Alison Peter Smithson

This is the first overview of the career of Alison and Peter Smithson, the most controversial yet most widely-influential of post-war architectural practices. From their first youthful project, the school at Hunstanton, to their final works, they epitomised the idea of the avant-garde architect, and were strongly engaged with artists and critics and with groups and tendencies in Britain and beyond. 0Structured thematically and chronologically, the book gives a coherent and compact narrative of the Smithsons' work and ideas. As well as all of the major buildings - including the Economist complex, the Garden building at St Hilda's College, and the Robin Hood Gardens estate - the book also discusses unbuilt projects, including substantial work for the British embassy at Brasilia and the Kuwait mat-building. It culminates with the less well-known factory additions, museum and house for Axel Bruchhauser, a furniture manufacturer in Germany. Central to their work, Mark Crinson argues, was a concern with belonging, with how we identify ourselves with places in a context of change.0Lavishly illustrated with new colour images as well as original drawings and historic photography, this book is an essential read for architects, students and enthusiasts for modernism wanting to learn more about the Smithsons.

From the start of the 1950s onwards the then young architects Alison (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003) played a crucial avantgarde role in British architecture due to the high experimental and ethical content of their designs and to their relation-ship with Team 10. With the building of Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (1950-1954) and their competition projects for Coventry Cathedral (1950-1951), the Golden Lane housing estate (1952) and the University of Sheffield (1953) they laid the foundations for a reflection on the more important issues in modern architectural culture. Their search for a language appropriate to the contemporary situation, their proposals for a new urban morphology, their ideas about the development of lifestyle in relation to interior space, and the connections architecture establishes with the environmental context are some of the themes explored during the course of their work.

Alison (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003), two of the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century, strove to adapt the progressive ideas of the pre-war modern movement to the specific human needs of the period of post-war reconstruction.As younger members of CIAM (Congrés Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), and as founding members of Team 10, they were at the heart of the debate on the future course of modern architecture. The uncompromising modernity of their Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (1949-1954) heralded the Smithsons' role as the leading exponents of the New Brutalism and the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. In this book Risselada has collected together the most important published essays about the career of this partnership of British architects, from early contributions by Rayner Banham, Philip Johnson, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Cook, to more recent texts by Peter Eisenmann, Christine Boyer, Beatriz Colomina, and Luisa Hutton.

Striving to adapt the progressive ideas of the pre-war modern movement to the specific human needs of post-war reconstruction, Alison and Peter Smithson were among the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century. As younger members of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and as founding members of Team 10 they were at the heart of the debate on the future course of Modern Architecture. Their polemics and designs - addressing issues such as the rising consumer society and the orientation of urban planning - laid the foundations for New Brutalism and the Pop Art Movement of the 1960s. An important adaptation made by the Smithsons and their generation was the rejection of modernism's machine aesthetics. The new notions of place and territory were juxtaposed to Le Corbusier's machine à habiter. To the Smithsons a house was a particular place, which should be suited to its location and able to meet the ordinary requirements of everyday life and to accommodate its inhabitants' individual patterns of use. This exhibition examines the evolution of the Smithsons' approach to this everyday "art of inhabitation." It does this by extensively documenting most of their designs for individual dwellings, especially their optimistic House of the Future of 1956 and the series of renovations of and additions to the fairy-tale-like Hexenhaus in Germany from the late 1980s onward

Architects Alison and Peter Smithson kept a visual diary of a drive from their London office to their Wiltshire cottage. The contrast of their sleek Citroen DS 19 with the verdant landscape links the urban and the rural in a sensible continuum. It was originally published as A Sensibility Primer in 1983.

An extended exploration of the authors' theories and work over the past seventeen years, in which not only their aesthetic but also their political and emotional concerns are made plain.