Peter & Alison Smithson
Peter Smithson, b. Stockton-on-Tees, 1923;
Alison Smithson, b. Sheffield, 1928.

Peter & Alison Smithson - British famous architects whose polemical ideas have made as big an impact as their buildings. Their work is often associated with an ill-defined and unwarranted denigrator term: Brutalism. Both studied at the University of Durham and worked for a time with the LCC. They began the design of Hunstanton School in 1949-54. This revolutionary design took its clues from Mies Van Der Rohe buildings and exploiting a “bare bones” aesthetic with exposed steelwork, floor beams and services, an early kind of technological minimalism. Their significant building, the Economist Building in St James’s, London, came a decade later (1964). It was followed by the Garden Building at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and Robin Hood Gardens, London (1972), and, more recently, the School of Architecture, Bath University (1988-9). Against this background of solid influential buildings, the Smithsons have written and exhibited their projects and ideas. In 1956 as members of the Independent Group they contributed to the This is Tomorrow exhibition (revised in 1990 for the ICA travelling exhibition on the Group’s work). However, their initial architectural fame as theorists rests most certainly with their involvement with Team 10 and the overthrowing of the old regime in CIAM. Central to all their ideas is the notion of place.

Major buildings / works:
Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Norfolk, 1949-54. “House of the Future”, Ideal Home Exhibition, London, 1956. Pavilion for This is Tomorrow exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956 (ICA, 1990). House for Dr Sugden, Watford, 1957. Economist Building, St James’s, London, 1964. Garden Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 1972. Robin Hood Gardens, London, 1972. School of Architecture, Bath University, 1988-9.

Bibliography:
Alison & Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring, London, 1967
Alison & Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light; Urban Theories ‘92?’60, London, 1970
Alison & Peter Smithson,Without Rhetoric, London, 1973.
D. Robbins (ed.), The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty,
Cambridge, Mass., 1990.