The best architectural firm that you ought to know about (and probably don’t).
A generation of the best British architectural talent started work there - Neave Brown, Alan Colquhoun, James Stirling, James Gowan, Christopher Dean, Rick Mather, Eldred Evans, and Richard MacCormac.
They produced some of Britain’s finest brutalist buildings: Including the Old Vic Annexe, Wyndham Court, Southampton , Bridgenorth Girls Secondary School, Westminster University Cavendish Campus, and Upholland Secondary School.
John Ellis returns to England to tell the story of the practice
Firm where he cut his teeth as an architect working there 1969-74, and where his father was one of the partners. The talk will be followed by Elain Harwood in conversation with John Miller (who worked at the firm in the early 1960s) and John Ellis.
We will also have rare access to one of the firm’s largest projects with a tour led by Professor Harry Charrington. The event will be introduced by Tony Fretton.
“The firm’s heyday occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s when commissions from public institutions were part of the architecture of the welfare state, and when this language was part of the orthodoxy of the time. The partners and their senior designers believed in the ideals and language of Modernism, looked to the great masters such as Le Corbusier, Mies van Der Rohe, the Russian Constructivists and early functionalists for inspiration and direction. It was a time of conviction and certainty, innovation and exploration, a new architecture for a new society.”
It’s now time to appreciate it.
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