Alison and Peter Smithson

Abstract

The dissertation looks into the work of the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson (1928-1993, 1923-2003). Their work is regarded as exemplary for the development of modern architecture in the second half of the twentieth century, specifically with regard to the relation between architecture, welfare state politics and the rise of a new consumer culture in Western Europe. As members of the platforms of Team 10, informal successor to the disbanded CIAM organization, and the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Alison and Peter Smithson were leading voices of the architectural debate of the post-war period, not only in Great Britain but globally. Among their many proposals for the future development of modern architecture their idea for ‘another architecture’: the so-called New Brutalism stands out as one of the most remarkable and important contributions, propagated as such by influential critics as Reyner Banham, Theo Crosby and Robin Middleton, and today, still an inspiration for architectural innovation. Main questions of the dissertation concern the architecture of the house, housing, and town planning, and how the Smithsons both continued, criticized and transformed modernist concepts of architectural order. The combined notions of form and formlessness, of image and movement, of material and experience, of process, finding processes and the As Found, are key to the aesthetics and aesthetic procedures as proposed by the Smithsons. The dissertation holds seven chapters. The first one ‘The Smithson-ness of the Smithsons’ is an almost autonomous piece as an introduction to the various interdependent themes of the research, including the methodological issues of discourse analysis, historiography and writing. The second and third chapter (‘“The Simple Life Well Done”’ and ‘Competing Traditions’) are an attempt to recontextualize the work and thinking of the Smithsons, not so much with regard to the CIAM and Team 10 debates of the time, but rather the British context and the themes of the everyday and dwelling. The fourth chapter (‘The New Brutalist Game of Associations’) is the central chapter in that it investigates the principles of ordering and the architectural concepts at stake in the work of the Smithsons. The last three chapters (‘Another Sensibility’, ‘The Great Society’ and ‘At Home’) are a further elaboration along the lines of first, modernization, landscape and the issue of context; second, the rise and fall of the post-war welfare state including the issues of mass housing and town planning; and finally, the house as ultimate assignment and demonstration of principle in architecture, and hence as paradigm of the structure of the discourse itself.