Credit: Hammonds
The 1960s was an incredibly fertile period for British designers. Not since the industrial revolution had the country perhaps held quite so much of the world's attention as it did now. But much of what Britain turned around and made its own at this point had origins in earlier decades, and foreign lands.
The predominant architecture associated with the high density, Utopian community building 1960s may not have, as it was intended, made an indelible contribution to the British landscape, but it has certainly left a lasting impression on our collective sense of what we do and don't like. Beloved of architects for the strict, almost dogmatic crusade for form and function, the style of architecture that we now call 'sixties' was actually an overhang of the modernist movement of the 1920 and 1930s and a foreign one at that.
Modernism was largely inspired by the influential Bauhaus movement and in particular the figurehead of all modernist architectural design Le Corbusier (who was actually Swiss and not French as is widely believed). This sleek, minimal, futuristic and often brutal form of architecture took the materials of the day principally concrete build around a steel shell to create designs based on the aesthetic of efficiency rather than flamboyance.
The result was a period of monolithic design generally loved by architects for its adherence to the mantra of 'form and function' and generally loathed by those who were forced to live and work within it.
Credit:www.galinsky.com
The designs of the 1950s and 1960s began from a common sense position. Massive bomb damage sustained during the Second World War had rendered large residential areas across our major cities largely uninhabitable. Britain therefore needed low cost housing that could be built quickly and if possible off-site against a climate of looming oil crisis and Cold War tensions.
We now tend to refer to this style of 1960s building as 'brutalist' a term that evolved from the less judgmental French phrase beton brut, or 'raw concrete'. This was pioneered by Le Corbusier, who instead of covering up the concrete that formed the basis of so many buildings instead invited the viewer to regard the material as the finished item.
It is at this time that pioneering British architects like Peter and Alison Smithson (The Economist Building, Robin Hood Gardens, both London), Sir Basil Spence (Coventry Cathedral) and the Hungarian emigre Erno Goldfinger (Trellick Tower) began to make their bold, striking conceptual mark on our cities.
It is also about this time that people first started referring to new buildings as 'boxy'. In short, even though the new high-rise high-concentration developments were the answer to many of the countries accommodation problems following the carnage wrought by World War II, the great British public were having none of it.
James Bond author Ian Fleming famously disliked the work of Erno Goldfinger so much that he named perhaps his most memorable Bond baddie after the Hungarian. In Bond's later screen incarnation, set designer Ken Adam would appropriate many ideas from the modernist movement when designing the spectacular super-villain hideouts.
More quietly influential during the sixties and ultimately one of the few figures of that era to find favour with both architects and residents was Eric Lyons. Lyons was a designer of housing in the private sector and his greatest desire was to put modern architecture within the financial and intellectual reach of a middle range of house buyers. His Span Developments Limited, worked far more effectively at blending modernist ideas with the local environment.
