How the Future Failed; a New Exhibition Pays Tribute to the Radical Designs of Architects Peter and Alison Smithson. So Why, Asks Teddy Jamieson, Did so Many Remain Unbuilt?
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Summary
Dying can do wonders for your reputation. There's nothing better for raising your standing with the general public than shuffling off this mortal coil. Just ask Ronald Reagan (though admittedly that might be difficult). Still, there are exceptions; certain people whom not even death can redeem. You know the sort: repressive dictators, serial killers oh, and the odd architect.
Case in point: Peter Smithson. A modernist in a country that preferred looking backwards, Smithson, along with his wife Alison, was at the cutting edge of post-war British architecture. The couple did more than most to take up and build on the ideas of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and helped coin the phrase "new brutalism" to describe their work - a style of architecture at odds with what they described as "fake antiquarianism". Think London's South Bank, or the Smithsons' own Economist Building.See the full content of this document
Extract
How the Future Failed; a New Exhibition Pays Tribute to the Radical Designs of Architects Peter and Alison Smithson. So Why, Asks Teddy Jamieson, Did so Many Remain Unbuilt?
Perhaps unsurprisingly in a country where Prince Charles is taking seriously as an architectural critic and where post-war buildings have been under sustained attack for the last 30 years, the obituaries and letters that followed reports of Smithson's death early last year were far from adulatory. But as in death, so in life: the Smithsons were always ...
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