16 ★ FT Weekend 2 November/3 November 2019
Arts
That brief
moment of
modernity
Architecture Although the great Bauhaus|
architects made only a short stay in Britain,
their influence was significant, as a London
exhibition reveals. ByEdwin Heathcote
Clockwise from
top left: halls of
residence at the
University of
East Anglia,
Norwich;
Sea Lane House,
West Sussex;
Village College,
Impington;
Model entitled
‘A Garden City
of the Future’;
designs for a
house, ‘Ferriby’
Architectural Press Archive /
Riba Collections; Dell &
Wainwright / Riba CollectionsT
here was a moment when
the greatest Modernists of
the Bauhaus arrived in Lon-
don. By 1936 Walter Gro-
pius, the founder of the
influential design school,wasin the
capital and had been joined by his fellow
Bauhaus masters László Moholy-Nagy
and Marcel Breuer.
It was notan auspiciousstart. Gropius
kicked off his illustrious new English
career with a design for a waste paperbasket; Moholy-Nagy took photos of
top-hatted schoolboys at Eton and
made a film about lobsters;Breuer,
the high achiever, designed acollection
of tables.
The traditional narrative has always
been that Britainwasn’t quite ready for
Modernism, that it was ontent withc
Queen Anne banks, Tudorbethan semis
and Art Deco cinemas. It had no need of
radical architects withcentral European
accents and socialist ideas. More
recently there has been a halfhearted
attempt to reassess their impact, to
argue that their short stay hereleft a real
legacy. The current exhibition atthe
Royal Institute of British Architects
(Riba),Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in
Britain 1933–66, sensibly seems to argue
something in the middle, that we
shouldn’t overstate the case — but nei-
ther should we dismiss it.
In some ways, in this centenary year
of the birth of the Bauhaus, it could have
done little else. Gropius took his
archives with him to Harvard, Breuer’s
are at Syracuse and Moholy-Nagy’s are
distributed. This year two new Bauhaus
museums have opened, in Weimar and
in Dessau, and the Bauhaus’s own
archives in Berlin arebeing restored.
So the RIBA has chosen to focus on
the Bauhaus and its influence in
Britain, on how a generation of archi-
tects who worked with the Bauhaus
émigrés and their Modernist contempo-
raries beganto eat
away at British
conservatism and
lay the ground
f o r t h e h u g e
postwar rebuild-
ing programme
t h a t wo u l d s o
radically remodel
the landscape.
There are the
few fragments
that the émigré
architects them-
selves left in Lon-
don and beyond.
Gropius’s elegant
house for Benn
Levy and Con-
stance Cummings in Chelsea, and the
gentler Modernism of Impington Vil-
lage College in Cambridgeshire. There
are Breuer’s seaside houses: Shangri-la
on the Solent in Hampshire, and Sea
Lane House atAngmering, West Sussex.
But there is also what could have
been. Gropius’s plans for a huge private
housing development in Windsor are
striking in their modernity. The estate
would have been visible from the castle
and King’sassent was sought (and
received), but the developer ( Jack
Pritchard, who put the émigrés up rent-
free at his Lawn Road Flats in Hamp-
stead, London) couldn’t raise the funds.
There was to have been an equally
impressive estate in Manchester, which
failed so completely the Riba uratorsc
couldn’t even find a picture of it. And
there was Breuer’s remarkable plan for
a “Garden City of the Future”.
Perhaps most fascinating, though, are
the most ephemeral designs. As well as
his superb photographs, Moholy-Nagy
designed posters, interiors, books and
pamphlets. There are Christmas cards
and menus for celebratory dinners here,
and it might have been nice to see a few
more of those, the posters for London
Transport or the rare but exquisite dust
jackets. There is, at least, a surviving
souvenir of his stay: the stunningdidn’t always need to be a manifesto.
Breuer’s Bristol exhibition pavilion for
furniture retailer Gane (long demol-
ished), with its rubble walls and open
plan, predated and prefigured the mid-
century houses of the US by more than a
decade. Perhaps Modernism’s next
period, so closely identified with the
open landscapes and blue skies of the
West Coast, really started here?
If the period was dominated by these
three men it is also interesting here to
see an effort to direct the gaze towards
the women who have een a littleb
neglected in the histories. There is, of
course, Edith Tudor-Hart (née Sus-
chitzky), the Bauhaus-trained Viennese
photographer, socialist and Soviet spy
(instrumental in recruiting Kim Philby
for the KGB), but there are also lesser-
known names, including Sadie Speight
(who worked with Leslie Martin, later
architect of the Royal Festival Hall),
Elizabeth Denby and Mary Crowley
(who worked on Kensal House, a pio-
neering Modernist social housing
scheme) and Norah Aiton and Betty
Scott who formed perhaps the first
female architectural practice in Britain.
The rest of the show reveals the influ-
ence of the émigré Modernists, from the
beautiful Hertfordshire Schools to the
works of Owen Williams, Denys Lasdun
and Eric Lyons. It’s somewhat bitty, tak-
ing many lesser-known works from the
archive to try to trace a narrative that is
never as smooth as it might seem.
But there is much here that is interest-
ing, unfamiliar and surprising.Gropius
may have written in a disappointed let-
ter to a German friend that Britain was
an “a-cultural country” but they did
manage to seed something, a culture in
which experiments in a gentler kind of
Modernism began to germinate and
slowly onvince the conservative Britsc
that there might just be a better, or at
least a different future.ToFebruary1,architecture.comwindows of the former Simpsons of
Piccadilly store (now Waterstones),
which look as seductively luxurious
today as they did in the 1930s.
It mightalsohave been helpful not to
put everything behind tiny windows in
clunky stands. The exhibition design, by
Chilean architects Pezo von Ellrich-
shausen, is terrible — a playschool maze
of clunky coloured columns,presuma-
blymeant to echo Bauhaus forms but
which actuallyobscure the contents.
An interesting feature of the architec-
tural exhibits here, though, is their deli-
cacy and general understatedness.Brit-
ain might have barely been touched by
the Modernist landings, butthe Mod-
ernists themselves do seem to have been
affected. There is a gradual move away
from the white walls and nautical balco-
nies, the Prussian rigour and radical
constructivist form-making, towards a
gentler, more organic Modernism. They
began building in brick, loosening the
plans, acknowledging that architectureAn interesting feature of
the architectural exhibits
here is the delicacy and
general understatedness
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