Until recently the ideas of Alison and Peter Smithson have been known mainly to those professionally involved in architecture and urban design. This is so because they have presented their ideas usually in project form, accompanied by elliptical texts designed to prevent the building up of rigid thought patterns in the minds of those studying them. Ordinariness and Light, by contrast, is an extended exploration of their theories and work over the past seventeen years, in which not only their aesthetic but also their political and emotional concerns are made plain. The book brings together a previously unpublished long text of 1952-53, "Urban Re-identification," and a sequence of later essays and statements. All this material has been revised for the present volume, and provided with a linking commentary. The general theme is "the invention of an architecture structured by notions of association." The authors argue that the form of the city and the town must correspond to the human needs of the present; looser knit than in the past, even the quite recent past; more open and changing. And for city and town to correspond to this pattern of society there must be better systems of physical communication, and new form-concepts through which society can recognize and realize its new self. The arguments, examples, and illustrations in the book show how a very small shift in our way of looking at the ordinary things that go to make up cities and towns could restore to them their rich classic connotations. Houses would once more feel like places of adventure, as well as security; roads would be made to give a sense of cohesion and connection, as well as of release. For the Smithsons, to sense an "ordering" in things is to feel liberated and free to use them. Ordinariness and Light will enable all who are exercised about the deterioration of urban life to share their dream of cities that can breathe. It may help, perhaps, to generate in society at large that kind of committed participation that their notion of "ordering" implies.

Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories, 1952-1960 and Their Application in a Building Project, 1963-1970

Arts & Photography

Smithson, Alison

Smithson, Peter

Architecture

Mit Pr

"When le Corbusier assembled Vers Une Architecture," write the Smithsons, "he gave to young architects everywhere a way of looking at the emergent machine-served society, and from that, a way of looking at antiquity and a rationale to support his personal aesthetic. Viollet-le-Duc had performed the same service to architects before le Corbusier: the role they played is traditional to the development of architecture. In this essay, based on material written between 1955 and 1972, we try to do the same as these architects before us. "We write to make ourselves see what we have got in the inescapable present...to give another interpretation of the same ruins...to show a glimpse of another aesthetic." The Smithsons gained an international reputation in the early 1950s, both for their buildings and for being instrumental in the development of the "thoughtful" approach to modern architecture. Their theoretical accommodation of the economic and social context in which the architect/urbanist works was set out as succinctly as possible in Urban Structuring, published in 1967. Team 10 Primer, first published in a special issue of Architectural Design in 1962, and subsequently brought up to date and published by The MIT Press in book form in 1968, documented the Smithsons' search with other leading architect/urbanist/teachers for a technique of working together, a skill or way of thinking that past cultures obviously had but that seemed to be lost to the builders in our present cities. Without Rhetoric—concerned with architectural form and its material embodiment—is a parallel volume to Ordinariness and Light (The MIT Press, 1970), which contained those essays concerning urban form written over the years 1952-1960. Architecture tends to be long-lasting, which makes thoughtful architects cautious, anxious to try to understand, to respond intelligently. They tend to dig into things, so that their intuition has as sound a base as possible to work on. Without Rhetoric is a refinement of the results of twenty years of such digging, intended to give the reader a real feeling for these particular architects' interests and obsessions. Among the many subjects discussed in word and image are The New Brutalism...the role of advertising in shaping what we think we need...The Rocket, a statement on the present state of architecture...Mies van der Rohe, a homage...some meditations on Braun...The use of repetition....

Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Alison and Peter Smithson, founders of Team X and authors of the classic Team X Primer, are among the most influential architects of the postwar decades. Their reevaluation of modernism shifted the focus of architecture and urbanism toward the particularities and uniqueness of human associations, urban patterns, and climatic conditions. Many of their ideas, both social (cluster and human association) and architectural (Brutalism, the nature of materials), profoundly influenced later generations of academics, students, and practitioners. As the social ideals of earlier times become an integral part of the reassessment of the built environment of recent years, the Smithsons continue to gain in significance. This unprecedented and long-overdue publication is the first comprehensive book available on the enormous legacy of the Smithsons. The architectural works in this book, which span from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s, include all of their major projects, such as Hunstanton Secondary School, Golden Lane Housing, Sheffield University, the Economist Building, and the "House of the Future." Introductions to groups of projects highlight the Smithsons' ongoing areas of inquiry; each project is accompanied by an original text, photographs, drawings, and plans. The rich and careful documentation on each project ensures that this volume will record the work of these important architects for posterity.

The Charged Void: Architecture

The Monacelli Press

The Charged Void: Urbanism is the companion volume to The Charged Void: Architecture; the two together comprise the complete works of Alison and Peter Smithson. For the designers, architecture and urbanism were inseparable: buildings encapsulate urban ideas; urban systems are the means by which buildings function effectively. This second book collects both urban and architectural designs that have specific implications for city form into fourteen thematic chapters: the Team X Doorn Manifesto with its worked examples (Close Houses, Fold Houses, Terraced Crescent Houses); large-scale designs such as the Berlin Hauptstadt, Hamburg Steilshoop, and the Kuwait Urban Form Study; and built manifestations of urban ideas, notably the Economist Building of 1959-64. More than a collection of work, The Charged Void: Urbanism represents a record of a focused thought process concerned with the qualities of urban life—a thoughtful and witty collection of observations, decipherings, and recommendations for understanding and improving the complex nature of the city.

The Charged Void: Urbanism

This book comprises edited essays, notes and letters spanning thirty years -- many previously unpublished -- richly illustrated with documentary drawings and photographs. The theme of the collection, developed through the Smithsons' reactions to the work of Mies van der Rohe and Charles and Ray Eames, is the influence across generations of architects, transforming over time the way the 'art of inhabitation' is practiced. The influence of Mies on the Smithsons' work is widely recognised; perhaps more surprising is the profound and subtle influence of the Eames' work on the Brutalist Smithsons. The book presents a fascinatingly intimate account of the way Mies and the Eames revolutionised architecture and design, as felt by two articulate and thoughtful practitioners, rather than the views of cultural historians.

Changing the Art of Inhabitation

Artémis *

The artist and architect Peter Smithson is one of the best-informed and insightful critics of Modernist and Postmodernist architecture. In Flying Furniture he sheds light on the construction of furniture, particularly mobile furniture, which has rendered obsolete the distinction between 'movables' and 'immovables.' The works featured here extend from Bauhaus up to the present day, representing such essential designers as Alison and Peter Smithson, Stefan Wewerka, El Lissitzky, Jean Prouvé, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Gerrit Rietveld. The book itself testifies to the possibilities and dynamism of the field of design with its unique shape, its playful layout and the witty remarks and quotations throughout.

Flying Furniture

LISSITZKY, El

Individual Artists

Walther König, Köln

Alison and Peter Smithson were among the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although great admirers of Le Corbusier, the Smithsons rejected his famous conception of the dwelling as a “machine for living”: for the Smithsons, a house should be suited to its location, and to the ordinary requirements of life; it should accommodate individual patterns of use. This book examines the evolution of their approach to the everyday “art of inhabitation,” extensively documenting housing designs such as the House of the Future and the renovations of/additions to the Hexenhaus.

Alison & Peter Smithson

nai010 publishers

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