Fair, Alistair

English

A review of the book by Louise Campbell, Miles Glendinning and Jane Thoma

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Review - Basil Spence: Buildings and ProjectsCitation for published version:Fair, A 2012, 'Review - Basil Spence: Buildings and Projects' Society of Architectural Historians of GreatBritain Newsletter, vol 107, pp. 15-16.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher final version (usually the publisher pdf)Published In:Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain NewsletterPublisher Rights Statement:© Fair, A. (2012). Review - Basil Spence: Buildings and Projects. Society of Architectural Historians of GreatBritain Newsletter, 107, 15-16General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 20. Feb. 2015the nineteenth century) on King’s Parade, Cambridge,with a flat-roofed Modernist block, failing to take intoaccount the fact that the existing fabric consisted of small-scale vertical elements with a broken skyline. One can onlyutter a heartfelt Laus Deo that it was never realised. Symondson’s book has a sensible Foreword by AlanPowers, but Harwood’s has a superfluous one by PiersGough, in which the Barbican is categorised as ‘baroque’,a misuse of the word if ever there was one. One aspect ofthe contrasting approaches described in these necessarybooks needs to be emphasised: SEDB used traditionalmaterials intelligently, and they have stood the test of time;CP&B’s (as the firm is referred to in Harwood’s text)buildings, on the other hand, which may have looked wellin photographs for the architectural press, often failed toperform satisfactorily, resulting in early demolition, not anuncommon fate of overrated, conspicuously wastefulModernist buildings.james stevens curlLOUISE CAMPBELL, MILES GLENDINNING andJANE THOMAS (eds): Basil Spence: Buildings andProjects (RIBA Publishing, 2012, 372 pp, numerous illus.,£45.00, ISBN: 9781859463093)Several years ago, when my parents moved from Glasgowto Yorkshire, I was delegated to supervise the removal menas they packed up the house. Over morning coffee, uponlearning that I was an architectural historian, the removersvolunteered their views on Glasgow buildings past andpresent. The best architect ever to have worked in the city,they suggested, was Alexander Thomson. The worst, theyopined, was Basil Spence, his name followed by a string ofcolourful expletives in broad Glaswegian. Their critiquewas the result of Spence’s work for Glasgow Corporationin the reconstruction of the inner-city Gorbals district inthe early 1960s. Spence’s ‘Hutchie C’ flats reinterpretedLe Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, their double-heightbalconies likened by their designer to hanging gardens inwhich washing hung out to dry would give theimpression of ‘a great ship in full sail’. But poormanagement, as much as anything else, meant that ‘theQueenies’ had by the 1980s fallen into disrepair; they weredynamited in 1993.Whereas Spence may be remembered on Clydeside as avillain, he has become something of a marginal figure inthe broader historical record. That this is so is perhapssurprising. Spence was the best-known architect amongstthe public in the 1950s and 1960s. Following his much-publicised win in the competition to design CoventryCathedral in 1951, his fame was secured by numerous pressand television appearances (explaining, perhaps, theremovers’ attribution of the Gorbals in toto to him).However, for those who sought to ‘purify’ the ModernMovement in the 1950s and 1960s, Spence’s approach,steeped in his Arts and Crafts training at EdinburghCollege of Art and with Lutyens, seemed dangerouslyromantic in its pursuit of meaning through formalmechanisms. This attitude has infused previous histories.Peter Kidson, Peter Murray and Paul Thompson’s Pelicanvolume on English architecture (1965) suggests that it is‘unfortunate’ that so much attention has been given toSpence’s cathedral design as ‘a Gothic revival structurewith Baroque tricks and modernistic detail’. KennethFrampton’s classic history of Modern architecture (1980)work: the finely crafted north transept extension wascompleted to his designs, and a successful bid to theMillennium Commission enabled the crossing tower to beerected at the same time. Pethers prepared new designs forthe upper stages of the tower, drawing on precedents fromLong Melford (1903), Cattistock, Dorset (1876), andWastell’s Bell Harry tower at Canterbury (1490-1515).Despite machinations (some particularly poisonous), themighty tower was completed (2005) under the direction ofthe Gothic Design Practice founded by Pethers with HughMathew (SEDB’s professional partner from 1969).However, the Fabric Advisory Committee and certainmembers of the Chapter remained hostile, so when a newDean was appointed in 2006, despite the fact thatcomparatively little was left to be done, including thecompletion of the cloister and the furnishings, hangingpyx, and screens for the Chapel of the Apostles, all todesigns by Pethers, he was discharged, even though hisachievements were regarded as triumphs by those whoknow something about scholarly architecture andtraditional construction. Symondson records the cavalierways in which both SEDB and Pethers were treated withtelling understatement: subsequent works at Bury compareunfavourably with their carefully considered designs.Harwood’s monograph deals with the œuvre of the firmestablished by Peter Hugh Girard Chamberlin (1919-78),Geoffry Charles Hamilton Powell (1920-99), and ChristofRudolf Bon (1921-99). When Powell won the competitionfor the Golden Lane housing scheme in the City ofLondon (built 1953-57), Chamberlin, Powell, & Bon wasestablished, and shortly afterwards the City invited it tosubmit ideas for some 35 acres of land which led to thecommission to design the huge Barbican development(1955-82), arguably the best example in the British Isles ofa high-density urban scheme incorporating cultural,residential, and educational uses, influenced by the theoriesof ‘Le Corbusier’ (1887-1965). Other works includedBousfield Primary School, The Boltons, South Kensington(1952-56), where coloured panels in the cladding weresupposed to have a didactic purpose, but the excessiveamounts of glass caused problems with solar heat gain andglare (a common problem at that time); The ProcessingBuilding, Cooper Taber Seed Factory, Witham, Essex(1954-56, demolished); the Rossdale House, 30a HendonAvenue, Finchley (1955-58); the Clutsom & KempShowroom, Oxford Street, London (1957-8, destroyed); theCullum Welch and Crescent blocks at Golden Lane(designed 1954-55); Two Saints School, near the Elephantand Castle, London (1958-60: only the pentagonal blocksurvives); Shipley Salt School, Higher Coach Road,Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire (1959-65: replaced in2005 because of endemic problems of solar heat gain andinadequate sound insulation); Cheltenham GrammarSchool (1960-65: demolished from 1990 after high aluminacement was found to have been used in its construction);New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), Cambridge(1958-68: in which a new monumental formalism is found,especially in the domed hall, though Pevsner found the‘sliced orange-peel details of the hall dome’ odd, and the‘historic allusions’ a ‘sign of weakness’); and buildings forLeeds University (1960-78: which involved the destructionof the Leeds General Cemetery at the insistence of theuniversity authorities). The firm also produced sundrymaster plans, including a scheme to replace the series ofvaried individual buildings (dating from the sixteenth toomits Spence altogether in heading straight for Alison andPeter Smithson. William Curtis (1996) sees good inSpence’s intentions, but calls Coventry an ‘expressivefailure’. More recently, Spence has been given a fairerhearing by Nick Bullock (2002) and John R. Gold (2007),but even then, Bullock also highlights the unplacedCoventry submissions by Colin St John Wilson and PeterCarter, and by the Smithsons.The task of Basil Spence: Buildings and Projects, therefore,is to make afresh the case for its subject. Drawingproductively on the extensive archive that is now housedin Edinburgh, the book’s focus is entirely apposite. Unlikethe generation that came to prominence in the 1950s,Spence was not much prone to abstract theorising. Hisoutput thus stands as the clearest expression of his ideas,and the account of it that we are given makes a fascinatingand much-needed contribution to British architecturalhistory. We begin with his pre-war houses in Scotland,veering from the vernacular to ‘contemporaryHollywood’. Various exhibition jobs in the late 1930s and1940s led Spence to the Festival of Britain, where his Seaand Ships Pavilion anticipated the framed ‘plug in’structures proposed in the 1960s by Cedric Price.Coventry Cathedral, won in 1951 and completed in 1962,cemented Spence’s international reputation, and wasfollowed by several major projects: the new SussexUniversity (1958-73); Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks (1959-70), and the Rome Embassy (1961-71), before in the 1970sthe practice became mired in various controversies andthen Spence’s final illness. The accounts in Buildings and Projects of individual jobssuccinctly present the design history of each andcontextualise Spence’s decision-making. The text isaccompanied by numerous original drawings andphotographs (though not always correctly: what claims tobe an image of the delightful Crookfur Cottage Homes inNewton Mearns actually shows a rather less delightfulhousing scheme in Derby). There are several standoutchapters. I enjoyed Clive Fenton and David Walker’sdiscussion of Spence’s churches in England and Scotland,where enclosure and serenity were created by a careful andincreasingly sophisticated handling of light and space. Theunexecuted St Ninian’s, Whithorn (1950), acted as a dryrun for Coventry in a manner that recalls the relationshipbetween Wren’s St Stephen Walbrook and St Paul’sCathedral. Miles Glendinning, meanwhile, deftly unpicksthe complex Rome and Hyde Park projects, revealing howSpence navigated his way through the minefield ofofficialdom and red tape. Louise Campbell summarises thehistory of Coventry Cathedral, from 1940s nationalmemorial to symbol of international post-warreconciliation, expressed subtly as a ‘total work of art’.Another standout is her account of the University ofSussex, where the language of the Roman Colosseum andGreek stoa generated an instant monumentality that wassomewhat at odds with the innovative curriculum beingdeveloped by Asa Briggs.What emerges from the book is the sheer variety ofSpence’s practice, and of the paradoxes that shaped it. Herewas a man who spoke extensively to the public yet wasnotoriously shy and maddened by criticism. He was drawnto the ideal of the atelier within his home, seeking closeengagement with his projects, yet he headed a complexseries of essentially independent offices spread acrossLondon and Edinburgh, almost a franchise operation. Hewas an establishment figure – his ‘lead’ practice inCanonbury revelled in the name ‘Sir Basil Spence OMRA’ – yet he was fiercely criticised in the wake of costover-runs and functional problems at Hyde Park. His earlyhousing comprised sensitive insertions into existingenvironments in best Geddesian tradition, yet the Gorbalswas an exercise in full-blown Corbusian Brutalism. Thissame tension is evident elsewhere. For example, the RomeEmbassy responded carefully to the adjacent Porta Pia, butother projects, such as his offices in Queen Anne’s Gate(1976), displayed Spence in less than contextual mood.While diversity and paradox may be key to anunderstanding of Spence’s work, I was occasionally lefthoping for some more over-arching assessment of hisoutput. Campbell’s introduction sets out her subject’sambiguous position: was Spence an exponent of the Artsand Crafts, a follower of the Modern Movement, developerof a Scottish regionalism, or a pioneer of High Tech? Heranswer, that Spence occupied the middle ground betweentraditionalists and the avant-garde is important, and usefullyreminds us of the value of a pluralistic model of architecturalhistory. Yet I was more intrigued by her suggestion that, wereSpence American and thus working in a context whereModernism was more a style than a fusion of design theorywith a particular social-ethical stance, his work might seemless problematic. Throughout the book, there are tantalisinghints of ways of reading Spence’s work other than as thefusion of continuity and change that has hitherto beenhighlighted by critics and historians. Glendinning, forexample, suggests that the Rome Embassy demonstratesSpence moving straight from the pre-Modern tradition toPostmodernism without ever fully embracing mechanicalfunctionalism. Brian Edwards, meanwhile, argues that thesculptural forms, concealed construction and multiplemetaphors of the Expo ’67 pavilion in Montreal anticipatethe recent work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Perhaps a telling comparison might be made withNicholas Hawksmoor. Though Hawksmoor’s work scaledgreater heights than Spence’s, like Spence his buildingswere shaped by ideas of decorum, and of selecting formsthat would connote meanings appropriate to their use andcontext. Like Spence, Hawksmoor fell from fashion in hislater years, grumbling about those ‘ready to knock youdown’. In recent years, Hawksmoor studies have beenreinvigorated by historians building on Kerry Downes’seminal 1959 book. One hopes that the solid foundationsof Basil Spence: Buildings and Projects will similarly provokeresponses and elaborations from its authors and others.alistair fair

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