Bread & Butter and Architecture

JOHN SUMMERSON

BREAD & BUTTER AND ARCHITECTURE

Just before the war, the profession of architecture—or that relatively small part of it which has eyes in front of its head as well as at the back—passed through a critical and self-conscious phase. Vital matters came right to the surface of professional life. The profession grew. And with a vigorous twist new and important—and, I believe, hopeful—potentialities came to light.

Perhaps the clearest way to present the resulting picture is to begin by comparing the point of view of a student leaving an architectural school in, say, 1925, with one leaving in 1938. In 1925 the prospect looked something like this. You passed your final examination and entered the office of an F.R.I.B.A. at £3 or £4 a week. In two or three years it might become £7, in ten years £12; then, perhaps a partnership. But, with luck you would not have to wait for that. An uncle or friend (pigmy shade of the eighteenth-century patron) would step in with a commission—perhaps a £1,000 house. From this you ‘worked up a practice’. You put up a brass plate. You won a competition or two. You made good.

At least, that was the idea and the ideal—to be a successful independent practitioner of architecture, a scholar and a gentleman (like Wren, in Kneller’s portrait) with clients in the aristocracy, the City and the Church. But of course it did not work out quite like that. Big country-house practices and Church practices had crumpled up in 1914-16; the biggest commercial work was firmly clutched by old-established firms with many partners. Still, there were the smaller houses, small factories, suburban churches, and the continual rebuildings in London and the provinces. And one hoped.

Now jump to 1938. The student of that year took a different view. Behind him was the depression of 1929-31, an event which caused the vista of private practice to shrink horribly and any

supply a resilient background, he had to be more of a realist. It was almost fanciful to pursue the brass-plate ideal, though it might be precariously achieved by a group of friends tacking half-a-dozen modest plates under a single bell-push. But there was an alternative—permanent salaried employment.

Now, salaried employment—except as a mere transition to independence—was, in 1925, a proposition which attracted few and was entertained by the unambitious and the not very talented. There were respectable opportunities in the civil service, but even these were not keenly contested. Employment on the staff of a local authority or, worse, a commercial undertaking (say a chain store) was sought only by those to whom the pay-envelope was a very much more urgent consideration than opportunities for the creation of architecture.

By 1935, however, salaried employment as an alternative to private practice demanded to be taken seriously. And it was. Between that year and the beginning of the war there was a rapid swing-round from the complacent, deprecatory view just indicated to lively interest and, positively, enthusiasm. The reasons were not only economic, and some of them are worth explaining. One of the chief reasons I would put down as the spread of 'Left' views among the younger part of the profession. These developed not from any deep preoccupation with politics but from the discovery of Continental 'functionalism' (as it was then called) which began to be widely studied here about 1927, eight years after the publication of le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture. The first incentive was psychological—the novelty, strange beauty and allure of foreign architectural experiments. The exploration and mastery of these led to a wider conception of what architecture is, of its relation to siting, to town-planning and thus to sociology and more remotely to politics: then, from politics back to sociology and the sociological position of the architect himself. One does not need to be particularly 'Left', or indeed politically minded at all, to appreciate that the architectural opportunities of the future are more likely to lie in the hands of administrative authorities and commercial corporations (whether publicly or privately controlled) than in the hands of

of such a future is exciting. It caught the imagination of many young architects of 1935 to 1938.

It was in the former year, 1935, that the great housing and slum clearance drive started up. Local authorities had to shoulder big architectural responsibilities and most of them were ridiculously ill-equipped for the job. But against the background of mediocrity and worse a few signposts stood out. There was the intelligent and imaginative office of L. H. Keay, Liverpool's Housing Director, where schemes for ironing out and replanning areas as big as fifty acres were being prepared. And there was R. A. H. Livett, doing pioneer work as Leeds' Housing Director on the big Quarry Hill Estate in that black city.

About the same time one began to hear of the architectural department of the Miners' Welfare Commission, admirably run by J. H. Forshaw. Here each job (they were mostly pit-head baths) was put in charge of a senior assistant with a small team under him—an arrangement very different from the usual haphazard distribution of hack-work among 'temporary' employees and the responsibility (nominal of course) of the chief for all designs.

To such offices as these, young A.R.I.B.A.s began to turn for those three essential things for any born architect—bread, butter, and the opportunity to build.

This change of opinion was, as I have said, pretty rapid and up to September 1939 its resultant thrusts were making themselves shrewdly felt—especially inside the walls of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Now the Royal Institute is, in origin, a learned Society and retains much of the traditional conservatism of such. For 107 years it has upheld the ideal of the independent artist-constructor-business-man acting in a fiduciary relationship to his client. Its membership and council show a large predominance of private practitioners; its external policy and energies have been chiefly directed to persuading the 'building public' to employ qualified architects, with an unconscious emphasis on their independent status. The Institute has never interested itself much in the status of the departmental principal, still less in that of the 'salaried' man in a humbler position, who nevertheless has earned the Associateship of the Institute, and is,

1 Forshaw's success here was followed by his appointment about three years ago to the senior post in the L.C.C.'s architectural department.

educationally, often better equipped than his chief. Lately, however, these two elements in the R.I.B.A.'s membership have been vocal, not to say truculent. When, in 1938, a President distinguished for his learning and eloquence referred lightly to departmental architecture as 'stale chocolate' there was a volcanic row. County architects, city architects, the chief architects to this and that, were wounded and indignant. And it is just possible that what wounded them most was that the terrible phrase was not entirely without point. Few of these men could get outside themselves sufficiently to be self-critical or to share the more philosophic confidence of some of their juniors in the future of departmental as against private practice. Not all of them could see that, while tradition and circumstance favoured the individual rich client with his private architect, 'official' architecture was very liable indeed to be stale. On the other hand, what the President evidently could not see was that 'official' architecture need not be either as second-hand or as tepid as his simile implied; nor, for that matter, did he see that the scales had already turned which would bring the brains and enthusiasm of the young down on the side of the departments.

From the 'salaried' camp came altogether tougher and less emotional criticism. Their prime objectives were to coerce the Institute into active leadership in architectural policy vis-à-vis the government (an impossible proposition for a 'learned Society') and (more reasonably) to direct the Institute's prestige towards getting better pay and working conditions for salaried architects of all kinds. The policy represented here issued chiefly from a body with an undeservedly dim and cumbersome designation—the Association of Architects, Surveyors and Technical Assistants.

It is a remarkable body, this A.A.S.T.A. Not long ago it was plodding along in the background with a mild up-with-the-under-dog policy. But the crisis of the 1930's infused it with vitality. It identified itself with the changed point of view which I outlined at the beginning of this article. It greatly enlarged its membership. It flushed a deep political colour. Before and during the first year of the war it conducted research into emergency building technique (shelters, evacuation camps, etc.) and produced a remarkable literature of reports and recommendations. In many respects the A.A.S.T.A. has come to fill the role originally (1933) proposed by the M.A.R.S. (Modern Architectural Research)

Group, but which that round-table of architectural highbrows was too supine and introvert to perform. Today, the A.A.S.T.A. represents in the most clear-cut fashion the Left wing of architecture. And it has gone further by establishing a specific relation to the building industry and becoming affiliated to the T.U.C.

From some points of view the A.A.S.T.A. may be regarded as an adumbration of what the Royal Institute itself may, one of these days, have to become. For, since the passing of the Architects (Registration) Act in 1938, closing the profession and protecting the title 'Architect', the Institute's position has become rather curious. It has voluntarily and deliberately and, in fact, by its own strenuous efforts surrendered its unique position as the body granting the highest architectural degrees to a statutory Registration Council. By this Act of surrender the Institute has prescribed its own educational standards for the entire profession, but at the same time has placed itself under the obligation to serve its members in ways substantial enough to make their subscriptions worth while: It cannot live indefinitely on prestige and the services of a superb library. It will have to promote the interests not merely of 'architecture' (as laid down in the Charter of 1835) but of architects; it will have to conduct an active policy aimed at identifying a highly-trained profession with every building activity in the country. From the 'learned society' condition of its origin it will have to develop into something rather like a Trade Union and at the same time, perhaps, become a centre of, or at any rate the mouthpiece for, technical research.

Enough of professional 'shop', which is not, perhaps, very interesting to the non-architect except in so far as it shows an important twist in opinion which is likely to change and clarify the relation of the architect to the public. I am not going to suggest that the private practitioner is to die out or that all architecture will be purveyed by public or semi-public departments. The individualist free-lance will still play an important part. More generally, the tendency will be for big private firms to become even bigger and to absorb structural engineers and quantity surveyors into their staffs, becoming, as it were, full-blown free-lance 'departments'.

In both official and private offices the absorption of engineering and other specialized technical skill is inevitable and necessary. For specialization has become formidable. The architect who has

to work with a variety of consultants and with a quantity surveyor (to say nothing of the army of specialized sub-contractors embraced by a big contract) to each of whom separately his client is under a contractual obligation is in an increasingly strange position. Is he an artist, a business-man, an administrator or what? It was possible to think, thirty or forty years ago, that he could be all three. But even if he can make shift to carry on a practice of this kind (and there are architects who do it astoundingly well) it is doubtful if the principle is one which can be upheld as a sound basis of future professional organization. America long ago developed the fully-equipped architectural firm with its separate staffs of planners, designers of façades, engineers, surveyors and so on, all working under immense pressure to produce the slick marketable result. The method proved its efficiency though it is not precisely the model to be followed in the lay-out of an architectural department from which imaginative work and a decent working career for its personnel are to be expected. But the 'all-in' office, well laid out, with a man at the head who is not necessarily a brilliant designer but knows enough about everything to run the show, is the pattern most likely to form in the future both in the 'official' and 'private' fields. In the 'official' field it is already crystallizing.

The proportion of building work which, before the war, was handled by architectural departments was very big indeed—much bigger than one would guess from a glance at, say, the architectural room at the Royal Academy, or even the discerning pages of the Architectural Review. After the war, it will no doubt be found that the departments have survived better than many private practices. Just how much of the burden of reconstruction they will carry will depend on how expenditure on building will be controlled and canalized. At present, there is no hint of an answer to the question, but some probabilities are clear enough.

Housing in the bombed and (what is more to the point) architecturally obsolescent industrial towns will take precedence in the reconstruction programme. Offices like those I mentioned at Liverpool and Leeds and to which I would add E. A. A. Gibson's

1Here and elsewhere in this article, readers of Mr. Dennis Routh's contribution to the September number of Horizon ('The Twentieth Century Revolution') will recognise a particular situation related to the general picture sketched by Mr. Routh.

comparatively new and very successful department at Coventry, will have big programmes before them. They will recruit some of the best architectural ability released from the forces. If anything resembling the recommendations of the Uthwatt report are by then adopted, their opportunities will be substantial. They will rise to them, and we shall get some real architecture.

But what of the other towns? Few have well-developed architects' departments. In some the only architects employed are junior assistants in the office of the Borough Engineer. Here one of several things may happen. Either architectural departments will be rapidly set up, or the Borough Engineer will solve the problems in his own way, with the help of an architecturally reinforced staff; or private architects will receive parcels of work, to be co-ordinated under the Engineer. There may be some pressure in favour of this latter course, but I doubt whether it will be encouraged by local authorities themselves. As I see it, the large towns will go all out for big unified schemes for housing, school-building and hospital-building carried out by the official architects of the housing, education and health committees. The smaller towns will compromise between methods, with variable measures of success.

Local authorities are not the only bodies whose architects will take a big hand in post-war building. There are the railways, whose architectural tradition just touches the Georgian Age but lost itself in 'practical man's' makeshift engineering and has shown few convincing signs of recovery. The Southern built competent stations between the wars; and the L.M.S. recently showed sense and foresight in appointing the young head of a successful school of architecture to a responsible post. The railways can contribute any amount to the re-civilizing of urban and rural Britain if only they will come off the idea that only luxury hotels and the façades to metropolitan termini need architectural thought. Before them is the shining example of Frank Pick and his Underground. It is hard to exaggerate how much a well-organized railway architect's department with a reasonably far-sighted Board behind it and its doors wide open to ambition and ability could do for us.

Banks have their architects' departments (competent but painfully conservative) and the Ministry of Works handles (with

unimpeachable tact) all post-offices and telephone exchanges. Then there are the chain stores. It has been their unacknowledged privilege to transform every High Street in the country and present us with what is nothing more nor less than a standardized shopping-centre, whose mock-imposing silhouettes and ghastly fascias leer at the Saturday shopping-crowds with the leer of a Jew capitalist in a Nazi cartoon. The output, generally, is bad. But there are exceptions and there is hope; I heard lately, for instance, of a good appointment made by one of the big dairy combines. The Co-op. architects, too, have done work above the average.

The field of opportunity within the grasp of the official architect is immense. If we are to think of the architectural future in terms of the rebuilding of towns he is bound to take a big place in the picture. This does not mean that the picture is rosy all at once. 'Stale chocolate' and, in fact, stinking rubbish have come out of dreary departments and petty maintenance-cum-storefitter offices in the very recent past. Big business knows what the public will put up with, knows how to stamp its ugly autograph on the face of every town with a population over 10,000, and will only learn with difficulty that to put one brick on another in this island is a privilege and a responsibility.

The fact that the best type of architect has not, hitherto, been enlisted in the chief sources of architectural output is proved by a glance at the centre or suburbs of any town. The shops, the pubs, the big bold cinemas, the tonic banks, the housing estates, the schools, the hospitals—a high proportion of all these are the work of the architectural 'salariat'. And a high proportion are not a quarter as good as they ought to be. Architecture worth looking at, living in and working in is nearly always by a man in private practice, sometimes engaged on a job handed out to him for purposes of prestige or by competition over the heads of an official department. But this does not prove that the conditions of private practice make for better architecture. It only proves that the departments—often poorly organized and badly paid—do not attract the best brains.

The development of the architectural department has been stealthy and obscure. Only now has its full extent and significance begun to dawn on architects and this chiefly because opportunity and even livelihood on the old lines offer for the young, a chilly

prospect. The alternative, if it is to benefit architects and public alike, needs energetic pioneer work. What one hopes for is initiative from the profession itself (will the R.I.B.A. do it, or leave it to the A.A.S.T.A.?) to press for a standard of organization and working conditions in architectural departments so that a sense of individual responsibility is retained, so that the slur on 'salaried' practice is wiped out once and for all and so that the immense mass of trained ability and enthusiasm now locked up in the forces (a little suspicious, probably, of the 'great era of reconstruction to which we look forward') can be given the chance it deserves. For we must remember that, although when Registration sealed up the profession, large numbers of men were admitted who are architects by force of habit rather than by training, the young architect of today is highly trained. If he is given a reasonable chance there is no earthly reason why English architecture should not climb very high very quickly.

And now, to extend the story in a specially interesting direction, what kind of architecture is likely to come out of the situation I have just analysed? The main facts from which an answer can be extracted seem to me to be these. The generation of architects which fits most naturally into the picture is the one which matured between the two wars—average age now, say, thirty-eight. This generation is largely school-trained, has very little, if any, loyalty to the grandees of the preceding generation and has formed itself partly on a definite 'line' adopted by one school or another, and partly on its own reaction to what has been going on in European architecture. The impress of school training is often very strong. The American influence at the Liverpool School, for instance, modified by the vogue for Swedish sentiment, can be traced in dozens of recent buildings. At the same time there is nothing in the Schools approaching an 'academic tradition'—using that phrase in the sense of a strict stylistic discipline. In his fourth or fifth year the ordinary student is already an addict of architectural journalism. His designs take their colour from the pages of the Review, the Journal, the Architect and half a dozen other periodicals; or from the shiny quartos on le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. He is always out to ring the last bell rung by a great name (1925, Ostberg; 1930, Dudok; 1935, le Corbusier). Later on he settles down to something not quite as adventurous as his thesis design but not as

cautious as the average of new buildings he sees around him. How dreary this sounds! How damning it would be if said of painters and poets! But this seems to be the way that a tradition of competence and quality in architecture comes along.

It is competence and quality we need most at the moment, not the vanity of trying to fly level with the poet-innovator le Corbusier, or the stupidity (as it seems to me) of being more interested in getting a few exciting, immaculate, individual results than in getting the roots of architecture untangled and properly planted in the soil where they belong.

To go further with the question of style, how 'modern' is architecture likely to be under the post-war conditions one envisages? The architect who wants to be 'modern'—a term by which I understand an objectivity of method not necessarily limited by previous results, technical or aesthetic—has to fight two battles. One against public and official prejudice. And one against the building industry. The first is very difficult to fight because 'modern' architecture simply cannot make a direct appeal to the barely existent susceptibilities of the ordinary layman, who as a rule cordially detests it: architecture which stands or falls (figuratively) by an organic unity of siting, plan, elevation and sections is as 'obscure' as some modern poetry. The second battle is difficult because the building industry is a great, lumbering tradition-ridden machine with an extraordinarily stiff resistance to the use of new materials unless they can be induced to conform to existing methods. The industry is enormous and composed of endless interlocking units. It is the traditional industry par excellence and even to visualize it coming under the sway of co-ordinated research is difficult. There are vested interests reaching into the building materials and engineering industries; and the conservatism of method on the labour side is as firmly entrenched.

For these reasons, a regression from the most advanced outposts reached by, say, Tecton ('High-point' flats), Maxwell Fry (Hostel for Girls, Gower Street) or Wells Coates (Palace Gate flats), seems likely in any post-war building effort. Interest will centre in evolving a type of design incorporating many accepted formulas of planning and finish but more flexible than anything which there could have been before the onset of the 'modern' movement between the wars. There is, however, one possibility of

special interest. In very big schemes under unified control (such, for instance, as local authority housing or school schemes), prefabrication might be of enormous value. There is evidence for this in the use of the Mopin system on the Quarry Hill Estate at Leeds, and there is just the chance that the idea of prefabricating units of structure and equipment may link up with the vast problem of demobilizing war industry and labour. But I do not know. I only mention it as a much-discussed possibility. In any case, I would hazard that prefabrication, in the present state of experience, would tend rather to conservatism in design (the repetition of units gives a hint in the direction of the Auguste Perret kind of classical modernity) than to any aesthetic adventures.

Altogether, it seems to me that the high fliers—the Lloyd Wrights and the Corbusiers and their satellites—have broken as many barriers as needed breaking for the present. They have liberated architecture and equipped it for all the real-life adventures which are looming ahead. The next thing to be done is to render architecture effective in English life; to link it firmly on the one hand with the many phases of national planning in which building has a place, and on the other with the architect's education and employment and the well-ordering of a profession which is, on the whole, idealistic, self-critical, and ambitious to seize the opportunities which must eventually follow the disasters of today.

NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The Co-operative Wholesale Society’s Store at Huddersfield (1937) is good shop architecture and good street architecture, in striking contrast with the generally low level of work turned out by the architectural offices of chain stores. The design comes from the C.W.S. architect’s department at Manchester, where the principal is W. A. Johnson, F.R.I.B.A. The assistant in charge was J. W. Cropper, L.R.I.B.A.

The Public Library extension at Scarborough (1935) illustrates one kind of opportunity which comes within the sphere of salaried designers employed by local authorities. It is the work of G. W. Alderson, A.R.I.B.A., in his capacity as architect to the Borough Engineer, J. Paton Watson, M.Inst. C.E. This interior is notable for its excellent lay-out and good finish.

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

THE WICKED BARONET

I have remarked elsewhere how many Victorian types have perished: the Permanent Invalid, the Angel Child, the Dear Old Lady in her caps and laces, the Fallen Daughter, the Aesthete, the Fop, the Wicked Baronet, famous for his seductions of the modest Village Maiden,—another type that has become long since a fleeting shade, they say.

I once met—it must have been fifty years ago—a Wicked Baronet, perhaps the last survivor of his species. He was a Baronet, anyhow, of an old creation—a Nova Scotia Baronet, which is, I am told, the most exclusive kind of all. Sir Peregrine Coucher, of Coucher Abbey in Cheshire, was his name. He was a Captain in the Coldstream Guards. Being, as I had every right by my transatlantic birth to be, a snob, and not knowing, as I have learned since, that Baronets are not aristocrats, I was pleased to be introduced to this nobleman as I thought him, and interested to meet, moreover, a trousered tiger, since in American society soldiers do not mix. I dared to ask if he would give me an interview; for I had become a sort of amateur journalist when I reached the shores of England, and I had prepared a list of inquiries I would put to my new acquaintances. There they proved to be willing, and even eager to answer: English people of all ranks like, I found, to talk about themselves. Not the least eager was Sir Coucher, as in my ignorance, I called him. He asked me to his London mansion, where he received me in his library naked; for, though no longer young, he seemed proud of his personal appearance. I was invited to visit him at his home in Cheshire, to which old Abbey I found he had restored as much as possible its monastic appearance. For though, as he liked to boast, his sins had been, ever since his early days at Eton, scarlet, Sir Peregrine was a deeply religious man. All there was to sit on in this Abbey were hard, straight-back settees of the most austere character; very uncomfortable I found them to that part of the person which, I had been told, the Lord Chancellor usually places on the Woolsack. Still more painful seemed her situation to a large lady of Israelitish appearance on another settee, whom I took to be this lady-killer's