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Modern Architecture, Heritage and Englishness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Nigel Whiteley
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Extract

In 1992 the National Trust launched a campaign to ‘Save 2 Willow Road’, a house in Hampstead built in 1938 by Ernö Goldfinger for his own use (Fig. 1). Goldfinger, born in Budapest in 1902, studied in the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of Paris in the 1920s. It was there that he met his wife, the painter Ursula Blackwell. They moved to London in 1934 and, along with other architectural émigrés or visitors helped introduce into Britain mainstream Modernist ideas from the Continent. Unlike most of the émigrés, the Goldfingers stayed on, living in their Hampstead house. The campaign leaflet describes 2 Willow Road as ‘a remarkable survival’ because it is ‘still filled with the furniture [Goldfinger] designed for it and the contemporary paintings and sculpture he and his wife collected. . . . today it retains the atmosphere of Hampstead between the wars. . . ’ (Fig. 2) This period piece of a house, this ‘modern masterpiece’ was, the reader was informed, now ‘at risk’ because the contents of the interior might be sold off. The National Trust sought to raise money to buy the property to conserve its integrated and historical ambience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 38 , 1995 , pp. 220 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1995

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References

Notes

1 This essay is based on a conference paper presented to the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in 1994. I would like to thank Edward Diestelkamp of the National Trust and Diane Chablo of English Heritage for their help. For their comments and critical observations, I owe a debt of gratitude to Gill Chitty and Helen Long. I am indebted to the National Trust for photographs.

2 In passing, it should be mentioned that the campaign, I’m pleased to report, was successful, and 2 Willow Road has been saved with the aid of grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Department of National Heritage. The National Trust hopes to open the house to the public in April 1996.

3 Modernismus (London, 1934), pp. 168-69.

4 ‘Is Modern Architecture on the Right Track?’, The Listener, 26 July 1933, p. 124.

5 ‘For and Against Modern Architecture’, The Listener, 28 November 1934, p. 885.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid. p. 888.

8 A Vision of Britain (London, 1989), p. 123.

9 ‘Robert Adam: A Critical Review’ in Classical Design in the Late Twentieth Century, (Winchester, 1990), p. 12.

10 Blomfield, Modernismus, op cit. p. 169.

11 Ibid. p.v.

12 Quoted in Classical Design in the Late Twentieth Century, op cit., p. 12.

13 For a discussion of this issue, see my ‘“Falsehood in a Ciceronian dialect”?: The “Ruskinian” tradition, Modernism, and the rise of the classical tradition in contemporary architecture’ in Wheeler, M. and Whiteley, N. (eds.), The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture (Manchester, 1992), pp. 179–211 Google Scholar.

14 Classical Design in the Late Twentieth Century, op. cit. p. 10.

15 Ibid. p. 12.

16 A Change of Heart (London, 1992), p. 11.

17 Ibid. p. 13.

18 There is a lack of clarity throughout the essay as to whether Saint means British or English. No doubt much to the annoyance and consternation of those who believe in distinctive national architectural identities within the United Kingdom, Saint tends to use British and English as if synonymous. The implication, however, is that both are significantly different from, if not in opposition to ‘continental’ or ‘foreign’.

19 Saint, op. cit., p. 3.

20 Ibid. p. 13.

21 Ibid. p. 17.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid. pp. 17-19.

24 The phrase ‘Modernism of good manners’ probably derives from A. Trystan Edwards’s Good and Bad Manners in Architecture, published in 1924.

25 For an interesting discussion of the ‘New Humanism’ and other factions, see Banham, Reyner, ‘Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945-1965’ in Summerson, John (ed.), Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing presented to Nikolaus Pevsner (London, 1968), p. 265–73Google Scholar.

26 Architectural Review, February 1942, pp. 37-38. The article was essentially a review of a new publication by Ellis Waterhouse on Joshua Reynolds.

27 Banham, ‘Revenge of the Picturesque’, op. cit. p. 265.

28 Arts Council, ’43-55: Ten years of British Architecture exhibition catalogue (London, 1956), p. 6.

29 Ibid. pp. 6, 8, 11.

30 ‘Introduction’ to Dannatt, Trevor, Modern Architecture in Britain (London, 1959), p. 27 Google Scholar.

31 Arts Council and the Royal Institute of British Architects, Architecture Today (London, 1961), p. 1 Google Scholar.

32 Ibid. p. 6.

33 R.I.B.A. Journal, June 1957, pp. 307-10.

34 The Unromantic Castle and other essays (London, 1990), pp. 7-8.

35 The Englishness of English Art (London, 1956; 1964 edition), pp. 193, 206, 194.

36 Ibid. p. 196, 195.

37 An example of the ‘typical’ rather than the ‘excellent’ is ‘Mr Straw’s house’ in Worksop, ‘a “time-capsule” of provincial life in the 1920s and a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people 70 years ago’ according to the National Trust’s East Midlands leaflet.

38 A Change of Heart, op. cit. p. 21.

39 In Dannatt, op. cit. p. 11.

40 Saint’s description of it as more than a short period would be challenged by a number of architects and writers. In ‘The Idea of Architecture in the 50s’ (Architects’ Journal, 21 January 1960, pp. 121-26), Peter Smithson discussed ‘the Festival, Empiricism, and Shake-Hands styles of the reconstruction period’ (p. 124) — in other words, ‘good manners’ — as essentially an episode which was over by the mid-1950s.

41 A Change of Heart, op. cit. pp. 23, 9.