Alison and Peter Smithson


Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Denham Smithson were English architects who together formed an architectural partnership. They are associated with New Brutalism in architectural and urban theory.

Education and personal lives

Peter was born in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham, north-east England. Alison Margaret Gill was born in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire.
Alison studied architecture at King's College, Durham in Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham, between 1944 and 1949. Peter studied architecture at the same university between 1939 and 1948, along with a programme in the Department of Town Planning, also at King's, between 1946 and 1948. His studies were interrupted by war: from 1942, he served in the Madras Sappers and Miners in India and Burma.
Peter and Alison had met at Durham, and they married in 1949. In the same year they both joined the architecture department of the London County Council as Temporary Technical Assistants before establishing their own partnership in 1950.
Of their three children, Simon, Samantha and Soraya, one, Simon, is an architect.
Alison Smithson published a novel A Portrait of the Female Mind as a Young Girl in 1966.

Work

The Smithsons first came to prominence with Hunstanton School, Norfolk by winning the design competition in 1950. At that time Peter was only 26 while Alison was 21 and they had just graduated from Durham University. The school was completed in 1954, which used some of the language of high modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe but in a stripped back way, with rough finishes and a deliberate lack of refinement that kept architectural structure and services exposed. They are arguably among the leaders of the British school of New Brutalism. They referred to New Brutalism as "an ethic, not an aesthetic". It was a "brute" injunction to social relevance, "an attempt to be objective about 'reality'", its aim to "drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work". Their work sought to connect architecture with what they viewed as the realities of modern life in post-war Britain. Their definitions and interpretation of Brutalism put them at odds with their contemporary Reyner Banham, an architecture critic known for his work in defining the stylistic components of New Brutalism.
Alison Smithson articulated their desire to connect building, users, and site when, describing architecture as an act of "form-giving", she noted: "My act of form-giving has to invite the occupiers to add their intangible quality of use." As such, they turned against the formal unity of classical proportion and symmetry, governed by principles of geometry, to instead fashion architecture on the topological principle of "form in process" or "deforming form," governed by qualities of circulation, penetration, and thresholds, as most especially evident in their Robin Hood Gardens scheme. After the critical success of Hunstanton School, they were associated with Team X and its 1953 revolt against old Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne philosophies of high modernism.
Among their early contributions were 'streets in the sky' in which traffic and pedestrian circulation were rigorously separated, a theme popular in the 1960s, yet first coined by the Smithsons in 1952 with their Golden Lane Estate competition entry. This exemplified the use of the human figure in relation to scale, to better understand the visual representation of an unbuilt architecture.
They were members of the Independent Group participating in the 1953 Parallel of Life and Art exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and This Is Tomorrow in 1956. Throughout their career they published their work energetically, including their several unbuilt schemes, giving them a profile, at least among other architects, out of proportion to their relatively modest output.
Peter Smithson's teaching activity included the participation for many years at the ILAUD workshops, together with fellow architect Giancarlo De Carlo.
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview with Peter Smithson in 1997 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.

Built projects

Their built projects include:
Robin Hood Gardens was under construction when B. S. Johnson made a short film about the couple for the BBC, The Smithsons on Housing. Sukhdev Sandhu, in a blog entry for the London Telegraph website, wrote that "they drone in self-pitying fashion about vandals and local naysayers to such an extent that any traces of visionary utopianism are extinguished." The finished flats suffered from high costs associated with the system selected and from high levels of crime, all of which undermined the modernist vision of 'streets in the sky' and the Smithsons' architectural reputation. In 2017, with the flats set to be demolished, a three-storey section including a walkway and maisonette interiors was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
They would go on to design several buildings at Bath, while relying mainly on private overseas commissions and Peter Smithson's writing and teaching.

Unbuilt proposals

Their unbuilt schemes include: