Smithson, Alison( 1928 – 1993 )
Sketch plans for two Snowball Appliance Houses, 1957 , Canadian Centre for Architecture,
DR 1995 : 0052 , 12 11. 5 cm, Pen and black ink on tracing paperThe Smithson’s greatest influence on the architectural world came through their writing, teaching,
and competition entries. Although devoted to professional practice, they balanced building with
theory, disseminating their ideas concerning social issues of housing.
British by nationality, Alison was born in Yorkshire and Peter in County Durham. They met
while studying in the Department of Architecture at the University of Durham, Newcastle.
Marrying in 1949 , they won the commission to design the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School.
Active in CIAM, the Smithson’s organization of the 1953 conference earned them the adage Team
X. Their colleague Reyner Banham described their work as brutalist, with dominant use of concrete
structures and rationalist form. The Smithson’s writings challenged architects to re-examine basic
tenets about housing and urban theory. They designed the prototype House of the Future ( 1956 );
headquarters for The Economistmagazine in St. James’ Piccadilly ( 1964 ); British Embassy in Brasilia
( 1964 ) (unbuilt); Garden Building at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford ( 1967 – 1970 ); Robin Hood Gardens
apartment complex ( 1966 – 1972 ); and buildings at Bath University starting in 1978.
Interested in social aspects of living, the Smithson’s most prominent housing project was the
Robin Hood Gardens. They designed rows of apartments in linear buildings dispersed with plazas.
Eventually unsuccessful because of crime, their sensitive architecture could not keep the complex
from falling into social disarray.
Constantly exploring theoretical ideas, the Smithsons used sketches extensively. Many of these
sketches take the form of diagrams that they called ideograms(Smithson, 2001 ). These simple images
were often very small, using few lines. With these sketches the Smithsons were critically reviewing
conceptual theories (analysis) while demonstrating a visual communication between the two of
them. With their precise qualities, the sketches feel cartoon-like, having firm, unbroken lines and
act very much like a parti. This sketch by Alison (Figure 7. 16 ) is a diagram for an appliance house.
Iterated in black ink on tracing paper, the lines are single thickness, some showing heavier and others
lighter, as if two pens were used. Soon after the prototype for the House of the Future, the appli-
ance houses were based on the concept of prefabricated housing. This intention was not so much
concerned with the manufacture of these units but with the spaces necessary for the inhabitants.
The Smithson’s had been conceiving of two different organizations, one linear and the other clus-
tered like a snowball.^6 This small sketch shows numerous circular shapes within a larger enclosure of
the snowball parti. The notion of this house was to gather all of the ‘appliances’ or functional aspects
of the house (on one side) leaving a large area for family living.
These very concise sketches reveal Alison Smithson’s thinking. The bedrooms remain circles in
each iteration, possibly because circles are faster to draw than squares and these sketches were not con-
cerned with the bedrooms but rather the ‘appliance’ spaces. With this example, Alison Smithson was
rendering the functional spaces of most concern to her, abstracting the rooms less important at the
moment. More time has been taken to sketch the kitchen, for example, although it takes on an
amoeba shape. This sketch emphasizes the popularity of ‘bubble’ diagrams. A technique to study only
one aspect of a project, bubble diagrams are not plans in a strict sense, but show adjacencies. Here the
‘bubbles’ inflluenced the shape of the rooms in this early stage of the process.H5719-Ch07.qxd 7/15/05 3:48 PM Page 199