Peter Smithson obituary by The TImes

architect/artist: Peter Smithson
obituary title: Peter Smithson Obituary
obituary compilation no: T-15
format: Text
date: March 10, 2003
appeared in: The Times/ Times Online
writer:

photo by:

courtesy:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1117998.ece

Obituary Details:

Peter Smithson
Architect who designed an innovative school and office complex, but lost out in the competition for a new Coventry Cathedral.

New Brutalism, the name of a style that became familiar in the Sixties, was associated in particular with Peter Smithson. With that wry humour that those who knew him much enjoyed, he and the critic Reyner Banham invented the term to describe a generally very heavy kind of concrete structure, on which the grain of rough wooden shuttering has been crudely and deliberately left imprinted in the surface for decorative purposes.

The Hayward Gallery and Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank are well-known examples of the style, and on the whole are much disliked for it. The late Hidalgo Moya, the designer of the Festival of Britain’s Skylon, remarked that New Brutalism was “like using an RSJ for a toothbrush” when referring to the enormous concrete handrails along the Hayward’s balconies.

Whether Smithson admired the style was not clear, but in choosing such a powerful epithet it did appear that he had incorrectly translated bêton brut, the name Le Corbusier introduced to describe his aesthetic at the Unité d‘Habitation in Marseilles, built in the Forties: but there is nothing in the way of brutality intended in Corbusier’s raw concrete — he saw in it the humanity of the locality.

Peter Denham Smithson was born at Stockton-on-Tees and educated at the local grammar school before going on to train as an architect at King’s College, Durham. After the interruption of the war (he served in Burma and India, 1941-45), he returned to complete his course and was described by Sir William Whitfield, then a young tutor at Durham, as an exceptional student. During his student years he met his wife Alison, and together they joined the Schools Division of the London County Council in 1949, leaving the following year to start their own practice.

It was from this point on they developed what many came to think of as the Smithson legend, with his astonishing rise to fame as architect and theorist. It began in 1950 when he and his wife won an open competition for Hunstanton School in Norfolk.

Despite the Corbusian tag of “Brutalism” with which he was rightly associated, it was the work of Mies van der Rohe, which inspired Smithson’s design for the school. Showing himself to be an unashamed disciple of the master, Smithson adopted the steel and glass formula and allowed its structural module to organise a brilliant planning solution of classrooms and staircases over two storeys and around a succession of small courtyards that eliminated all corridors. Such was the economy of this bewilderingly simple design that Smithson at once emerged as something of a master himself.

He emerged, too, as the master of the emphatic statement, demonstrating this in his dramatic entry for the competition to rebuild Coventry Cathedral in 1951. Coming right after Hunstanton, this design was inspired by an innovative hyperbolic-paraboloid roof, which gave his proposal a big top with a clear span. Although the much safer, more tasteful Spence scheme triumphed, many thought that Smithson’s design should have won, and it brought him international recognition. The idea was simple enough: from low over the west entrance, the great roof would have soared up to an enormous height over the east windows, following the site and plan of the demolished building.

Yet if the country lost a remarkable work of architecture, the attention brought Smithson a new commission, for the Economist Building in St James’s, completed in 1964. Here, on a site on the south side of Boodle’s, he saw his responsibilities embracing both architecture and town planning, and he divided the substantial accommodation into three blocks of varying heights, arranging these around a central space called the Plaza. He envisaged this as a breathing space in a closely built-up area where people could walk across and meet others away from the noise of St James’s. He saw it, moreover, as an interesting town planning device that could be exploited in congested situations elsewhere; the only pity is that the roofline of the main tower was altered by another firm of architects, damaging the proportion of Smithson’s original.

He was an architect who was very keen to seize on a strong architectural idea and pursue it throughout, as can be seen in his next commission, the Robin Hood Gardens housing scheme for Tower Hamlets, worked on over a very long period and completed in 1972. This was harshly criticised as inhumane, and was disliked by its council occupants for looking like a concrete fort. Its completion and subsequent reputation did Smithson’s career more damage even than his arrogance, which many people found difficult to bear.

Nonetheless, Robin Hood Gardens was the result of what in intellectual terms was a very interesting idea. Smithson had indeed based it upon fortress imagery, a castle “keep” with a mound in the middle, protected from the rough world by “castle” walls. The finished complex has all this, to protect the occupants from the dereliction and chaos all around, but unfortunately the interior is covered with graffiti and litter.

Hunstanton, Coventry Cathedral, the Economist Building and Robin Hood Gardens were Smithson’s most striking designs. By comparison, his addition to St Hilda’s College at Oxford, completed in 1970, was rather dull, as were his extensions to Bath University of the 1980s. One of his latest best works was the small garden pavilion he designed for Lord Kennet.

Smithson and his wife, unlike offices of the Norman Foster variety, had few if any assistants and designed everything themselves, and his fame was at least partly due to his personal presence and integrity. He exhibited in This is Tomorrow, the 1956 show put on by Brian Robertson at the avant-garde Whitechapel Gallery, and from the first, his intermittent commissions were interspersed with teaching.

In the 1950s and 1960s he was a tutor of considerable influence at the Architectural Association School. From there, in 1976, he was appointed Banister Fletcher Professor of Architecture at University College, London, and he became a visiting professor at Bath University from 1978 to 1980. Then, from 1982 to 1986, he taught in successive years at the universities of Delft, Munich and Barcelona. Largely through lack of commissions, the theory of architecture had taken over from its practice.

For the German firm Tecta, he and his wife also designed furniture of a highly original and sculptural kind, which was exhibited in Cologne and Berlin in 1993 and at London’s Building Centre the following year. There is to be a retrospective of his work at the Design Museum this year.

Between 1960 and 1991, when the Smithson oeuvre was published, he was a prolific writer. Books, pamphlets, urban manifestos and studies of special subjects such as the loss of the Euston Arch poured out. Like many first-rate architects, Peter Smithson was under-used, but he was not unfulfilled.

His wife died in 1993. He is survived by their son and two daughters.

Peter Smithson, architect, was born on September 18, 1923. He died on March 3, 2003, aged 79.

---