The Charged Void: Architecture

by Alison Smithson

Alison and Peter Smithson, founders of Team X and authors of the classic Team X Primer, are among the most influential architects of the postwar decades. Their reevaluation of modernism shifted the focus of architecture and urbanism toward the particularities and uniqueness of human associations, urban patterns, and climatic conditions. Many of their ideas, both social (cluster and human association) and architectural (Brutalism, the nature of materials), profoundly influenced later generations of academics, students, and practitioners. As the social ideals of earlier times become an integral part of the reassessment of the built environment of recent years, the Smithsons continue to gain in significance.

This unprecedented and long-overdue publication is the first comprehensive book available on the enormous legacy of the Smithsons. The architectural works in this book, which span from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s, include all of their major projects, such as Hunstanton Secondary School, Golden Lane Housing, Sheffield University, the Economist Building, and the "House of the Future." Introductions to groups of projects highlight the Smithsons' ongoing areas of inquiry; each project is accompanied by an original text, photographs, drawings, and plans. The rich and careful documentation on each project ensures that this volume will record the work of these important architects for posterity.

Genres: Architecture

608 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2001

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This outstanding monograph on Alison and Peter Smithson, every page meticulously laid out by the architects themselves, contains innumerable photographs and drawings, supported by minimal and cogent verbal comments. It is their exposition of their own work and ideas, as they see them - and what an eye-opener it is! Going beyond the familiar accounts of their career, it fills all the gaps between their famous projects: Hunstanton School (1949-54) Cluster City (1952) Sheffield University (1953), the Economist Building (1959-64), the Robin Hood Gardens housing, East London (1966-72, now sadly and stupidly demolished), St Hilda's College, Oxford (1967-72) and their masterly collection of buildings for the University of Bath (1979-88). It ends with AS's passing in 1993 and was brought to publication by PS. The numerous photographs of them in their various studios, always together, gives the book an hospitable, intimate feeling. AS's written comments show a witty, inventive mind playing with a language they developed as a private tool for thinking about architecture their way, inventing delightful joyceian expressions like "moonviewing, riverstruck", "sun-accepting"or "outside inside and inside outside", explaining that a project for a small porch "grew out of paying attention to a man and his cat"; and another by saying that "our team set out to address the sky".

The book shows how from their earliest UK work the Smithsons developed an ability to analyse any given typology or urban system existing in the British tradition (village, farm, agrarian landscape, urban terrace) whilst at the same time defining the essential elements of a deliberately rudimental modernist lexicon capable of adaptation and contextualisation into any situation. Then at the 1953 International Congress of Modern Architecture, they announced their breakaway from CIAM, having discovered, as they declared, that "'belonging' is a basic emotional need - its associations are of the simplest order. From 'belonging'- identity - comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness." - a statement that encapsulates much of their philosophy: emotion, neighbourliness, simplicity and above all, the social.

The Smithsons explored a universalising, mythological idiom consisting of pure concepts such as light, space, grid, and surface. Their contemporary James Stirling was also breaking away from modernist orthodoxy at that time, but was taking architecture in a different direction. Stirling despised the Smithsons as hilariously messianic (and there's something in that) but all of them were looking for some new direction, all influenced in the 1950s by Nigel Henderson, leader of the Independent Group, who gave them a visual culture by bombarding them with images. They all shared a fondness for the cutaway axonometric drawing, of which this book contains an abundance. Above all they shared a belief that in architectural design, circulation (how people enter buildings and move through them) was essential to exalt those collective, informal moments in everyday life when activities in rooms flow out into non-directed socialising activities in corridors, staircases, shared bathrooms, lobbies and external spaces between buildings.

The reader is taken through the book in different ways; one of the themes is "Conglomerate Ordering": the idea of buildings as circulation routes with chunks of accommodation clamped on where necessary. Despite the immense technical interest of the Smithsons' architectonic language, of which perhaps the key characterising element is the diagonal line (the diagonal latticework of a wooden screen, or a big beam spanning from corner to corner across a room) it seems to me that the soul of the Smithsons' work is circulation. Their Economist Building, London (begun 1959) is one example. This is actually two buildings overlooking a terrace, connecting two lateral streets, and based on a concept that came from their analysis of the existing local network of public alleyways; it exemplifies their insistence on the urban and the architectonic as a unity. The social is also manifested as their "street in the sky" concept, which originated in the Sheffield University project and is evident at Bath School of Architecture and Engineering (1982-88), where a pedestrian path meanders up, around, and into the building. The "controlled chaos" of the plan of this building demonstrates their expertise at deforming the cellular box. Corridors and stairwells become the irregularly-shaped streets and turnings in a community where people can stop and chat, in the tough, bruising, confrontational setting Reyner Banham called "Brutalism". This is an inspiring and important book.