Cut and Paste Urban Landscape

The Work of Gordon Cullen

Mira Engler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317535584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media; a time in which Thomas Gordon Cullen came to be one of Britain's best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen.

Despite Cullen's wide acclaim, there has been little research into his life and work; particularly his printed images and his methods of operation. This book examines Cullen's drawings and book design and also looks into his process of image making to help explain his considerable popularity and influence which continues to this day. It presents the lessons Cullen had to offer in today's design culture and practice and looks into the post-war consumerist design strategies that are still used today.

1 Publicity drawings

“Cut-and-paste” Cullen style

Whether we like it or not, the designed image of our present society is being realized now in the pages of the American glossies by people who can do it best – those who have the skill and imagination to create the image that sells and the wit to respond humanly to their own achievements.

Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton’s 1960 essay “Persuading Image” captured two practices – a decade’s worth of production by his own avant-garde Independent Group and the three-decade-long practice of Cullen. Both practices, however different in their approach, promoted the notion of collaboration between the business community and the consumer. The essay also marked the peak of a generation of growing influence on the part of the commercial art and industrial design professions.

Hamilton’s essay explored the status of images in British consumer society and described a fundamental shift in the role of artists and designers in the post-World War II visual culture and market economy, a shift that coincided with the rise of consumer tendencies across the world. Hamilton observed that to play a creative role in the new consumer visual society, the designer must adjust to a new set of values that involve working with industrialists and market researchers to actively shape consumer desire and to “design a consumer to the product.”¹ The images created by designers and advertisers, “moulded” as they were “by the most successful editors and publicists of the era,” were supposed to instill in the consumer a “desire for possession.” In other words, the new order required that manufacturers, the illustrators they hired, and mass publicity work together to persuade the public to accept ideas and buy products.

During this interwar period, before the growth of postwar consumerism and the cultural manifestations of the Independent Group and Pop Art, the economic downturn forced Britain to acknowledge its deficiencies in product design and its competitive disadvantage in the international market. This recognition spurred cooperation between art and industry and led to government-funded efforts to build up the industrial design profession: architectural and art magazines promoted professional expansion into commercial and industrial design, architects and artists turned to product design, and photographers and illustrators undertook commercial art and advertising.² In particular, illustrators at architectural firms took on a role that went beyond draftsmanship, becoming the de facto communication and publicity experts of their offices.

A product of the 1930s

The Depression, the alliance between art and industry, the increased status of images in British consumer society, and the growing influence on the part of the commercial art and industrial design professions in 1930s Britain – these characterized the environment in which Gordon Cullen emerged and played a critical role in shaping his life work. He was among the best known of the newly versatile architectural draftsmen in Britain in the 1930s, and during this period not only produced some of his most original graphic work but also exhibited the qualities that made him successful. When World War II broke out, Britain relinquished its industrial production and consumerist drive to the war effort; putting commercial design on hold, Cullen lent his skills to the war effort and thereafter joined the AR as a staff member.³ The war demarcates a change in the status and environment of his career, but not in its nature.

The interwar worlds of commerce and publishing both validated Cullen’s career choice of becoming an architectural draftsman and commercial artist (as opposed to an Artist, with capital A) and furnished the environment for his work to flourish. As Britain entered an era marked by mass-produced and mass-consumed images, they became a strong and new form of agency: they shaped, rather than merely represented, the architectural discourse. Architecture itself became a commodity of the new consumer economy, in the same way as a vacuum cleaner or electricity – stoking consumer desire.⁴

When Cullen joined the workforce in 1933, the Depression had weakened artists and architects and sent them searching for new sources of income. Fortunately, the British government, realizing that good design could boost the manufacturing industry in creating domestic products, used public money to found and fund design institutions in an effort to build up the market economy. The industry sponsored public exhibitions, design competitions, and publications that brought together the nascent British modern architecture and the rising design professions in an effort to create new markets for their products.⁵ Mass-produced domestic appliances and prefabricated building units needed buyers, and effective marketing and advertising required both professional and popular mass media. Architectural magazines were able to secure voluminous advertising contracts, which gave them incentive to expand their readership base, and then to expand their featured topics. All this encouraged an emphasis on pictures in place of text.⁶

Cullen’s ability to create the type of visuals that the industry needed to appeal to consumers led him to set out as a freelance draftsman and commercial artist in 1937 – after only four years of apprenticeship in private architectural practice. During the 1930s, he worked on everything from magazine and book illustrations to miniature models, from magazine covers and book jacket designs to newsprint and product catalogue advertising, posters, and national exhibition panels. He remained in high demand until the outbreak of the war.

Among the “who’s who”

Of course, Cullen did not practice in a vacuum. His predecessors and peers were numerous, their work renowned. His visual concepts intersected with those of the era’s top architects and artists, with whom he was personally acquainted. It is clear that he drew inspiration from their works. Moreover, magazine editors and both business and government clients who hired Cullen had a hand in shaping the look of his drawings. The three heads of offices for whom he worked – Raymond McGrath in 1933–34, Godfrey Samuel (later Harding & Samuel) in 1934–35, and Berthold Lubetkin of Tecton in 1936–37 – were among the leading British modern architects as well as founders of key professional organizations. They were also well connected with mainstream media outlets. By working in this professional network, Cullen brushed shoulders with the “who’s who” of London’s architectural, art, and design scenes; he crossed paths with the architects associated with the Modern Architecture Research Group (MARS) and the elite of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA), notably the leading industrial designer Misha Black.⁷ Simply being linked to this circle helped him make connections with potential clients and employers.

Winning fame and public esteem was another matter, however. To achieve success in this circle, one first had to appear in the monthly Review, whose readership included the elite ranks of architecture, art, and design. The Review’s counterpart, the biweekly Architects’ Journal (AJ), was under the same publishing house, the Architectural Press (AP), but covered the technical and business side of architecture and catered to practicing architects, professional builders, and craftsmen. Cullen’s career was intertwined with both journals, though the Review served as his experimental ground and became his more influential platform.

Cullen’s first published work appeared in the Review in 1935, and was regularly featured until 1940.⁸ During that time, he illustrated monthly features in the periodical’s “Decoration Supplements” and “Current Architecture” sections, including projects for such well-known modern architects as Lubetkin, F.R.S. Yorke, Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates, and Walter Gropius. For many of these projects he received no public credit, but he did come to know the local and international art and architecture scene.⁹

His arrival at the Review coincided with the journal’s shift to a broader public appeal and the inclusion of topics beyond architecture, such as interior design, furniture, landscape design, and town planning. In his memoir, J.M. Richards, the Review’s editor at the time, explained the editorial policy of looking beyond strictly architectural topics as “the need to do everything possible to remedy the isolation from which the modern architects suffered . . ., and a desire to appeal to a wide circle of readers.”¹⁰ Richards acknowledged everything but the new consumer environment that was driving the decisions. His colleague, AP co-owner and chief editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings, had an entrepreneurial mind and was closely attuned to this new environment.

The Review’s new policy marked the emergence of a different sense of mass media and of architecture – one that required greater pictorial presence and the hiring of people like Cullen. Much of his work was commissioned for and appeared in the Review – and as a result gained influence and attracted more commissions. Thus the relationship between Cullen and the Review is integral to any examination of his early work.

Direct influences

Artists and designers have always sought out great masters whose work they emulate, borrow, and build on. Cullen looked for role models who not only created inventive imagery but also understood the new commercial apparatus sustaining art and architecture. He was attracted to like-minded artists who worked in the industrial system – Le Corbusier, Raymond McGrath, and Paul Nash.¹¹ All three doubled as artists or architects and product designers. Le Corbusier painted while practicing architecture and designing furniture. McGrath came into architecture after pursuing a career in engraving and designing wallpaper, glass, upholstery, clocks, signs, and furniture. Nash had been a practicing painter who also d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Prologue: Gordon Cullen in the realm of image making and consumer culture
• 1 Publicity drawings: “cut-and-paste” Cullen style
• 2 Townscape drawings: “scaping” the urban landscape
• 3 The book: Townscape, a new consumer product
• 4 Bountiful offspring: Townscape takes on a life of its own
• Epilogue: life after Townscape
• Index