“There is certainly a disaster in structure,” mentioned Philip Dowson, who has died on the age of 90, in a prescient speak he gave in London in 1975. This changed into the Council of Europe’s Architectural Heritage Year. Dowson recognized collecting public opposite towards contemporary-day homes, the squandering of herbal resources, the souring of the as soon as sweet, mild and socially worried contemporary-day movement, the lack of nerve with the aid of using architects hastily reverting to reactionary positions, a failure to reuse antique homes and the catastrophe of rampantly destructive “complete redevelopment”.
These had been all problems the Prince of Wales changed into to soak up thirteen years after in his BBC tv documentary A Vision of Britain. In the interim, however, and in reality from the founding in 1963 of Arup Associates, a multidisciplinary exercise of architects, engineers and amount surveyors, Dowson have been looking for answers and setting them, convincingly, into exercise.
In an fashionable collection of public, personal and industrial homes, from lucid and crafted extensions to Oxbridge faculties thru to humane and quietly radical workplace homes, whole with generously planted courtyards, paved inner streets or even swimming pools, for customers consisting of IBM, Wiggins Teape and the Central Electricity Generating Board, and the universally acclaimed Snape Maltings in Suffolk, one in all Britain’s best-cherished live performance halls, Dowson and his companions proved that there may want to certainly be a contemporary-day structure that changed into warm, diffused and tactile, incredibly aware of nearby topography and layout traditions, environmentally sound and but very well rational and naturally of its time.
These quality homes, frequently making exemplary use of conventional materials, underpinned with lovingly jointed concrete and thoughtfully precise metal frames, had been now no longer stylish once they had been constructed withinside the Sixties and 70s, nor are they stylish now. This, perhaps, is due to the fact they accompanied no fashions. Dowson, an fashionable or even romantic pragmatist, took instinctively towards dogma. He changed into, he said, “an enemy of doctrine”. He pleaded again and again in well-wrought lectures up and down Britain “now no longer for this or that ‘ism’, however for a brand new humanism”.
In 1962, he designed a severely acclaimed, and now listed, contemporary-day own circle of relatives residence close to Long Melford, Suffolk, which, thru the tool of timeless, lengthy brick partitions stretching thru the constructing and out into similarly lengthy landscape, established “a connection among fireside and horizon”. He had come to understand time-honoured methods and styles of constructing, now no longer least due to the fact they loosened “the ties of doctrine”.
At the very time Arup Associates changed into nurturing surprising contemporary-day factories and growing its trademark deep-eaved workplaces that owed as lots to Frank Lloyd Wright as they did to British or Bauhaus precedent, the exercise labored with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Imogen Holst to form a brand new domestic for the Aldeburgh competition of track and arts. Fellow specialists anticipated the enterprising exercise, fronted with the aid of using Dowson, to expand a thorough new layout. They selected a totally one-of-a-kind course.
In an interview with Building in 1981, Dowson remembered pronouncing to his accomplice Derek Sugden, the structural engineer and acoustician: “We’re going to be truely castigated for this due to the fact the architectural international goes to mention it’s ‘repro’ and historicist.” But he advised Sugden: “I do not a supply a rattling due to the fact certainly I love this a part of the international.” (He had made his domestic in East Anglia.)
“Here we have got were given this marvellous antique variety of malt homes and we have got simply were given to move in there and go away with out everybody understanding we have got been.” As Michael Hopkins, architect of the diffused but awesome 90s Glyndebourne Opera House, has said, “They [Arup Associates] confirmed us the way to do a contemporary-day intervention – a live performance corridor seating 800 people – in a redundant agri-commercial constructing, making it appear as though it has constantly been there growing out of the reed beds. Now it’s far one of the maximum precious locations in England.” It changed into this reputedly easy vernacular spirit that Dowson and his colleagues added into the layout of present day constructing types, mainly college faculties and massive industrial headquarters.
