Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Denham Smithson were English architects who together formed an architectural partnership, and are often associated with the New Brutalism.
Personal lives
Peter was born in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham, north-east England, and Alison Margaret Gill was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Peter served in the Madras Sappers and Miners in India and Burma, then returned to finish his architectural studies. They met while studying architecture at Durham University and married in 1949. They joined the architecture department of the London County Council as Temporary Technical Assistants before establishing their own partnership in 1950. Of their three children, Simon, Samantha and Soraya, one, Simon, is likewise an architect. Alison Smithson was also a novelist; her A Portrait of the Female Mind as a Young Girl was published in 1966.
Studies
Alison Smithson studied architecture at King's College, University of Durham between 1944 and 1949. Peter Smithson studied architecture at the same university between 1939 and 1948, along with a programme in the Department of Town Planning, also at King's, between 1946 and 1948.
Work
They first came to prominence with Hunstanton School, completed in 1954, which used some of the language of high modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe but in a stripped back way, with rough finishes and a deliberate lack of refinement that kept architectural structure and services exposed. They are arguably among the leaders of the British school of New Brutalism. They referred to New Brutalism as "an ethic, not an aesthetic". Indeed, their work sought to emphasize functionality and connect architecture with what they viewed as the realities of modern life in post-war Britain. Alison Smithson articulated their desire to connect building, users, and site when, describing architecture as an act of "form-giving", she noted: "My act of form-giving has to invite the occupiers to add their intangible quality of use." After the critical success of Hunstanton School, they were associated with Team X and its 1953 revolt against old Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne philosophies of high modernism. Among their early contributions were 'streets in the sky' in which traffic and pedestrian circulation were rigorously separated, a theme popular in the 1960s. They were members of the Independent Group participating in the 1953 Parallel of Life and Art exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and This Is Tomorrow in 1956. Throughout their career they published their work energetically, including their several unbuilt schemes, giving them a profile, at least among other architects, out of proportion to their relatively modest output. Peter Smithson's teaching activity included the participation for many years at the ILAUD workshops together with fellow architect Giancarlo De Carlo. National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview with Peter Smithson in 1997 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.
Their last project: the Cantilever-Chair Museum of the Bauhaus design company TECTA in Lauenfoerde, Germany
Robin Hood Gardens was under construction when B. S. Johnson made a short film about the couple for the BBC, The Smithsons on Housing. Sukhdev Sandhu, in a blog entry for the London Telegraph website, wrote that "they drone in self-pitying fashion about vandals and local naysayers to such an extent that any traces of visionary utopianism are extinguished." The finished flats suffered from high costs associated with the system selected and from high levels of crime, all of which undermined the modernist vision of 'streets in the sky' and the Smithsons' architectural reputation. In 2017, with the flats set to be demolished, a three-storey section including a walkway and maisonette interiors was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. They would go on to design several buildings at Bath, while relying mainly on private overseas commissions and Peter Smithson's writing and teaching.
