Designing the British Post-War Home

Kenneth Wood, 1948-1968

Fiona Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317509318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

In Designing the British Post-War Home Fiona Fisher explores the development of modern domestic architecture in Britain through a detailed study of the work of the successful Surrey-based architectural practice of Kenneth Wood. Wood's firm is representative of a geographically distinct category of post-war architectural and design practice - that of the small private practice that flourished in Britain's expanding suburbs after the removal of wartime building restrictions. Such firms, which played an important role in the development of British domestic design, are currently under-represented within architectural histories of the period.

The private house represents an important site in which new spatial, material and aesthetic parameters for modern living were defined after the Second World War. Within a British context, the architect-designed private house remained an important 'vehicle for the investigation of architectural ideas' by second generation modernist architects and designers.

Through a series of case study houses, designed by Wood's firm, the book reconsiders the progress of modern domestic architecture in Britain and demonstrates the ways in which architectural discourse and practice intersected with the experience, performance and representation of domestic modernity in post-war Britain.

1 Kenneth Wood

An introduction

Professional training

Kenneth Brian Wood was born into a working-class family at Silvertown, East London in 1921 and spent his childhood in London and Kent. Following a secondary education at Dartford Grammar School he continued his studies at The Regent Street Polytechnic’s School of Architecture in London. He initially enrolled in the evening school to train in engineering services (1937–39) and worked by day as a junior draughtsman for Matthew Hall and Company, a large engineering firm based in London’s Dorset Square.¹

Wood’s studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he trained in the Royal Air Force as an aircrew fighter navigator and in airfield control. Between January 1944 and April 1945 he was seconded to the Air Transport Auxiliary where he served as a pilot in the ferry pools at Thame, White Waltham and Hawarden.² It was during his military service that he began to develop a broader interest in design, sketching out ideas for ‘minor things’ as a relaxing way of occupying his mind in free moments.³ In 1944 he married Betty ‘Micki’ Sergeant at Dartford in Kent and the two embarked on a successful lifelong partnership. Micki was for many years the backbone of Wood’s architectural practice; the safe and accomplished pair of hands that kept the office running smoothly and maintained a careful eye on its financial stability.⁴

After the war Wood resumed his working life at Matthew Hall and returned to his engineering training with greater maturity and a new found sense of confidence, responsibility and ambition.⁵ It was at that time that he began to pursue his interest in design more seriously, entering and winning a Central Institute of Art and Design prize in 1946 for his practical reconsideration of an everyday household object – a meat carving dish. In the same year a brief secondment to Blomfield’s architectural practice further expanded his professional horizons.⁶ His experience working with student architects at the firm, some of whom were also training alongside him at Regent Street, convinced him to change professional direction. In 1948, on completing his engineering qualification, Wood reapplied to the Regent Street Polytechnic and was accepted to study architecture, commencing in the evening school as one of three older ex-servicemen on the course in the autumn of that year.⁷

Although the direct influence of what has come to be called the Modern Movement in architecture was fairly limited in terms of what was built in Britain in the inter-war years, its influence in Britain’s architecture schools was significant.⁸ Trevor Dannatt, who trained at the same school of architecture from 1938, recalls that the course had a practical emphasis that was supplemented by lectures on the theory and literature of architecture.⁹ He remembers reading Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture during his first year of study and of being conscious of the existence of a new movement in architecture at that time.¹⁰

On Wood’s recommended reading list, as he began his architectural training at Regent Street ten years later, were a number of introductory and historical texts. Apart from Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, there were Frederick Gibberd’s The Architecture of England: from Norman Times to the Present Day, Nikolaus Pevsner’s European Architecture and J.M. Richards’ Introduction to Modern Architecture, along with technical works and studies of allied subjects, including fine art and graphic design. Contemporaries of Wood who attended Regent Street in the late 1940s remember it as a conventional establishment with a practical focus on modern design and construction.¹¹ Students were encouraged to explore the development of modern architecture and were expected to design in the contemporary idiom, creating buildings that fulfilled the social requirements of the day through the employment of rational and scientific principles.

The curriculum for Wood’s first three years of study included: studio design, construction, theory of structures, theory of architecture, colour, museum studies and outdoor sketching, materials, land surveying, measured drawings, building regulations and theory of planning. In years four and five he went on to study acoustics, sanitation, specifications, heating, lighting, ventilation and professional practice, some of which he was already familiar with through his earlier training. A component of the course that Wood particularly valued and enjoyed was the historical study of pre-Gothic, Gothic and Renaissance architecture.

As modern architecture evolved in plural forms after the Second World War, the pressing question for young architects such as Wood was not whether to become a modern architect but what type of modern architect to become. In March 1950, in a lengthy article in The Architectural Review, J.M. Richards examined some of the most significant local, national and international architectural tendencies that had emerged in the previous decade and questioned whether common principles or directions might be identified to help guide future development.¹² He was chiefly concerned with the ‘premature stylization’ of modern architecture and identified four progressive architectural strands: a ‘mechanistic’ strand that acknowledged ‘increasing mechanization and the industrialisation of building’ as the basis for future architectural development; a ‘post-cubist’ strand, evolving from ‘the pure abstraction of the thirties’ within which he included the British work of Tecton; a ‘regional organic’ strand that attempted to ‘substitute regional character for the international style, as a way of building on existing traditions without abandoning modern freedom of planning and technique’; and an ‘empirical organic’ strand that included recent developments in Swedish architecture.¹³

Swedish architecture had been examined by the journal at some length three years previously, initially with reference to modern houses designed by Sven Markelius, Stüre Frölén and Ralph Erskine, which were taken to exemplify efforts ‘to humanise the aesthetic expression of functionalism’ through a reconsideration of human habits and emotional needs.¹⁴ A second article on what the journal termed ‘The New Empiricism’ followed in January 1948 and effectively proclaimed the first wave of modern architecture over: ‘The first excitement of structural experiment has gone and there is a return to workaday common sense. There is a feeling that buildings are made for the sake of human beings rather than for the cold logic of theory.’¹⁵ This new Swedish tendency, it argued, was expressed in freer planning, a more diverse approach to fenestration, widespread use of indigenous materials inside and out, attention to the relationship between the site and the surrounding landscape, consideration of external landscaping as part of the overall design, an emphasis on the creation of atmosphere, reflected in greater ‘cosiness’ in domestic work and, among ‘the more sophisticated’, the mixing of furniture of different styles.¹⁶ This Swedish model – with its balancing of visual and functional, social and cultural priorities – had particular resonance for Wood as he began to develop his early domestic work and can be distinguished from the picturesque approach that Reyner Banham later described in The New Brutalism (1966) in relation to the style of Swedish-influenced housing that emerged in Britain’s New Towns.¹⁷

Eric Lyons and Span

During his time at Regent Street, Wood worked as an assistant to Dudley Marsh, who was based at Herne Bay in Kent, with Farmer and Dark – where he was involved in designs for a power station at Fahahil in Kuwait – and in the architects’ department of the recently formed Regent Oil Company at Park Street in Central London. On completing his formal training his first position was with Eric Lyons at his practice at East Molesey in Surrey, where he worked from around 1953 to 1956. Although only nine years older than Wood, Lyons was from a different architectural generation. A graduate of Regent Street Polytechnic in the early 1930s, he had gone on to work with Maxwell Fry and Walter Gropius, and with Andrew Mather, before joining Geoffrey Townsend to design speculative houses just before the war.¹⁸ Wood ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Kenneth Wood: an introduction
• 2 The modern house
• 3 House for an artist: Whitewood, 1958
• 4 Flexible house: Wildwood, 1958
• 5 Timber house: British Columbia Lumber Manufacturers’ competition house, 1957
• 6 Exhibited house: Vincent House, 1959
• 7 Developing house: Fenwycks, from 1959
• 8 Show house: Hampton House, 1961
• 9 Converted house: Torrent House, 1965
• 10 House for art: Picker House, 1968
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index