Mavericks: Breaking the Mould of British Architecture

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Introduction

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1

Robert Smythson

13

2

John Vanbrugh

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3

James Wyatt

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4

John Soane

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Charles Robert Cockerell

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh

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Charles Holden

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H. S. Goodhart-Rendel

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James Stirling

85

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Cedric Price

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FAT

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Zaha Hadid

113

Further Reading

122

Photographic Acknowledgements

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Index

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103

Detail of fig. 119

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Introduction

Detail of fig. 51

What is a maverick? The Oxford English Dictionary defines one thus: ‘An unorthodox or independent-minded person; a person who refuses to conform to the views of a particular group or party; an individualist.’ How, then, might an architect be a maverick? There are various answers to this question and, indeed, various types of maverick architect.

The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is the architect who refuses to conform to the norms of mainstream architectural culture. This may be in terms of designing in an idiosyncratic way that actively disregards stylistic convention, or it could be about being at the leading edge of architectural design and thought. Although comparatively few architects can stake reasonable claim to belonging in the former camp, there are, naturally, many who match the description of the latter at some point in their careers. But the field narrows when we restrict it to those architects who have consistently been at architecture’s vanguard. One can begin a career with maverick tendencies, but it takes a certain character to continue on that path throughout an entire lifetime. This is especially the case if one has acquired a reputation for designing buildings of a particular style or form that clients and peers have come to expect, which has thus become normalised, or if it becomes necessary to conform in some other way in order to make a decent living. The maverick always runs the risk of having little work.

Beyond their actual designs, the maverick qualities of several architects have emerged in relation to the role, practice and status of the discipline of architecture, and in some instances these qualities have actually played a part in shaping the profession itself. These maverick architects are the ones whose influence has perhaps been the greatest.

Other types of maverick architect have managed to exert almost no influence at all beyond their own careers, despite being maverick to their very core – in personality, professional conduct (or otherwise!), and in their relationship to their peers. It is important, though, when thinking about personality and temperament, to distinguish the maverick from the artistic genius and all its clichéd connotations, such as withdrawal from societal norms, and even mental illness. Mavericks are not necessarily geniuses, though some are, of course. The further back in time we go the two can become synonymous, mainly because many of those whom we consider today as geniuses, and who are thus remembered by history, were also mavericks. As we near the present it is, by contrast, far easier to separate the mavericks from the architectural geniuses. Hindsight is very often necessary for true genius to become apparent, whereas mavericks are almost all identifiable in the present.

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Fig. 13 Castle Howard, Yorkshire, 1699–1725

estate to cement his standing among Britain’s political élite. Carlisle had first approached William Talman, one of the leading country-house architects of the day, who had just completed major work at Chatsworth.

But after a disagreement about fees and Talman’s arrogant manner, Carlisle withdrew the commission, and, in 1699, turned to Vanbrugh.

Exactly how Vanbrugh won the commission to build Castle Howard is still open to some speculation. Another century was to pass before architecture was codified as a profession and systematic training became widespread. As Swift had wryly observed, Vanbrugh had no architectural experience, especially with a project of this scale. It may not be too fanciful to imagine a merry night at the Kit-Cat Club during which Vanbrugh’s natural charisma convinced Carlisle to entrust to him the design of his new country house. Perhaps realising in the cold light of day the enormity of what he had secured, Vanbrugh quickly sought professional expertise from Nicholas Hawksmoor. By this time Hawksmoor had been working for nearly two decades in Christopher Wren’s office and was just establishing an independent architectural career for himself. Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor were contrasting yet complementary characters: Vanbrugh, the gregarious extrovert; Hawksmoor, quieter and more fastidious, but with a no less imaginative mind. From the off the two men developed a strong personal and professional rapport.

Vanbrugh’s approach to architecture was informed perhaps above all by his innate feel for the effects his buildings would have on those who saw and inhabited them. One of his first moves at Castle Howard was to position the house on the top of the hill in order to aggrandise its appearance from afar. At the centre of his composition (fig. 13) stood a cuboidal block, reminiscent of the house Hawksmoor had designed at Easton Neston, although at Castle Howard it was topped by a huge, oversized dome. Either side of this central block Vanbrugh added rambling wings that extended into the landscape, revealing his debt to the villas of Andrea Palladio in the Veneto. But in massing and detailing, Vanbrugh took a new direction.

Although his forms were largely derived from the classical language of architecture, unusually for the time Vanbrugh was also strongly influenced by Elizabethan and especially medieval architecture. For him,

Fig. 14 Kimbolton Castle, Cambridgeshire, 1707–09

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh

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Fig. 52 James Craig Annan, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1893.

Photograph. National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. x132515 Detail of fig. 55

When Mackintosh died in December 1928, his name had long since slipped into relative obscurity. He finally left Glasgow – the city with which he is now synonymous – with his wife Margaret Macdonald in 1914, a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, for Walberswick in Suffolk. By this time, his professional career had begun to collapse; the previous years had seen a precipitous drop in the quantity of work coming into the office of Honeyman, Keppie and Mackintosh, and in the latter’s case this was coupled with frequent bouts of depression, exacerbated by heavy drinking. Mackintosh spent his time at Walberswick painting watercolours of flowers, which appeared to be going well until, somewhat bizarrely, he was accused of espionage. It seems his Scottish accent, coupled with his sketching, often at dusk, had aroused the suspicions of those nervous of enemy invasion. In August 1915 Mackintosh and his wife left Walberswick for London, settling in Chelsea, where they remained for the next eight years. In wartime London little work came Mackintosh’s way, and he and Macdonald made a meagre living selling textile designs to manufacturers.

The exception during this time was his work for the toy manufacturer W. J. Bassett-Lowke, who commissioned Mackintosh to decorate his house, 78 Derngate, in Northampton (fig. 53). The stunning interiors Mackintosh created there showed that even in these years he remained in touch with the latest artistic developments on the continent: Fauvism, the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev and even the beginnings of Art Deco. Although Mackintosh and Macdonald had made several friends among Chelsea’s bohemian set, they were always short of money and in 1923 decided to move to the south of France. There Mackintosh finally abandoned any aspirations of returning to architecture and embraced watercolour with a vigour and ambition that far exceeded his previous work in the medium (fig. 54). Even as he tackled this strange new sundrenched landscape, one can still see continuities with his architectural work: the interest in line, of light falling on layered surfaces and of multiple, interlocking geometries.

These were strange final years for an architect whose fire had burned perhaps brighter than any other in the years around the turn of the century. Moreover, they have distorted our view of Mackintosh, who is now popularly seen as a lonely artistic genius, almost pathologically obsessed with his art and unappreciated in his lifetime. In fact the real Mackintosh was even more complex. Much of his career proceeded uneventfully, as he worked his way up a successful Glasgow practice.

As opposed to some clichéd, romanticised artistic ideal, what really 57

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H. S. Goodhart-Rendel

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Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel was an almost exact contemporary of the first generation of Modern Movement architects born during the mid1880s, among them Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn and Gerrit Rietveld. Despite this backdrop to his career, Goodhart-Rendel remained resolutely independent – and often rather idiosyncratic – in his architectural tastes. He did much, for example, to promote Victorian architecture when few others could see its merits.

In conversation he was remarkably erudite, maintaining a lively and intellectually agile manner that belied his slightly wearied appearance.

As the architectural historian Sir John Summerson described, recalling their first meeting, at a dinner party in the late 1920s: after dinner conversation ran on to Beethoven’s piano works and then shifted to the architecture of Schinkel and (of all people) ‘Greek’ Thomson. Rendel was perfectly at ease with all three, reciting fragments of Beethoven at the piano making acute observations on the two architects and their respective styles. Amusing, inexhaustibly learned but always sensitive to the opinions of others, he talked the evening away to everybody’s delight.

Fig. 72 Fred May, A drawing of the RIBA’s Annual Dinner of 10 February 1939 with various eminent architect attendees, including Goodhart-Rendel, depicted in playful caricature.

Pencil and wash with white highlights on card, 55.5 × 40.5 cm. Royal Institute of British Architects, London, inv. SC159/17(1)

Despite his personal charm, most contemporary observers found Goodhart-Rendel’s architecture strange and outdated, more at home in the nineteenth century than the brave new world of the twentieth. In short, as Summerson put it: ‘Rendel was an architect whose buildings nobody understood and therefore nobody liked.’ But behind them lay a rigorous and spirited intellectual position that was not quite so out of keeping with the times as many thought.

Born in 1887, Goodhart-Rendel had an unusual upbringing. His father was a lecturer in classics at Cambridge University and a former amateur footballer, and his mother was the daughter of the prominent industrialist and politician Stuart Rendel, Baron Rendel of Hatchlands. In 1890 the family moved to Edinburgh, where Goodhart-Rendel’s father had taken a professorship, but on his death five years later, his grief-stricken widow returned to England with her son. They moved to Surrey, and to Chinthurst Hill, a house designed by Edwin Lutyens. Already the young Goodhart-Rendel was showing an aptitude for architecture and also music – two lifelong passions that he pursued with equal and idiosyncratic vigour.

He spent a year at Eton College before attending Mulgrave School in Yorkshire. During these years he discovered the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor, James Gibbs and John Soane, all still rather unusual tastes at this time. During his mid- to late teens, when not at school or 77

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modern language of clear, pared-back forms that express their structural function. He developed these ideas after the Second World War when church design became almost his sole focus, completing several major works such as St John the Evangelist, St Leonards-on-Sea (1946–58), Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, Liverpool (1951–54), and Holy Trinity, Dockhead (fig. 79).

Several other projects, including a huge and ultimately unrealised design for the Benedictine abbey at Prinknash, were in progress when Goodhart-Rendel died unmarried at his London home in Eaton Square in the summer of 1959. Though he was largely misunderstood in his own day – and for several decades after – many current observers are coming to appreciate the complex and often deliberately paradoxical ideas behind the work of this most individual of architects.

H. S. Goodhart-Rendel

Fig. 77 St Wilfrid’s, Elm Grove, Brighton, 1932–34: interior

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Fig. 78 One of Goodhart-Rendel’s first churches, St Wilfrid’s, Elm Grove, Brighton, 1932–34, is a strange fusion of the Gothic and the Modern Movement with few – if any – peers. Perhaps the only way to explain its appearance is through Goodhart-Rendel’s idea of appropriateness. The exterior is constructed from local brick and is pierced by arched windows, not for historical reasons, but because those are the window forms most appropriate for brick structures.

The roof, meanwhile, is made of reinforced concrete, the obvious choice to span its interior spaces.

Fig. 79 Situated on Dockhead, just off the major thoroughfare of Jamaica Road, and not far from St Olaf House, the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, 1957–60, is probably rarely noticed by the streams of motorists who pass it every day. Yet as soon as one looks at it for more than a few seconds, its elegant volumes, which simultaneously conjure images of English parish churches, churches from southern France and even the Baroque of Hawksmoor, are hard to ignore.

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Cedric Price

10 Fig. 89 Cedric Price, South Bank: perspective sketch for ‘The Thing’, 1982–88, unbuilt. Black ink, graphite and black felt-tip pen on wove paper, 15.3 × 10.3 cm. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. In 1984 Price was commissioned by the GLC to revive London’s South Bank. As well as interventions to existing buildings, Price proposed a mile-long footbridge between Charing Cross and Waterloo Stations and a ferris-wheel structure that would act as an observation tower. Though all unbuilt, his proposals prefigured much of what was to come.

Fig. 90 Cedric Price, 1970

Most architects have a natural, almost involuntary, reflex that the solution to a problem should always be a building. The desire to build – and to change the world doing so – is ingrained in architects from the first moment of their training, and exists in most a considerable time before.

This basic impulse is what drives people to begin the long, arduous course of study required to become an architect.

Arguing that a building might not, in fact, always be the answer immediately puts one in opposition to much of mainstream architectural culture. And this was the position that Cedric Price adopted consistently throughout his unusual but highly influential career. Price famously suggested to a potential client who wanted a ‘dream house’ to change his life, that he would in fact be far better off getting divorced instead. For Price, buildings were the answer only when careful analysis of a problem had identified a clearly defined purpose to which they would be put.

And, by extension, if that purpose no longer existed, the building should be demolished. Price remained true to his word, arguing vehemently in favour of the demolition of his Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town, one of his few projects to be built, when it was suggested that it might be listed. He was, furthermore, a proud member of the National Federation of Demolition Contractors.

As a thinker and as a personality, Price was controversial, iconoclastic, provocative, but also prescient. Many of his ideas proved prophetic, with some of the most radical accepted almost as orthodoxy decades later, while the origins of such structures as the London Eye, the Millennium Dome and the Centre Georges Pompidou can be seen in some of his designs. It is, however, a crass simplification of Price’s career to say merely that he was ahead of his time, even if he was in many ways.

His contribution lay in his conception of architecture itself, which was one that embraced change, movement, flexibility and uncertainty, both in a disciplinary sense and on the level of an individual building or intervention. Price argued above all for an architecture that would adapt and evolve and foster new and unpredictable patterns of activity, rather than simply stand as a passive backdrop or an aesthetic proposition as it still so often does. This put him fundamentally at odds with the architectural profession, of which he was scathing: ‘I’m only radical because the architectural profession has got lost. Architects are such a dull lot and they’re so convinced that they matter.’

Price’s background was well-to-do. He was born in Staffordshire in 1934, and after Alleyn’s School in south London, he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, to study architecture, perhaps influenced 93

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Zaha Hadid

12 Fig. 110 Zaha Hadid, The Peak Leisure Club, Hong Kong, 1982–83.

Acrylic on canvas, 260 × 150 cm.

Zaha Hadid Architects Collection, London

Fig. 111 Zaha Hadid, July 2012

‘The architectural career of Zaha Hadid has not been traditional or easy.’ So began the jury citation for Hadid’s Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. She was the first and remarkably remains the only woman ever to have won architecture’s highest honour. Her unflinching personality and the sheer force of her will are the stuff of legend. She is notoriously demanding of her clients and staff alike. At times she can appear grand and prima-donna-like, but she can also be remarkably down to earth, and has worked for many years at a table with her staff, among whom she inspires devotion.

Hadid’s work, which has made an enemy of the modernist box, polarises opinion. Some find her buildings indulgent, ostentatious and absurdly expensive – a classic case of form over function and the work of a designer who cares most about her artistic ego. For others, Hadid is one of the few truly original architects working today: a visionary whose work, at its best, makes all other buildings look dull and ordinary. Though she has her imitators, few share the range of her creative vision, which encompasses everything from masterplanning to interiors and furniture.

There is simply no mistaking a Zaha Hadid building, and yet trying to describe the sensation of facing one is so fruitless that it has reduced certain architecture critics to the descriptive banalities of ‘swooping curves’ and ‘sinewy forms’. With their soaring rhapsodies and staccato rhythms, her buildings are a dramatic embodiment of Goethe’s famous description of architecture as ‘frozen music’.

Born in 1950 in Baghdad into a wealthy, cosmopolitan family, Hadid has had essentially two stages in her career: the first, one of formal research and experimentation, when her radical designs were confined to the drawing board; and the second, when clients and technology caught up with her ideas and she began to realise buildings, eventually on a prodigious scale. Baghdad was in her youth a prosperous, secular and relatively modern city that looked to the west. A trip with her father to the ruined Sumerian cities of southern Iraq proved particularly formative as Hadid grew up, as did more generally the ever-present views of sand dunes and of the rivers that weave through the country. Hadid attended Catholic schools in Baghdad and then in Switzerland, before studying mathematics at the American University in Beirut. In 1972 she enrolled at London’s Architectural Association. This was an exciting time: a group of architects and thinkers, among them Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind, were beginning to forge a new direction for architecture in response to Modernism’s failed social utopianism and the market-inflected trivialities of Postmodern historicism. The result was 113

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