Architect and historian, England
Determined to sustain the humane possibilities of architecture in a world without the
master narratives of cultural authority and universal history, Alan Colquhoun has made
rigorous contributions to the discipline as a theorist, writer, critic, and architect.
Throughout the 1950s he was, according to Reyner Banham in The New Brutalism, “one of the guardians
of the intellectual conscience of his generation of London architects” (1966). As an
architect working in London, he was one of the earliest modernists to submit the clichés
of modernism to functional and contextual critique in the hope of redefining architecture
after the death of neoclassical repetition and the birth of ahistorical relativism.
Colquhoun’s earliest connection was to the architects of a nascent movement called
Brutalism (sometimes referred to as the New Brutalists) that was pioneered in England by
Peter and Allison Smithson as an aesthetic response to the country’s desire to rebuild
after World War II using the heroic model of Mies van der Rohe’s brand of modernism.
Although the term “brutalism” suffers somewhat from negative associations with
ugliness, severity, and a generally unpleasant form of modernism, the Smith-sons’
original aspirations for the style were rooted in a purist, truth-to-materials aesthetic. The
Brutalists’ rejection of provincial English architecture that Banham had criticized as
“whimsical” would be measured by International Style standards, modernist forms, and
classicism, as exemplified in their embrace of Mies, Le Corbusier, and Gerrit Rietveld.
Colquhoun’s early work and thought, however, have sometimes been referred to as a
more refined Brutalism in that he allowed many demands of context to mitigate the
starkness traditionally associated with brutalism. He could now be called a Postmodernist
if one interpreted, in his words, “the postmodern to mean not only the revival of historical
forms, but all those tendencies, apparently within modernism itself, that have modified its
original content” (Colquhoun, 1989, ix). For Colquhoun there is no final or completed
order to architecture, as any history leads to the object and activity of criticism.
Colquhoun is committed to a critical and didactical engagement with architecture that
fully incorpo-rates the claim that no one, including himself, can offer a final argument
from a final (universal) perspective.
Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, Colquhoun’s writing explores the
problems presented to architects by historical repetition and functional logic, problems
that he has recently approached from an anthropological and philosophical turn to
language. Colquhoun took pains to separate Modern architecture from the more purely
visual or “picturesque” transformations of the 19th century by pointing out the distance
from “Historicism,” a distance increased by the didactic demands of Modern architecture.
Early on, his critical interest was in the element of architecture that defined its connection
to its age—that is, he wanted to know what it was that generated style in 20th-century
architecture. Colquhoun explicitly linked this style to the function of the building such
that “the visual hierarchy always reflects a functional hierarchy, an understanding of
which intensifies the aesthetic pleasure derived from the forms.” His later work expanded
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 532
this notion with the assertion that there did not exist any singular style for any one
context but there were “a multiplicity of ‘language games’ that may vary according to
circumstance” (Colquhoun, 1988, 5). His work has been influenced to some extent by
recent attention to language in social theory, particularly the works of the philosophers
Walter Benjamin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean-François Lyotard. Colquhoun’s
discovery of a state of architectural affairs similar to the state of social science affairs
offers him ways to examine the world without relying on universal commitments or
teleological narratives.
Colquhoun’s early theoretical and architectural work focused on the role of function in
an attempt to conceptualize the building as a self-contained entity, the form of which was
created out of the internal requirements of the building itself. On the other hand, his later
work examines the question of the individual building as a part of larger spatial and
historical contexts. The use of historical typology, however, is typically less important
than concerns of logical function and abstraction.
Colquhoun’s architectural work followed a trend coeval with his theoretical and
critical work. He began his architectural career as a detail assistant to Tom Ellis and
Lawrence Israel for the firm of Lyons, Israel and Ellis. There he worked on early
Brutalist buildings, such as a workshop and scene-painting building for the Old Vic
Theater in South London. In 1961 he formed a partnership with John Miller. In 1975
Richard Brearley became a partner, and Su Rogers became one in 1987, the year that the
firm’s name was changed from Colquhoun and Miller to the more descriptive Colquhoun,
Miller and Partners. In the 1960s the firm’s work focused on medium- to large-size
public buildings, and by 1970 public housing comprised the largest part of their work.
During the 1980s their work focused on museums, including their renovation work on
Whitechapel Art Gallery in London that improved and reinterpreted the building’s
already diverse elements with a concern for the historical, social, and contextual fabric of
the building’s exterior and the functional utility of the building’s interior.
Determined to sustain the humane possibilities of architecture in a world without the
master narratives of cultural authority and universal history, Alan Colquhoun has made
rigorous contributions to the discipline as a theorist, writer, critic, and architect.
Throughout the 1950s he was, according to Reyner Banham in The New Brutalism, “one of the guardians
of the intellectual conscience of his generation of London architects” (1966). As an
architect working in London, he was one of the earliest modernists to submit the clichés
of modernism to functional and contextual critique in the hope of redefining architecture
after the death of neoclassical repetition and the birth of ahistorical relativism.
Colquhoun’s earliest connection was to the architects of a nascent movement called
Brutalism (sometimes referred to as the New Brutalists) that was pioneered in England by
Peter and Allison Smithson as an aesthetic response to the country’s desire to rebuild
after World War II using the heroic model of Mies van der Rohe’s brand of modernism.
Although the term “brutalism” suffers somewhat from negative associations with
ugliness, severity, and a generally unpleasant form of modernism, the Smith-sons’
original aspirations for the style were rooted in a purist, truth-to-materials aesthetic. The
Brutalists’ rejection of provincial English architecture that Banham had criticized as
“whimsical” would be measured by International Style standards, modernist forms, and
classicism, as exemplified in their embrace of Mies, Le Corbusier, and Gerrit Rietveld.
Colquhoun’s early work and thought, however, have sometimes been referred to as a
more refined Brutalism in that he allowed many demands of context to mitigate the
starkness traditionally associated with brutalism. He could now be called a Postmodernist
if one interpreted, in his words, “the postmodern to mean not only the revival of historical
forms, but all those tendencies, apparently within modernism itself, that have modified its
original content” (Colquhoun, 1989, ix). For Colquhoun there is no final or completed
order to architecture, as any history leads to the object and activity of criticism.
Colquhoun is committed to a critical and didactical engagement with architecture that
fully incorpo-rates the claim that no one, including himself, can offer a final argument
from a final (universal) perspective.
Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, Colquhoun’s writing explores the
problems presented to architects by historical repetition and functional logic, problems
that he has recently approached from an anthropological and philosophical turn to
language. Colquhoun took pains to separate Modern architecture from the more purely
visual or “picturesque” transformations of the 19th century by pointing out the distance
from “Historicism,” a distance increased by the didactic demands of Modern architecture.
Early on, his critical interest was in the element of architecture that defined its connection
to its age—that is, he wanted to know what it was that generated style in 20th-century
architecture. Colquhoun explicitly linked this style to the function of the building such
that “the visual hierarchy always reflects a functional hierarchy, an understanding of
which intensifies the aesthetic pleasure derived from the forms.” His later work expanded
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 532
this notion with the assertion that there did not exist any singular style for any one
context but there were “a multiplicity of ‘language games’ that may vary according to
circumstance” (Colquhoun, 1988, 5). His work has been influenced to some extent by
recent attention to language in social theory, particularly the works of the philosophers
Walter Benjamin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean-François Lyotard. Colquhoun’s
discovery of a state of architectural affairs similar to the state of social science affairs
offers him ways to examine the world without relying on universal commitments or
teleological narratives.
Colquhoun’s early theoretical and architectural work focused on the role of function in
an attempt to conceptualize the building as a self-contained entity, the form of which was
created out of the internal requirements of the building itself. On the other hand, his later
work examines the question of the individual building as a part of larger spatial and
historical contexts. The use of historical typology, however, is typically less important
than concerns of logical function and abstraction.
Colquhoun’s architectural work followed a trend coeval with his theoretical and
critical work. He began his architectural career as a detail assistant to Tom Ellis and
Lawrence Israel for the firm of Lyons, Israel and Ellis. There he worked on early
Brutalist buildings, such as a workshop and scene-painting building for the Old Vic
Theater in South London. In 1961 he formed a partnership with John Miller. In 1975
Richard Brearley became a partner, and Su Rogers became one in 1987, the year that the
firm’s name was changed from Colquhoun and Miller to the more descriptive Colquhoun,
Miller and Partners. In the 1960s the firm’s work focused on medium- to large-size
public buildings, and by 1970 public housing comprised the largest part of their work.
During the 1980s their work focused on museums, including their renovation work on
Whitechapel Art Gallery in London that improved and reinterpreted the building’s
already diverse elements with a concern for the historical, social, and contextual fabric of
the building’s exterior and the functional utility of the building’s interior.
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