Knight in shining architecture ARTS
TERENCE BENDIXSON
Britain's knights of architecture are a fairly mixed bag. The only common ground between them seems to be that they are architects and have had a royal tap on the shoulder. Sir Basil Spence is probably the best known, for his work on the Festival of Britain followed by Coventry Cathedral; and Sir Basil is in some ways a twentieth century version of the enormously successful Victorian architect, Alfred Waterhouse. He is less expert at handling space than Waterhouse, but there is a strong link between the two men in the originality of their detailing, their ability to go on finding new ways to cope with window surrounds, banisters, light fittings and other bits of what the motor industry calls 'trim.'
It is a moot point who comes next at the top of the architectural pops. Sir Hugh Casson deserves a high place because of his wit in public speaking, and his elephant house at the London Zoo is generally agreed to show off its occupants remarkably well.
Sir Robert Matthew, who has just given his desperately careful advice to the Minister of Housing about what to do with the site next to Westminster Abbey, is less well known in England than in Scotland, where he is pro- fessor of architecture at Edinburgh. This partly reflects the way the Scots take architecture more seriously than the English, and have generally had a nationally known figure at the head of the profession. Before Sir Robert Matthew it was Sir Robert Lorrimer.
Which brings me to the fourth in my list, Sir Leslie Martin, who followed Sir Robert Matthew as architect to the London County Council and who is now professor of archi- tecture at Cambridge, a school which has changed out of all recognition from the one he took over from Sir Albert Richardson. Sir Leslie is by far the most interesting of the four because he is at once an influential designer and a thinker of some repute.
Among buildings he has done since he left the ICC is a snail-plan court for Caius College, Cambridge, in which successive levels of undergraduates' rooms are set back so as to form broad sun decks on the roofs of the rooms beneath. This incredibly simple idea of setting back the façades of successive floors in a building—an idea as old as the ziggurat and for which Sir Leslie would claim no copy- right—is one of the most influential in archi- tecture today. And as there is also a tendency for it to be treated as a styling device, it threatens to become as much of a cliche as the kitchen sink was a few years ago in plays. The Caius College court shows its application to students' quarters. The new Foundling Estate building in London by Martin and Hodgkinson, now just having its site prepared, shows it applied to houses in a city. This Foundling building resembles a deep river valley with heavily terraced sides, the terraces being banks of set-back dwellings and the river bed a walking street flanked by shops.
A comparable approach got a showing in London a fortnight ago when Moshe Safdie, the Canadian architect whose firm designed Habitat 67 for the Montreal Expo, displayed a model of houses piled up to form man-made hills, shaped like an 'A' instead of the 'V' of the Foundling building. The living quarters formed decks on the outside slopes, while the space inside the hill contained shops, skating rinks, underground stations, car parks and other communal equipment.
Such buildings break new ground in two ways. They show that it is possible to live high in the air and still get the advantages of a front garden—Safdie's Habitat houses will have trees in gardens seven storeys up. They also demonstrate how the same piece of land can be used for several different purposes all piled up on top of one another. There is no modern building in Britain yet that fully exemplifies these ideas, so the Foundling building will be particularly interesting; it seems likely to attract as many visitors in the 1960s as Sheffield's Park Hill, with its streets in the sky, did in the 1950s.
Another of Sir Leslie Martin's characteristics is his ability to think big. Nowhere was this shown better than in his report on Whitehall, one part of which prompted the public inquiry reported on by Sir Robert Matthew. Sir Leslie's reaction to the great size of the modern government machine and to the obsolescence of the buildings it was struggling to work in, was to recommend a bigger and better govern- ment office stretching from the Embankment to St James's Park. I suspect that it would be no longer than the river frontage of the Houses of Parliament or of County Hall on the South Bank, but as it more than swept away the two biggest buildings in Whitehall it registered very big indeed.
Nor did Sir Leslie confine his boldness of approach to architecture. He also proposed the opening-up of a new route—for walking rather than driving—from Trafalgar Square through Covent Garden to the British Museum, for which he has designed a new reading room and book store. He saw this as a way of establishing the physical relationship between government and university which is obscured at present by the intervening maze of Covent Garden. This proposal is in the tradition of Nash with his successful grand design for linking St James's Park to Regent's Park, or of Wren with his fruitless schemes for the City after the great fire. So far, the only comparable modern attempt in central London since Kingsway is the broad, tree- lined belvedere stretching from County Hall to the National Film Theatre on the South Bank.
Sir Leslie's willingness to think afresh and to build anew has earned him some hard knocks from critics who despair at the tearing- away of pounds of London's living flesh. This reverence for the social organisation of parts of cities, as opposed to the framework of buildings, is a paradox that is. either real or imaginary, depending on how you look at it. To the sociologically minded, the existing re- lationships tend to be thought of as sacred. To the architecturally minded, the act of building anew is the starting-point for the formation of new relationships.
Sir Leslie is more concerned with how things could be than with how they are. Get the facts and measure them is his cry. He is also emphatic that architects should stick to build- ing and not try to do other people's jobs for them. He will work willingly with sociologists and economists, but not try to be one. Given this clarity of purpose, it is a pity he has not got more buildings to work on. The school and his research undoubtedly keep him busy, but since he is one of the very few British archi- tects whose work is thought good enough to be published abroad, it is lamentable that some of the big institutional clients do not seek him out. There is in his buildings a bold simplicity mixed with an attention to detail that is the oldest of old fashions in architecture and the best of the new waves as well.
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