History of Architecture and Design Season 1, Episode 15: English houses of the Thirties

An architect at work : Fletcher's Well Ponteland

In the first broadcast, Dr. Geoffrey Baker uses the house he designed for himself, Fletcher’s Well near Newcastle upon Tyne, to explain some of the practical constraints an architect faces in the design of any building and to suggest the role played by aesthetic considerations. This discussion goes a long way to explain how contemporary architects think about architecture, and in what ways they have been influenced by the modern period we have chosen to study.

Universal International Exhibition : Paris 1900

Television broadcast 2 is intended to act as a sort of summary to the mainstream developments in architecture and design in Europe up to 1900. Tim Benton looks at some of the architecture and interior design of this mammoth turn-of-the-century celebration and shows that, far from being dominated by Art Nouveau, the Exhibition’s most marked features were eclectic and nationalist.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh : Hill House

Sandra Millikin takes a close look at Hill House, perhaps the most perfect of Mackintosh’s houses, built in 1903 at Helensburgh, near Glasgow, for the publisher Walter Blackie. Besides indicating how the design responded to the needs of the particular client, Millikin also suggests the ways in which the house related to traditional Scottish forms and to Mackintosh’s other work.

Industrial architecture : AEG and FAGUS factories

In television broadcast 4, Tim Benton compares the industrial buildings by Peter Behrens for the AEG (General Electrical Company of Germany) in Berlin with the almost exactly contemporaneous Fagus shoe-last factory which Walter Gropius designed for Karl Benscheidt, in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, both built just before the First World War. […] The Fagus factory is often referred to as the first really ‘modern’ building, while the AEG buildings, at first sight, appear to have a markedly classical aesthetic.

Frank Lloyd Wright : the Robie House

In television broadcast 5, Sandra Millikin discusses the Robie House built in the Hyde Park district of Chicago in 1909. The residence represents a culmination of the house type which Wright developed in the 1890s, in what has become known as the “Prairie” style. Millikin demonstrates Wright’s concern with materials and his masterly organization of space.

R. M. Schindler : The Lovell Beach House

In television broadcast 6, Sandra Millikin discusses the highly original contribution of Rudolf Schindler to the modern movement, which is frequently attributed to his Beach House for Dr. Phillip Lovell at Newport Beach, California. This masterpiece was built during 1925-26 and its design clarity and sophistication elevate Schindler’s work to a level directly comparable with that of Le Corbusier at this time.

Erich Mendelsohn : the Einstein Tower

Television broadcast 2 looks at one of the very few completed Expressionist projects, Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, near Potsdam, built between 1918 and 1922. It analyses Mendelsohn’s working methods through letters and sketches from the Front during the First World War. As a largely symbolic, though technically competent building, the Einstein Tower achieved instant notoriety for Mendelsohn, who retained his Expressionist sketching technique as a means of drafting out his ideas throughout his career.

Bauhaus at Weimar 1919-1925

In television broadcast 8, Bauhaus objects from the period and a model of the Haus am Horn are examined in the studio. Tim Benton talks with George Adams, who was a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in its first years; topics discussed include student attitudes during this period and the influence of prevailing trends in avant-garde art.

Berlin Siedlungen

The most notable success of the New Objectivity in architecture was the solution of most of the problems posed by mass housing in Germany. In Television broadcast 9, Tim Benton traces the development of the Siedlungen (housing estates) built in Berlin during the 1920s through the work of Bruno Taut, Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, and Otto Bartning. He shows that, despite the large scale of these projects, the garden city ideal was never far away.

The Weissenhof Siedlung 1927

The Weissenhof Siedlung, built in Stuttgart in 1927 for the housing exhibition sponsored by the Werkbund, proved to be a turning point in the self-identification of the International Style. The Weissenhof Siedlung was intended as a ‘manifesto’ demonstration of Modern Movement architects’ abilities in the field of housing. In Television broadcast 10, Tim Benton looks at work by Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, Mart Stam, Hans Sharoun and Le Corbusier, to assesses how far the work matches up to the architects’ ideals.

International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Paris 1925

In television broadcast 11, Tim Benton provides a detailed look at the Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts of 1925. Benton offers a close reading of the buildings and designs exhibited to explain many of the paradoxical characteristics of French design during this period and to consider, using contemporary photographs, in what ways the architecture the exhibition's pavilions could be said to reflect avant-garde tendencies.

Adolf Loos

In television broadcast 12, Tim Benton looks at a number of buildings in Vienna designed by Adolf Loos, including the Goldman and Salatsch store, Kniže’s, the Scheu house and the Moller house. These projects illustrate Loos’s characteristic handling of space and concern with craftsmanship and materials. Benton shows how Loos’s work developed from a sophisticated version of Arts and Crafts to something close to the International Style.

Le Corbusier : the Villa Savoye

In television broadcast 13, Tim Benton visits Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, built at Poissy near Paris from 1929-1931, one of the most impressive monuments of the International Style. In a detailed analysis of the building, Benton relates the Villa Savoye to ideas expressed in Le Corbusier’s writings of the 1920s. The motto of the film is Le Corbusier’s phrase: “The house: a machine for living in.“

English flats of the thirties

In television broadcast 14, Tim Benton looks at two very different developments to illustrate the differences and the common denominators in the design of flats in the 1930s. The huge municipal Quarry Hill estate in Leeds, designed by R.A.H. Livett, is compared with Highpoint I, an apartment block for upper-income tenants, in Highgate, London, designed by Berthold Lubetkin.

Hans Scharoun

Hans Scharoun is best known for his expressionist designs in the years following the First World War, for his housing at Siemensstadt and Breslau in the late 1920s, and for his work after the Second World War. Less well known is his work of the 1930s. In television broadcast 16, Tim Benton considers two of Scharoun’s domestic designs of this decade: the Mohrmann house and the Scharf house in Berlin.

English furniture : technique and design

Television broadcast 17 analyses the structures and the processes of production in wood and steel furniture around 1930-34, concentrating on the work of Heal and Son and Pel Limited. It investigates the introduction of tubular steel furniture to Britain from Germany and France, and questions Charlotte Perriand’s defence of tubular steel as a material of mass production and superior technological properties, as published in The Studio in 1929.

Wood or metal : English furniture of the thirties

Television broadcast 18 examines the work of Sir Edwin Lutyens, who Amyas Connell one said would ultimately be regarded as the greatest English architect of the twentieth century. When we think of the way British architecture was purged of its former traditional romantic expression by modernists such as Connell, this viewpoint may appear curious. In looking at Deanery Gardens, Sonning (1899), Dr. Geoffrey Baker here notes Lutyens’s empirical approach to planning and discerns a supremely English character in Lutyens’s work.

The London Underground

In television broadcast 19, Geoffrey Baker visits three stations designed by Charles Holden for the London Underground’s Piccadilly Line (Cockfosters, Oakwood, and Southgate). At a time when the imagery of the International Style was controversial in England, Holden’s task was to evolve an architectural expression for the Underground which would fit in with suburbia and which would also project an image of a modern transport system.

Moderne and modernistic

Looking back at British architecture in the 1930s, there were a significant number of buildings which looked modern to the lay man, although purist advocates of modern architecture scorned them as dangerous aberrations, calling them "Moderne" or "Modernistic." In television broadcast 20, Geoffrey Baker considers some of the ingredients of the "Moderne" idiom, with examples drawn mainly from commercial architecture (including Wallis, Gilbert and Partners’ Firestone and Hoover factories) and seaside architecture (Joseph Emberton’s Blackpool Pleasure Beach buildings and Oliver Hill’s housing at Frinton-on-Sea).

The other tradition

In television broadcast 21, Geoffrey Baker examines the persistence of academic classicism in British architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, exemplified in such buildings as Manchester City Library and Liverpool Cathedral. Despite growing support during the 1930s for the ideology of the Modern Movement, examples of the style were comparatively rare in Britain. Focusing on the new headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, built during the 1930s, Geoffrey Baker shows how conservative traditions were modified by modernist tastes.

Mechanical services in the cinema

In television broadcast 21, Stephen Bayley takes the cinema as the paradigm of mechanical servicing in architecture. One particular cinema is singled out for detailed analysis: the Astoria, in Finsbury Park, London. The role of the heating and electrical plant is described in detail, which, in conjunction with the bizarre decoration, produced an emotional and physical atmosphere which was for many people their first taste of the convenience and benefits which modern architecture could bring.

The semi-detached house : the suburban style

A case could be made for the argument that in the English suburbs, land developers and speculative builders—by wanting to build individualistic houses in vernacular styles away from the city—predicted the formulation of the garden cities. In television broadcast 23, Stephen Bayley suggests that the accumulation of different pressures combined to produce a form of housing and community planning that was, like the Roman idea of rus in urbe, an ideal of sorts.

The housing question

Housing has been the most distinctive interest of the Modern Movement in architecture; yet, despite the good intentions of the theorists, the results of this interest have not always been successful. Television broadcast 24, the final programme of the course, studies three post-war housing developments which are very different in character: the L.C.C.’s Roehampton Estate; Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in North Kensington and Ralph Erskine’s new estate at Byker, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Episode 25