CONNELL, WARD AND LUCAS

Architecture firm, England
The London-based architectural firm Connell, Ward, and Lucas was founded in 1933
by two architects from New Zealand—Amyas Connell (1901–80) and Basil Ward (1902–
76)—and one from England—Colin Lucas (1906–84). Connell and Ward arrived in
England in the 1920s and studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of
London; in 1926 both won prizes to study architecture in Rome. Lucas studied at the
University of Cambridge and in 1928 formed a building company whose main goal was
to experiment with concrete construction. Although the partnership lasted only six years
and was disbanded in 1939, it was nonetheless one of the leading modernist firms active
in Britain during the 1930s, and the architects were important, vocal proponents of
modern architecture.
Before forming the partnership, the three were already known in architectural circles
for innovative projects. Connell designed High and Over (1928–31), a home for the art
historian and archaeologist Bernard Ashmole, who later became the director of the
British Museum in London. Located on a 12-acre site in Buckinghamshire, High and
Over is often considered the first significant modern house built in England. Local
residents protested that its white-walled exterior, ribbon windows, and Y plan were
incongruous in the rural setting. In 1930 Lucas designed the first reinforced-concrete
house in England, Bourne End in Buckinghamshire. Bourne End’s extensive glazing,
unornamented surfaces, and flat roof show a strong identification with the modernist
language of the International Style. With Connell in 1932, Ward designed New Farm in
Surrey, a home with an open, spacious plan whose structural system was modeled on Le
Corbusier’s Dom-ino Houses.
In 1933 Connell, Ward, and Lucas not only officially established their partnership but
each became a founding member of the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group,
the British branch of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). The
firm’s involvement with MARS is indicative of the architects’ support for the Modern
movement in general, as well as their interest in architectural developments on an
international scale, innovations in technology and construction, and solutions for mass
housing. Despite opposition from the British building industry, the architects consistently
developed new building techniques to make the walls of their reinforcedconcrete
structures progressively thinner, and they rightly looked at their own work as
experimental.
The firm’s commitment to the new architecture, as International Style and modernist
works were often described, was immortalized in a 1934 BBC radio debate titled “For
and Against Modern Architecture,” when Connell agreed to be challenged on the air by
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architect Reginald Blomfield. Connell, who had been unknown to the public before the
debate, responded boldly to Blomfield’s fierce attacks on the International Style for its
foreignness, its overemphasis on function, its lack of an artistic vocabulary, and its break
with venerated traditions. Blomfield criticized the use of the flat roof in a thinly veiled
attack on French and German modernism derived from Le Corbusier and Walter
Gropius’s Bauhaus aesthetics, respectively. A transcript of the debate was made public,
Connell emerged as a public figure, and the firm began to receive more commissions.
One of the partnership’s most well known works is a house at 66 Frognal Way (1938)
in Hampstead, London. Built for a lawyer and his family in a neighborhood of neo-
Georgian villas—one of which was owned by Blomfield—the house celebrated the
elements Blomfield despised: unornamented, white exterior walls; ribbon windows; a
free plan; and a free facade. Once again basing the structural system on Dom-ino Houses,
Connell, Ward, and Lucas used their ample experience with reinforced concrete to
puncture the house with gardens, concrete patio slabs on all three levels, a sun deck, and
an observation point. A colorful, lush interior, most of whose furnishings the architects
designed, is masked by the unadorned street facade. The design of the house, first made
public in 1936, resulted in a series of lawsuits precipitated by Blomfield, accusing the
architects of destroying the character of the neighborhood. The comparatively
unquestioned presence of E.Maxwell Fry’s modernist Sun House (1936) around the
corner is most likely testament to Blomfield’s personal hatred of Connell.
Although Connell, Ward, and Lucas is most famous for designing private homes, in
1935 it participated with other MARS members in a competition for public housing. The
firm’s entry—reinforced-concrete flats (apartments)—did not win, but in that same year
the firm built other blocks of low-cost flats; the first, Kent House, is in the Chalk Farm
neighborhood in London, and the second, in Surrey, was designed as an extension of a
Regency-style house. The blunt modernist style of this addition was criticized for
clashing with the existing, more traditional building.
Despite the firm’s defense of modernism and its controversial works, a 1936 design
for the Newport Civic Building, with its overt references to Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm
Town Hall (1909–23), seemed to Connell, Ward, and Lucas’s peers to have betrayed the
modernist cause. Several MARS Group members objected to the design’s particular use
of brick, its classical symmetry, and its symbolism of function, and the firm was forced to
explain and defend the work in front of a MARS meeting. An attempt to officially
censure Connell, Ward, and Lucas was abandoned, but from that point on, the three had
little interaction with the group, despite remaining members for several more years.
With few commissions at the beginning of World War II, Connell, Ward, and Lucas
closed in 1939 and did not reopen after the war. Each of the three architects continued to
practice on his own. Connell went to Nairobi, Kenya, and established a new firm,
TRIAD. His works include the Aga Khan Platinum Jubilee Hospital (1959) and the
Parliament Buildings (1963); he returned to England in 1977. Ward set up a new firm as
well, became the Lethaby Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in
London, and then led the School of Architecture at the Manchester College of Art.
Ward’s firm designed the microbiology building (1960) at Oxford University as well as a
store and office block (1967) at the Glasgow Airport. Lucas joined the Housing Division
of the London County Council (LCC); under his supervision the LCC designed the
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important Alton West Estate (1955–59) at Roehampton, a housing scheme inspired by Le
Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles (1946–52).
The work of Connell, Ward, and Lucas is marked by a consistent willingness to
experiment with modern materials and forms. Its use of concrete, steel, and glass and its
identification with the pared-down elements of modernist works was unusual for the
rather conservative architectural climate of England in the 1930s, but it shows the
architects to have been imbued with the same spirit as that of first-generation modern
architects in continental Europe.