some efforts to update architectural history, paying at least some attention to sexuality, gender, and race, though they do this gingerly. We are told which architects were gay (Womersley, Gwynne), though this sometimes goes alongside a silly, essentializing canard that they were therefore “flamboyant” and somehow resistant to an austere and therefore homophobic modernist norm. This is nonsense. The work of both is considerably less camp than that of hetero figures such as Frederick Gibberd, an establishment architect of decorative and sometimes kitsch mosques and cathedrals (and subject of the enjoyable 2018 volume by Christine Hui Lan Manley), or the devoutly Catholic conservative Velarde. In Edwin Rickards, the Baroque architect’s equally baroque sex life is lightly sketched in, with a passage from a memoir in which he is seen in Paris, offering a “mulatto” sex worker to a colleague; in a very Victorian gesture, Brittain-Catlin coyly leaves the conversation in the original French, though he footnotes a translation.

Many volumes stress that most twentieth-century architects firmly supported the postwar welfare state, as well they might, given how much work it gave them, and it’s clear they took working-class housing seriously. Nonetheless, there is an avoidance of explicit politics, excepting Allan’s Berthold Lubetkin, on the most explicitly Marxist of London architects. This timorousness is at odds with much of the actual architectural writing of the era, whether the Fabian and Stalinist polemics of the 1930s, the Nye Bevan–quoting Smithsons, or the McCarthyism of Reyner Banham’s 1955 essay “The New Brutalism.” (It should be noted that the most public Communists in British architecture were local authority architects like Arthur Ling or Ted Hollamby.) This creates problems when the volumes reach the counterrevolution of the 1980s: Geraint Franklin firmly refuses to link John Outram’s work to neoliberalism, even though his English oeuvre comprises an electricity substation serving a Thatcher-era deregulated “enterprise zone,” an opulent mansion for a Swedish tax exile, a speculative business park, and a private business school.

There is also a lack of engagement with imperialism, although it is, as in Britain more generally, absolutely everywhere. It is to be expected in the nineteenth century—Bentley’s Gothic fountains for colonial Jamaica, the extensive work of Pugin and his son in Australia—but it is surprisingly common among the modernists, too. Examples include, in Brittain-Catlin’s Leonard Manasseh & Partners, a courthouse in Trinidad; in Peter Womersley, a tower and a market in Hong Kong; and in Neil Bingham’s Patrick Gwynne (2023) and Alan Clawley’s John Madin (2011), resorts and luxury flats in Malta and Cyprus. Even the Smithsons entered competitions in colonial Uganda. Usually, these “foreign” projects are perfunctorily noted before moving on, although British architecture for imperial export has been the subject of much of the most interesting recent research, from Crinson’s study of British modernists in Africa to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2024 exhibition Tropical Modernism. In avoiding the subject, the books not only fail to come to grips with the barbarism of the British Empire; they also make British postwar culture appear rather more insular than it actually was.

In a rare exception, the more explicit, bombastic imperialism of nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture is acknowledged in Brittain-Catlin’s Edwin Rickards. The architect’s Deptford Town Hall (1905), in a slum district of southeast London, is one of the city’s great oddities, a truly “flamboyant” explosion on a drab arterial road, bursting with low-relief sculptures of boats, beasts, and colonial heroes. It has probably brought more people more unexpected pleasure than any building in the area—I can say this advisedly as someone who has lived close to it for twenty-six years. The hall is now used by Goldsmiths College, an institution with a strongly left-wing body of students and staff. Recently, the four statues on the front of the building, two of which depict colonizers and slave traders (Francis Drake and Robert Blake), were splashed with red paint to represent blood, with accompanying demands that they be removed. Politically, the case is inarguable, but architecturally, these statues are so integral a part of the building that their removal would leave a massive tear in its fabric. Do we desire such a scar? What are the alternatives, and how might an architectural intervention be made? Brittain-Catlin doesn’t tell us, merely registers the dispute.

But the real politics of these books is the politics of preservation. This presents obvious conundrums for modernism, which for much of the century was its sworn enemy. For a few British modernists, like the architect Cedric Price and the critic Martin Pawley, the very fact of the existence of the Twentieth Century Society—a charity set up on the model of lobbying organizations like the Victorian Society—was a betrayal of their ideals, the Sant’Elia dream of each generation building its own city replaced with another “museum,” in which retrofuturistic architecture now takes its own place in the vitrines. Most of the twentieth-century figures in these books took part in the “comprehensive redevelopment” of the 1960s, which erased huge swathes of nineteenth-century townscape, and when it came time for their own buildings to be preserved, they had ideas that sit very oddly with the common sense of preservation. Patrick Gwynne’s early International Style house for his family, The Homewood, was donated by him to a state preservation body, the National Trust, while he was still alive. Bingham’s volume ends with the architect’s baffled opposition to the house’s preservationists’ insistence on retaining its 1930s fittings. For Gwynne, the point of the building was one of mass and space, and piquant period furniture and teak cupboards were irrelevances.

However much some contributors might be chary of politics, the preservation of modernist buildings in Britain—where the lion’s share of modern architecture from the 1930s to the 1980s was for the public sector and the welfare state, as these books amply demonstrate—has meant trying to preserve fragments of a social democracy in an era in which they are under constant attack. One of the earliest and best volumes in this series, Clawley’s John Madin, covers a Birmingham architect whose major buildings have almost all been destroyed since the book’s publication. One of these, the Birmingham Central Library, a firmly Brutalist ziggurat of public reading rooms placed imposingly but sympathetically in the heart of a Victorian municipal square, was one of the major public buildings of postwar Europe, comparable in its scale and quality to Boston City Hall (1968). On its site now sits a private office block of almost audacious blandness. Conserving a Victorian church is of mostly architectural significance; conserving a council estate, a municipal bus station, a comprehensive school, a public hospital has social effects. These books serve, somewhat inadvertently at times, as an enormous, accessible archive of what was once thought possible for public space and public architecture, and an index of the least we should demand.