Architecture shapes lives

Press, 29 May 1985, Page 15

Architecture shapes lives

In Residence

Carole Van Grondelle

PROPERTY REPORTER

One of Europe’s pioneers in the post-war architectural movement towards modernism, Mrs Alison Smithson, passed through Christchurch last week.

She was on her way to Palmerston North for the New Zealand Architects’ Conference being held this week, for which she was invited from England as keynote speaker, amongst a panel of international architects. Quietly spoken and contemplative, her quietude belied a mind of imagination and intensity, and a wealth of experience, spanning four decades.

Alision Smithson and her husband, Peter, are recognised as among the major contributors of ideas to British architecture in the 1950 s and 19605.

Although less influential now, after World War 11, they led a generation of architects toward a style which became known as the New Brutalism — with its emphasis on purity of structure and a type of cubist, concrete geometry.

Clearly concerned for bringing together the aesthetic qualifies of art and life, the Smithsons expounded an architectural ideology which they developed in a wide-ranging collection of books, articles, exhibitions, and lectures. Mrs Smithson began her training in architecture at the age of 16, “before all the men came back from the war” in 1944. She graduated from university five years later, and married that summer.

After a year of working for the then London City Council, the Smithsons set themselves up in private practice, an arrangement they have maintained to this day. The work they have been

commissioned to complete has varied widely. They have designed several university buildings, including the Garden Building, St Hilda’s Collge, Oxford, and the second Arts Building at the University of Bath, as well as a number of buildings in London: the Economist Building in St James Street, and Iraqi House in Piccadilly, among them.

The Smithsons have also been involved in urban planning projects in Berlin, Hamburg, Kuwait and Jerusalem, and they have held exhibitions of their work in the Tate Gallery, the Milan Trienalle, in 1968, the Venice Bienalle, in 1976, and the Christmas-Hog-manay in Edinburgh, in 1980.

Mrs Smithson has been brought to New Zealand to speak about the wider role of the architect in society, a topic she believes involves the elements of culture, lifestyle and people’s attitudes.

“Architecture involves just about everything,” she said. “It dominates our landscape, and it influences us in how we use buildings and how we think about those buildings.”

She gives the example of a Victorian town hall where the entrance door is in the middle, with entrance steps leading down to the pathway — something we expect from a public building, but perhaps unpractical in a generation of car owners.

Similarly, she questions the relationship of residential houses and owners’ cars over the practical aspects of baby handling, and other things like shopping bags, and picnic baskets.

“The house-car relationship makes the street; streets make the towns, and so on,” she said.

Mrs Smithson believes that much of the impressive amount of redevelopment and refurbishment going on in London at present is of a quality unsurpassed since World’ War I. She attributes this to “Arab money,” where Arab interests, used to high German and Swiss standards, are demanding high building standards in London as well. Nevertheless, she said that there is little original work left in the large city.

She cited the house which sits at the back of the Smithsons’ house in South Kensington, which was renovated about 18 months ago in pink marble floors and rosettes, by a woman from Sydney. Several months ago, however, the house was sold and all the renovations were ripped out again. “But that’s typical — it’s almost another Parkinson Law,” she said. "The more a house has been converted, the more it will be a converted again. It’s just like America was twenty or thirty years ago.”