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A pair of sleek white apartment blocks rise above the trees of Windsor Great Park. Their sharp concrete balconies and horizontal strip windows embody all the promise of modernity, just a stone’s throw from the spires of Eton and the turrets of Windsor Castle. As the developers of the complex put it in 1935, this was to be “the housing method of the future”, a place kitted out with all the latest mod cons: tennis and squash courts, swimming pool, skittle alley, Turkish bath and cinema room. With the option of housemaid service, as well as stabling for horses alongside the garage, it was billed as a place “for those who care for the country, whose manner of living is intelligent, and whose social standards are high”. The problem was, you had to like modern architecture, too – and most people in Britain didn’t.
Isokon 3, this heady vision for Windsor designed by Bauhaus maestro Walter Gropius, never happened because the British public wasn’t ready for it. Despite the best efforts of its developer, Jack Pritchard, who received the blessing of King George V for the buildings to be erected overlooking his castle, there simply wasn’t enough demand for this new functionalist, wipe-clean world, freshly imported from the continent. Despite seductive brochures offering “all the amenities of living that are to be found in a really comfortable country house … at a price which is very much less than the cost of living in a country house of your own”, the project never got off the ground. Neither did a similar Gropius-designed scheme in Birmingham.
The delicate watercolour renderings and sales brochure are all that remain of the dream, now on show at the RIBA in a new exhibition, Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain 1933–66, marking the centenary of the radical German art school and its impact on British architecture. The show casts a necessarily broad net, given our introverted island wasn’t particularly receptive to the radical cocktail of machine-made functionalism, abstraction and socialism. Gropius was joined in London by artist László Moholy-Nagy and designer Marcel Breuer for just three years, taking refuge from Nazi Germany in the first (and only) Isokon apartment building in Hampstead, before they all moved on in 1937. It is painfully symbolic that the first items in the exhibition are the menu cards from their farewell dinners, and a photograph of them happily leaving Britain for the US.
The Guardian’s own contemporary coverage is also telling. In a 1930 interview with Gropius (spelt with a lower-case “g” throughout the article, because “various modern architects and artists do not use capital letters”), he remarks that “only in England and Spain has this architectural style few adherents”. The newspaper’s scientific correspondent reported: “He thinks the Americans will develop this style of modern architecture most successfully. They are not so individualistically conservative as Western Europeans.” Gropius was being diplomatic. Later, he would write of Britain as a “land of fog and emotional nightmares”.
Still, the RIBA’s curators have done their best to suggest that the Bauhäuslers had a good time here, gave many lectures and made lots of influential friends. They’ve had a thorough rummage through their copious archives and put together an illuminating show that not only documents the little-known output (built and unbuilt) of the Bauhaus three on these shores, but also traces the evolution of Britain’s own homegrown brand of modernity.
Along with Gropius’s unrealised plans for Windsor, another highlight is Marcel Breuer’s “Garden City of the Future”, a utopian scheme he produced for the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1936, in collaboration with FRS Yorke, which looks like the result of Ebenezer Howard on acid. Gone are the garden city movement’s familiar arts-and-craftsy cottages arranged along radial avenues; instead, we find gigantic concrete ziggurat shopping centres, Y-shaped apartment blocks and curious amoebic pavilions. It was a high-density, mixed-use urban plan designed, said the architects, so that “a man can spend, in the open air, at rest or sport, the hour he must at present waste in travel to or from his work”.
It duly inspired furious letters to the Telegraph, along the lines of “this isn’t British”, but it also provided a fertile source for others to mine. The outward-stepping courtyard shopping building, supported by great angled buttresses, clearly influenced the form of James Stirling’s 1966 project for Queen’s College in Oxford, while Breuer would go on to recycle a number of the ideas in later buildings, from France to Argentina.
Elsewhere, we see how the hard lines and sharp corners of the Bauhaus style were softened by their arrival on British soil. Another fascinating yet little-known Breuer project is the Gane Pavilion, once again designed with FRS Yorke, for the Royal Agricultural Show in Bristol in 1936. Looking more like a Californian Case Study House from the 1950s, it incorporated massive masonry walls made of roughly squared Cotswold stone, topped with a projecting flat roof, enclosing a free-flowing domestic interior lined with plywood. It was a kind of rustic Bauhaus, the utilitarian ideology safely wrapped in a cosy blanket of rural Englishness, with even a nod to our national obsession of being “in keeping”.
Practical constraints had unexpected aesthetic impacts, too. The widespread lack of central heating in British homes in the 1930s prompted Breuer to move away from the tubular steel furniture designs that he had developed at the Bauhaus and adopt the warmer potentials of wood. “Plywood ahoy!” he wrote in a letter to Gropius as he left Germany for England, anticipating the furniture designs he would produce for Isokon, including the famous Long Chair and a plywood dining table, both of which have spawned countless imitations since. Similarly, Gropius’s Wood House in Kent, built with Maxwell Fry in 1937, an oak-framed building clad in cedar boarding, anticipates the house he would go on to build for himself in Massachusetts, and presages the kind of timber-clad suburban modernism that would later take root in various aspirational corners of leafy England.
But, in the main, the exhibition gives the impression that we didn’t get a grip on what the Bauhaus evangelists were preaching until long after they’d left. Gropius’s Impington College in Cambridgeshire, built in 1939, by which time he was ensconced at Harvard, is perhaps the most important single work in this regard. Separating out the various components of the building in the landscape, with classrooms arranged to maximise daylight, it would go on to inspire the nature of most British state schools of the postwar era.
There is a good section on the role of the county architects in developing these ideas, with a particular focus on the pioneering Hertfordshire schools programme. It highlights Mary Crowley’s designs for the first school in Cheshunt in 1949, and the evolution of the standardised prefabricated system, which would be adopted across the country by the 70s – finally realising an ideal that the Bauhaus had first espoused half a century earlier.
As we stand poised to break ties with EU, the exhibition provides a useful reminder of the progressive values that outsiders can bring to Britain, however little we welcome them at the time.
• Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain 1933–66 is at RIBA Architecture gallery, London, until 1 February.
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