Episode 113: Alison Smithson
Alison Margaret Gill was born on June 22nd, 1928, in Sheffield, England. Her father was the principal at South Shields School of Arts. In the 1940s, Alison attended Edinburgh University before moving on to the School of Architecture of the University of Durham in Newcastle-upon-Tine. There, she met Peter Smithson. In 1949 when she graduated with high honors, she joined Peter and worked for the London County Council as well. That same year, they get married. The following year in 1950, they would start their firm. In 1944 England passed the Butler Education Act. This was an education expansion that created a new form of school. And with a new form of schooling - it required just brand new schools. So in 1949, the couple entered a design competition to design Hunstanton Secondary Modern School in Hunstanton, Norfolk. So once they won that award, that’s when they officially opened their firm in 1950. Y'all Alison was 21 years old! That sad part is that like 30 years after it was built they would say that the building had lots of issues like leaks, cracked glass panels, and poor insulation. And even during construction, there were steel rations which I believe probably delayed construction and maybe forced some shortcuts or mishaps in construction. HOWEVER, despite the shortcomings, folks marveled at the building. Commenting that this building gave a sense of hope? It was a new vision for a post-war Britain bringing it to more modernist times. A term that would become New Brutalism. In 1953 Alison and Peter attended the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne in France also known as CIAM conference, a huge event where the likes of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius would attend. Alison and Peter were not the only ones that didn’t agree with Corbu or those other old farts and their take on modernism and urbanism. At this conference, together with Aldo Van Eyck, Ralph Erskine, and a few others, they would form a group called Team X or Team 10. Alison was there to document it all. What we know of Team X is because of the publications that Alison spearheaded like Team X Primer in 1964, The Emergence of Team X out of CIAM in 1982, and Team 10 meeting: 1953-1984. Another notable project that they worked on was to design a group of apartments at Robin Hood Gardens in London. It was a project that they coined as “Streets in the Sky” which refers to their early ideas on belonging and creating friendly neighborhoods. Alison passed away from Breast Cancer on August 14, 1993. In her obituary a dear friend of hers Mary Banham (not related to Reyner said “ My long-term friendship with Alison was illuminated for me by her acts of great generosity at the most difficult times in my life - wonderful practical offers from imaginative leaps of which only she seemed capable. Her professional colleagues say that she could solve knotty architectural problems that had been concerning them all for weeks by her similarly sudden and spontaneous flashes of genius.”
Caryatid: Jng Liu
Jing Liu is an architect based in Brooklyn with her partner and husband Florian Idenburg together they have the firm SO-IL. They do work all over the world, they’ve done projects on cultural campuses. One project that they did was the museum at the University of California, Davis Campus on their website they described it as an “open-ended relationship between the visitor and the site at the outset”.
Read more about her firm and the article mentioned on the show here.
References
Alison + Peter Smithson / - Design/Designer Information. web.archive.org/web/20101124011148/http://designmuseum.org/design/alison-peter-smithson.
“Brutalist Architecture Explained.” Apple Podcasts, 23 Feb. 2024, podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brutalist-architecture-explained/id1732869514.
Faculty Publication: Not Quite Architecture: Writing Around Alison and Peter Smithson | Princeton University School of Architecture. soa.princeton.edu/content/faculty-publication%3A-not-quite-architecture%3A-writing-around-alison-and-peter-smithson.
Goodwin, Dario. “Alison and Peter Smithson: The Duo That Led British Brutalism.” ArchDaily, 8 Mar. 2022, www.archdaily.com/645128/spotlight-alison-and-peter-smithson?ad_campaign=normal-tag.
Taylor-Foster, James. “What Can Be Learnt From the Smithsons’ ‘New Brutalism’ in 2014?” ArchDaily, 22 Sept. 2023, www.archdaily.com/519027/what-can-be-learnt-from-the-smithsons-new-brutalism-in-2014?ad_campaign=normal-tag.
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