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
Entries A–F 567
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
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 568
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.
CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAUX D’ARCHITECTURE MODERNE
The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, founded in Switzerland in 1928,
was related to earlier European avantgarde efforts, such as the German Werkbund’s 1927
Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, and to journals such as the Swiss ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen. Some of its initial
impetus also came from Le Corbusier’s attempts to overturn the 1927 rejection of his
entry in the League of Nations competition in favor of a Beaux-Arts design. The first
CIAM meeting, sponsored by the French-Swiss noblewoman Hélène de Mandrot,
resulted in the issuing of the La Sarraz Declaration, signed by 24 European architects,
which demanded that architecture should be taken away from the classically oriented
Beaux-Arts schools of architecture and linked to the general economic system. It invoked
Taylorist ideas about the need to design for minimum working effort through the
rationalization and standardization of building components and emphasized that
architects should seek to influence public opinion in favor of the new architectural
approaches. By its second congress, held in Frankfurt in 1929, CIAM began to be the
most important international organization of the Modern movement in architecture, with
delegates on its governing council, the CIRPAC (Comité International pour la Realisation
des Problèmes d’Architecture Contemporaine) from Belgium (Victor Bourgeois),
Denmark (Ed Heiberg), Germany (Ernst May), England (C.J.Robertson, later replaced by
Wells Coates), Finland (Alvar Aalto), France (Le Corbusier), Hungary (Farkas Molnár),
Italy (Alberto Sartoris), the Netherlands (Mart Stam), Norway (Lars Backer), Poland
(Szymon Syrkus), Sweden (Sven Markelius), Switzerland (Hans Schmidt), Spain
(Fernando Garcia Mercadal, later replaced by Josep Lluis Sert), the United States
(Richard Neutra), and the Soviet Union (Moisei Ginzburg), along with its Swiss
president, Karl Moser, and secretarygeneral, Sigfried Giedion, a Zurich art historian and
critic. Its membership shifted many times over the rest of its history, although Le
Corbusier and especially Giedion remained central throughout, until the decision in 1959
by a group of former CIAM “youth members” led by Alison and Peter Smithson and
Aldo van Eyck to cease using the name.
The published results of the second and third congresses included plans from the
associated exhibitions that traveled across Europe, the first on housing for the lowestincome
wage earners and the second on the rational site organization of housing districts.
The approach taken reflected the ideas of the architectural avant-garde at the time: the
importance of efficiently designed, sanitary, and well-lit minimum apartment housing and
the related need to site the buildings for repetitive low-cost construction and maximum
solar exposure for every unit. By 1931 a self-selected core group within the congress,
which included Le Corbusier, Giedion, and the new president, the Dutch town planner
Cornelis van Eesteren, determined that the next congress, to be held in Moscow in 1932,
should be devoted to the theme of the “Functional City.” In contrast to what he called the
“cardboard architecture” of classical urbanism, van Eesteren and other CIAM members
advocated an approach to city planning based on the most rational siting of “functional
elements,” such as workplaces and transportation centers. This idea was linked to the
belief that city planning should be based on the creation of separate zones for each of the
CIAM “four functions” of dwelling, work, recreation, and transportation, an idea already
stated in part in the La Sarraz Declaration. Changes in Soviet architectural policies led to
repeated postponements of the fourth congress, and it was eventually held on a cruise
ship traveling from Marseilles to Athens and back in July-August 1933. CIAM members
from Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 564
Hungary, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland,
and Yugoslavia analyzed the same-scale plans of 33 modern cities prepared by CIAM
groups from most of these countries, along with additional plans from Dalat, Vietnam;
Bandung, Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia); and Baltimore, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
The disputed results of this congress were eventually published in Greece in late 1933
and formed the basis of what Le Corbusier would later style La Charte d’Athènes ( The Athens Charter).
After 1933 CIAM was greatly affected both by the Soviet shift toward what came to
be known as socialist realism, which often resulted in an overscaled neoclassicism, and
by the Nazi proscription of the Modern movement in Germany. CIAM activities were
ended in the Soviet Union, and German CIAM members such as Walter Gropius and
Mies van der Rohe eventually relocated to Harvard University (1937) and the Illinois
Institute of Technology (1938) in the United States, respectively. After several years of
delegate meetings, the fifth CIAM congress was held in Paris in 1937 on the theme of
“Housing and Recreation.” Associated with this congress was Le Corbusier’s “Pavilion
des Temps Nouveaux” at the 1937 Paris Exposition, which included large murals
illustrating the CIAM four functions and a display of the CIAM 4 “doctrine of urbanism,”
which he termed La Charte d’Athènes . Following this, Giedion, who gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures
at Harvard in 1938–39, advocated that the next CIAM congress be held in the United
States, but no CIAM congresses occurred again until 1947. In the interim Giedion and
Sert set up a New York CIAM chapter in 1944, and Le Corbusier went from attempting
to influence the occupation Vichy government to successfully allying himself with the
Allied victors. CIAM and La Charte d’Athènes , finally published in Paris in 1943, became immensely
influential in the postwar years, particularly in Latin America and eventually in the
decolonizing nations of the former European empires. This was due both to Le
Corbusier’s own efforts, such as his working with Brazilian architects in Rio de Janeiro
in 1936 and with Argentine architects on several occasions, and to the efforts of Sert,
who developed urban master plans with Paul Lester Wiener in Brazil, Peru, Colombia,
Venezuela, and Cuba. Sert became president of CIAM in 1947, but the first two postwar
congresses, CIAM 6, held in Bridgwater, England (1947), and CIAM 7, held in Bergamo,
Italy (1949), were unable to develop any clear new approaches. CIAM 8, “The Heart of
the City,” held near London in 1951, was more successful in this regard and was one of
the earliest efforts to discuss the issue of urban public space in the transformed postwar
circumstances of modern architecture. Its combining of the Italian and Polish CIAM
groups’ concerns about historic centers with Le Corbusier, Sert, and Wiener’s fascination
with the design of new monumental cores suggested a different basis for modern
architecture beyond the design of social housing, one that looked both backward to the
classical tradition and forward to a later generation’s interest in reconstituting urbanity in
late 20th-century cities.
In 1952 the CIAM Council decided to begin efforts to hand over CIAM to the “youth
members,” and the first step in this direction was to increase their participation at CIAM
9, which was held in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1953. In the confused developments
that followed, a youth group charged with organizing the tenth congress and eventually
known as Team X (Ten) emerged, with Alison and Peter Smithson of England, Aldo van
Eyck and Jacob Bakema of the Netherlands, and Georges Candilis as important voices.
CIAM 10, held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), in 1956 was the last regular
CIAM congress, and there the decision was made to dissolve all existing CIAM groups.
Entries A–F 565
A selected group of 30 members, including members of Team X, were to plan the next
congress. This was eventually held at Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1959 and was published
as CIAM’ 59 in Otterlo. At this congress it was decided to discontinue the use of the name CIAM.
CIAM’s influence on architecture and architectural education has been extensive,
ranging from the plans of the new capitals of Chandigarh, India (Le Corbusier, Jeanneret,
Fry, and Drew, 1950), and Brasilia, Brazil (Costa and Niemeyer, 1955), to efforts such as
the Harvard Urban Design program, established by Sert in 1960. Although the name
CIAM was no longer used, in many ways Team X, which lasted until 1981, was a
continuation of some aspects of CIAM, including the latter’s emphasis on the importance
of a small avant-garde of like-minded architects meeting to develop urbanistic doctrines
and the use of architectural magazines and visiting design teaching positions to
disseminate ideas. Much of the criticism of CIAM since its demise has concerned its
specific formal strategies of urban reorganization, which were deliberately intended to
break with all previous pat-terns of urban development to help bring into being a more
rational and collectivist society. By the 1950s CIAM members were themselves
questioning specific aspects of these “functional city” strategies, although they did not
challenge the basic premises of CIAM activities. Since 1960 CIAM has been extensively
criticized and is usually understood as an extension of the work of Le Corbusier; in part
this is true, but it oversimplifies the organization’s complex history.
was related to earlier European avantgarde efforts, such as the German Werkbund’s 1927
Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, and to journals such as the Swiss ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen. Some of its initial
impetus also came from Le Corbusier’s attempts to overturn the 1927 rejection of his
entry in the League of Nations competition in favor of a Beaux-Arts design. The first
CIAM meeting, sponsored by the French-Swiss noblewoman Hélène de Mandrot,
resulted in the issuing of the La Sarraz Declaration, signed by 24 European architects,
which demanded that architecture should be taken away from the classically oriented
Beaux-Arts schools of architecture and linked to the general economic system. It invoked
Taylorist ideas about the need to design for minimum working effort through the
rationalization and standardization of building components and emphasized that
architects should seek to influence public opinion in favor of the new architectural
approaches. By its second congress, held in Frankfurt in 1929, CIAM began to be the
most important international organization of the Modern movement in architecture, with
delegates on its governing council, the CIRPAC (Comité International pour la Realisation
des Problèmes d’Architecture Contemporaine) from Belgium (Victor Bourgeois),
Denmark (Ed Heiberg), Germany (Ernst May), England (C.J.Robertson, later replaced by
Wells Coates), Finland (Alvar Aalto), France (Le Corbusier), Hungary (Farkas Molnár),
Italy (Alberto Sartoris), the Netherlands (Mart Stam), Norway (Lars Backer), Poland
(Szymon Syrkus), Sweden (Sven Markelius), Switzerland (Hans Schmidt), Spain
(Fernando Garcia Mercadal, later replaced by Josep Lluis Sert), the United States
(Richard Neutra), and the Soviet Union (Moisei Ginzburg), along with its Swiss
president, Karl Moser, and secretarygeneral, Sigfried Giedion, a Zurich art historian and
critic. Its membership shifted many times over the rest of its history, although Le
Corbusier and especially Giedion remained central throughout, until the decision in 1959
by a group of former CIAM “youth members” led by Alison and Peter Smithson and
Aldo van Eyck to cease using the name.
The published results of the second and third congresses included plans from the
associated exhibitions that traveled across Europe, the first on housing for the lowestincome
wage earners and the second on the rational site organization of housing districts.
The approach taken reflected the ideas of the architectural avant-garde at the time: the
importance of efficiently designed, sanitary, and well-lit minimum apartment housing and
the related need to site the buildings for repetitive low-cost construction and maximum
solar exposure for every unit. By 1931 a self-selected core group within the congress,
which included Le Corbusier, Giedion, and the new president, the Dutch town planner
Cornelis van Eesteren, determined that the next congress, to be held in Moscow in 1932,
should be devoted to the theme of the “Functional City.” In contrast to what he called the
“cardboard architecture” of classical urbanism, van Eesteren and other CIAM members
advocated an approach to city planning based on the most rational siting of “functional
elements,” such as workplaces and transportation centers. This idea was linked to the
belief that city planning should be based on the creation of separate zones for each of the
CIAM “four functions” of dwelling, work, recreation, and transportation, an idea already
stated in part in the La Sarraz Declaration. Changes in Soviet architectural policies led to
repeated postponements of the fourth congress, and it was eventually held on a cruise
ship traveling from Marseilles to Athens and back in July-August 1933. CIAM members
from Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 564
Hungary, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland,
and Yugoslavia analyzed the same-scale plans of 33 modern cities prepared by CIAM
groups from most of these countries, along with additional plans from Dalat, Vietnam;
Bandung, Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia); and Baltimore, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
The disputed results of this congress were eventually published in Greece in late 1933
and formed the basis of what Le Corbusier would later style La Charte d’Athènes ( The Athens Charter).
After 1933 CIAM was greatly affected both by the Soviet shift toward what came to
be known as socialist realism, which often resulted in an overscaled neoclassicism, and
by the Nazi proscription of the Modern movement in Germany. CIAM activities were
ended in the Soviet Union, and German CIAM members such as Walter Gropius and
Mies van der Rohe eventually relocated to Harvard University (1937) and the Illinois
Institute of Technology (1938) in the United States, respectively. After several years of
delegate meetings, the fifth CIAM congress was held in Paris in 1937 on the theme of
“Housing and Recreation.” Associated with this congress was Le Corbusier’s “Pavilion
des Temps Nouveaux” at the 1937 Paris Exposition, which included large murals
illustrating the CIAM four functions and a display of the CIAM 4 “doctrine of urbanism,”
which he termed La Charte d’Athènes . Following this, Giedion, who gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures
at Harvard in 1938–39, advocated that the next CIAM congress be held in the United
States, but no CIAM congresses occurred again until 1947. In the interim Giedion and
Sert set up a New York CIAM chapter in 1944, and Le Corbusier went from attempting
to influence the occupation Vichy government to successfully allying himself with the
Allied victors. CIAM and La Charte d’Athènes , finally published in Paris in 1943, became immensely
influential in the postwar years, particularly in Latin America and eventually in the
decolonizing nations of the former European empires. This was due both to Le
Corbusier’s own efforts, such as his working with Brazilian architects in Rio de Janeiro
in 1936 and with Argentine architects on several occasions, and to the efforts of Sert,
who developed urban master plans with Paul Lester Wiener in Brazil, Peru, Colombia,
Venezuela, and Cuba. Sert became president of CIAM in 1947, but the first two postwar
congresses, CIAM 6, held in Bridgwater, England (1947), and CIAM 7, held in Bergamo,
Italy (1949), were unable to develop any clear new approaches. CIAM 8, “The Heart of
the City,” held near London in 1951, was more successful in this regard and was one of
the earliest efforts to discuss the issue of urban public space in the transformed postwar
circumstances of modern architecture. Its combining of the Italian and Polish CIAM
groups’ concerns about historic centers with Le Corbusier, Sert, and Wiener’s fascination
with the design of new monumental cores suggested a different basis for modern
architecture beyond the design of social housing, one that looked both backward to the
classical tradition and forward to a later generation’s interest in reconstituting urbanity in
late 20th-century cities.
In 1952 the CIAM Council decided to begin efforts to hand over CIAM to the “youth
members,” and the first step in this direction was to increase their participation at CIAM
9, which was held in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1953. In the confused developments
that followed, a youth group charged with organizing the tenth congress and eventually
known as Team X (Ten) emerged, with Alison and Peter Smithson of England, Aldo van
Eyck and Jacob Bakema of the Netherlands, and Georges Candilis as important voices.
CIAM 10, held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), in 1956 was the last regular
CIAM congress, and there the decision was made to dissolve all existing CIAM groups.
Entries A–F 565
A selected group of 30 members, including members of Team X, were to plan the next
congress. This was eventually held at Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1959 and was published
as CIAM’ 59 in Otterlo. At this congress it was decided to discontinue the use of the name CIAM.
CIAM’s influence on architecture and architectural education has been extensive,
ranging from the plans of the new capitals of Chandigarh, India (Le Corbusier, Jeanneret,
Fry, and Drew, 1950), and Brasilia, Brazil (Costa and Niemeyer, 1955), to efforts such as
the Harvard Urban Design program, established by Sert in 1960. Although the name
CIAM was no longer used, in many ways Team X, which lasted until 1981, was a
continuation of some aspects of CIAM, including the latter’s emphasis on the importance
of a small avant-garde of like-minded architects meeting to develop urbanistic doctrines
and the use of architectural magazines and visiting design teaching positions to
disseminate ideas. Much of the criticism of CIAM since its demise has concerned its
specific formal strategies of urban reorganization, which were deliberately intended to
break with all previous pat-terns of urban development to help bring into being a more
rational and collectivist society. By the 1950s CIAM members were themselves
questioning specific aspects of these “functional city” strategies, although they did not
challenge the basic premises of CIAM activities. Since 1960 CIAM has been extensively
criticized and is usually understood as an extension of the work of Le Corbusier; in part
this is true, but it oversimplifies the organization’s complex history.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)