Evans + Shalev: Architecture and Urbanism

by Joseph Rykwert (Introduction)

It is difficult to imagine the history of modern architecture in Britain being written without reference to the work of Eldred Evans and David Shalev. From 1967, when they won the international competition for Newport High School, Evans and Shalev maintained a distinctive presence as designers. Together they created a body of work that is uniformly innovative, elegant and sensitive to place, and realised with care, skill and intelligence. This new monograph documents their remarkable oeuvre as it developed over six decades. Introduced by Joseph Rykwert, the book includes critical commentaries by David Dunster, Patrick Hodgkinson and others.

216 pages, Hardcover

Published September 4, 2019

About the author

Joseph Rykwert CBE was Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom and America. He taught the history and theory of architecture at several institutions in Europe and North America. Rykwert is the author of many influential works on architecture, including The Idea of a Town (1963), On Adam's House in Paradise (1972), The Dancing Column (1996) and The Seduction of Place (2000). All his books have been translated into several languages.

Reviews

[Douglas Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a shame for Evans & Shalev – despite being two of the brightest names in British architecture at the start of their careers, their reputation will rest on only two projects, both in Cornwall: the Truro Law Courts and the Tate St Ives. Evans was famously considered the true star talent of the generation that included Richard Rogers, and Shalev brought an extreme conceptual rigour to their practice, and they began with a bang: their Newport High School of 1965 was very well received at the time.

I find the early work fascinating: rigorous and abstract, with a spatial complexity generated through nesting spaces of different sizes in plan, crossed with sophisticated sections that bring light down in all manner of ways, and I love spending time trying to work out what is going on in their highly refined drawings. But the early work is also fiddly, and perhaps ornate: the designs are bespoke, inflexible, with perhaps a little too much attention being paid on getting all the breeze blocks lined up perfectly.

Their early work shows the influence of Team X, and has common interests with van Eyck and Hertzberger, as well as being clearly aligned with the Camden School. But in its ruthless geometry it also feels like it sits strangely between the social-minded work of Neave Brown and the apolitical forms of the New York Five.

This is apparent at Alexandra Road, where their two buildings were both controversial – their home for children in care was apparently unusable, despite having followed a very strict brief, and the home for disabled adults was rendered useless by Care in the Community. Both still stand, but both have been treated very badly and are effectively lost.

Evans & Shalev were famous for coming second in competitions – this book collects these projects, and shows that by the time they were building again after the 1970s, they had come to their own reconciliation with historic form, and the remainder of their career saw them designing in something *like* postmodernism, but with an abstract reduction that to me feels incredibly of the turn of the 80s/90s.

Apart from Benson & Forsyth, who were their students and trod a similarly dogged path, Evans & Shalev were perhaps too serious and too obsessive to really be successful, and it is hard to be all that enthused by the later works, which despite successful moments, feel reticent. But the attitude to architecture is so engaged and committed that I find it hard not to be impressed, even if nowadays you need to be more flash, perhaps a little more shallow, to get by.