- Alison and Peter Smithson
Roles
1952 Co-founder The Independent Group with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson at the ICA in London.
1953 – 1956 Members of British CIAM group Member Modern Architectural Research (MARS)
1956 – 1981 Core member of
Team 10
1956 – 1981 as Alison Smith chronicler of Team 10
Education
19454 – 1948 Diploma in Architecture, University of Durham
Main Projects
1949 – 1954 Hunstanton Secondary School, (now Smithdon High School) Norfolk.
1959 – 1964 The Economist Building, St James’s Piccadilly, London
1966 – 1972 Robin Hood Gardens housing, Poplar, East London
1967 – 1971 The Garden Building, St Hilda’s College in Oxford
1982 – 1988 School of Architecture and Building Engineering, University of Bath
1985 Hexenhaus, Lauenforde, Germany
1986 – 2003 The Cantilever-Chair Museum, TECTA, Lauenfoerde, Germany
Alison Smithson
Architect (1928 – 1993)
“Places draw us to them for reasons beyond the feelings derived from the five senses...some deeper recognition is at work, felt through an unextinguishable animal sensibility.”
Alison and Peter Smithson
Alison Margaret Gill studied at the University of Durham, where she met fellow student Peter Smithson, they married in 1949. In 1950 they began a joint practice and a seamless partnership in which they shared credit for everything they designed or wrote. Arguably among the leaders of British New Brutalism the Smithson’s teaching, projects and theoretical writings are as influential as their built work, particularly in the international field of architecture. Their seminal work within the Team 10 group of CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) has long been recognised as overturning the accepted pre-war principles of the older generation world figures. Peter Smithson noted:
“For Alison Smithson Team 10 had its origin in the spontaneous recognition of there being others whose ideas and work ran parallel to her own. At the ninth Congress of CIAM at Aix-en-Provence (1953) those others were Georges Kandelis and Shadrach Woods then working in Morocco, and Jaap Bakema and Aldo van Eyck working in Holland. For the group working then Alison Smithson was the necessary primitive force to its existence.”
download profile:
Alison Smithson
further links:
Alison and Peter Smithson, The Design Museum
Alison and Peter Smithson, The Independent Group
Alison and Peter Smithson, The Open University
From here to Modernity: Episodes 2 and 3, Video Open University; Including: in Episode 2 - Hunstanton Secondary School and in Episode 3 - Robin Hood Gardens
Robin Hood Gardens: Video The Guardian
Team 10: Alison and Peter Smithson