First Architectural Work: From Housing to Education
It was not thrilling but was quite enjoyable. I don’t think I did anything of real interest – it didn’t click.1
A generation of optimistic young people who had been raised and educated within middle class families with socialist or utopian leanings and who had been schooled at a variety of new progressive institutions came to maturity in the early 1930s. In Britain, the generation that established and inhabited the first Garden Cities produced sons and daughters some of whom grew to adulthood committed to the idea that design could meet the needs of society and create a better quality of life for all. Their upbringing emphasized unity of hand, heart and mind in the service of the public good and the central role of the arts in civic life. As we have seen, Mary had experienced such an education and flourished as a pupil at Bedales School. Other contemporaries with a bent towards making art had found their way to Oundle, an independent endowed school dating from 1556 that from 1893 until 1922 came under the leadership of F. W. Sanderson. Sanderson reconfigured the school to support a progressive ideology of ‘learning through doing’. Jack Pritchard, later a pivotal figure in the British Modernist movement, found solace at Oundle after first failing at more traditional schools.2 This was also the case with David Medd who found the arrangement of workshops and laboratories, in place of traditional classrooms, suited his passion for construction. This generation born close to the turn of the century had witnessed the impact of the Great War and the subsequent rise of socialist politics that ushered in a gradual greater acceptance of public provision of education, housing and health.
As well as the role of the state, the role of the arts in society came increasingly into question and a number of intellectuals of this generation and those slightly older were experimenting with theory and practice which addressed the question of the relationship between the arts and science in general, and the role of the artist and designer for the public good.3 While this was a question addressed in England, as we have seen, the impetus came both from Europe and the USA. In Finland, Alvar Aalto, who was greatly admired by Mary and her contemporaries, exemplified through his work the idea that everyday objects might become objects of beauty through a design attitude that fully appreciated their practical function as well as their aesthetic. The Bauhaus attempted to unite the arts, crafts and design into one educational project addressing the everyday functional and aesthetic needs of modern society, while in the USA the Cranbrook Academy for the Arts was beginning to emerge as a new form of arts school dedicated to the ideal of the integration of art in daily living and inspired by the American Academy at Rome. Within this climate of experimentation, political upheavals of the 1930s with the rise of Fascism had the effect of bringing many individuals together in their efforts to find opportunities to work – to make art and to build.
As the Medds later reflected,
In an age of new social priorities after the war, there were architects about who believed that the starting point of design – whether for education, for housing, for hospitals – was the needs of people, not a style or grammar of architecture, not a statement of pre-determined form … . they believed it to be possible, by starting with direct knowledge of what people wanted to be and to do in a new building, eventually to win through to design of architectural quality.4
For newly-qualified architects across Europe, housing was the major social issue of the day and many of Mary’s contemporaries, such as those who were members of the Modern Architectural Research or MARS group (1933–1957), were establishing their careers as architects in public housing.5 Mary was listed as a proposed participant in the MARS group as early as 1933 and was nominated by her friend Elizabeth Denby to be a member in 1937 but does not appear as a listed member until 1940.6 Mary’s travels with her family and with fellow students at the AA, already enabled her to see at close hand the establishment of a completely new form of social architecture and it was to housing that she looked for her first architectural commissions during these years. Housing might well have become the focus of her career, but her frequent return visits to Bedales, continuing friendship with Laurin Zilliacus and commitment to her father’s wide ranging interests all served to maintain the focus on education.
London was then the centre of a nexus of talent and opportunity. In his autobiography, Max Fry observed, ‘so little divided us then, the artists, the philosophers, the engineers, even the industrialists who were members of this society’.7 The travel of ideas and the exchange of knowledge across Europe had affected all countries involved in re-envisaging their urban landscapes following the First World War and in England a public commitment to deal with slum clearance through local government municipal action was one of the many forces that stimulated the modernist movement in architecture.
Some of the housing models emerging on the continent were particularly inspirational. Socialist housing schemes for families of skilled workers in Vienna (Heiligenstadt – Karl Marx Hof), Amsterdam and Rotterdam illustrated how a progressive politics might change the cityscape, promoting health, well-being and community. Utopian housing schemes with integrated childcare centres and kindergarten must have appeared to Mary as at least part fulfilment of the Garden City movement that her family had been so closely associated with on a grander scale.
3.1 Kensal House, Kensal Rise, London, 1937. Photograph by Edith Tudor Hart (1908–1973). RIBA Photographic Collection
Utopian experimentation in city planning required designers who could identify with the lives and experiences of ordinary families, especially with women and children. The 1930s was a pioneering age for nursery education so it is not surprising that one of Mary’s first jobs was advising the Kensal House experimental flats development in North Kensington. Mary’s special interest and knowledge of education was sought by her friend Elizabeth Denby as housing consultant for J. Maxwell Fry’s firm working on the innovative scheme.8 This significant modernist development, commissioned and financed by the Gas Light and Coke Company and intended for re-housed slum dwellers, was opened in 1937 and included an on-site nursery.
The nursery at Kensal House was set as an unusual curve following part of ‘a round shape of a former gas-holder on the site’ and contained certain elements that were to continue over the decades of Mary’s design of schools for younger children.9 The playrooms were light and airy and opened out easily to a terrace allowing for outdoor play. The buildings at the time were known as ‘the sunshine flats’.
Denby, who preferred to think of Kensal House as an ‘urban village’, was, like Mary, motivated by Scandinavian developments in social architecture. In particular she was inspired by a social climate in Stockholm that encouraged people to build their own houses out of wood and prefabricated materials. Mary later reflected that Denby’s enthusiasm for such projects encouraged her own interest in simple construction and prefabrication.10 They became firm friends and, as already noted, travelled together to Sweden in the 1930s.
Another important development in London during these early years in Mary’s career was the Peckham Health Centre, designed in 1935 by Owen Williams, which became known as ‘one of the great public-health experiments of the twentieth century in the UK’.11 The building was designed to have an impact on the activities within it. Freedom of movement and visibility in an open-plan structure were considered important in promoting social cohesion, spontaneity of behaviour, and awareness of opportunities for action. At the heart of this experiment established by a husband and wife team of scientists was a school.12 At the Peckham Health Centre, health was defined not as a state but as a process of interaction with the environment. In a similar sense, the education that Mary had experienced and would seek to advance was also best understood as a process of interaction with the environment. It seems that through these initiatives the traditional concept of school focussed exclusively on the young was expanding and that Mary’s project, explored in her final year thesis of ‘An Educational Centre for Arts and Sciences’ was becoming realized in different forms, not only by Henry Morris’s village colleges in rural Cambridgeshire but also in the inner cities as at Peckham. Mary must have delighted in a building that corresponded with Quaker principles and supported democratic management where at the heart of the building an Olympic-sized swimming pool reflected the sunlight from above. ‘Flanked on one side by the gymnasium and on the other by an assembly hall which could be used for meetings, dances, and plays, the pool had long glass panels on either side, providing a view into it from the lounge or “long room” and the cafeteria, and a view across it from one to the other.’13 Here mothers could meet while their children played and families could enjoy the social facilities. Mary recognized these efforts as ‘a great movement, one that should have gone on but was stopped by the war’.14 It was only after the war that the first Hertfordshire new school buildings could begin to reflect some of the lightness and optimism first laid down in the extraordinary building of light, water and sunshine at Peckham.
Around this time also, examples of Modernist housing were beginning to appear in England: we have noted Mary’s familiarity with High Cross at Dartington and she would have been aware of her fellow AA student Wells Coates’ celebrated first building, Lawn Road Flats, completed in 1934. The political climate in Europe was effecting a movement of ideas and practices across continents and London, the city Mary knew best, provided a stopping off point for many architects, designers and artists fleeing oppression. Lawn Road provided a base for many of them in exile.
Exhibitions provided an immediate vehicle for emigrés to become involved with the local artistic and architectural communities of the metropolis and also offered Mary interesting work at this time. One of her first tasks after returning from Germany in the autumn of 1933 was to work on models for the Building Trades Exhibition at Olympia. She was in stimulating company,
Elisabeth Scott, Chesterton and Shepherd were there a good deal. Scott had to spend most of the afternoon making a model of a really bad cinema – as bad as possible – too bad to make her, of all people, do that! 15
But the most important and lasting work that she completed during these years was a group of three houses at Tewin in Hertfordshire.16 This was Mary’s first commission as a qualified architect bringing her instant recognition, and has frequently been referenced and illustrated since.
When land known as ‘Sewell’s Orchard’ came up for sale, Mary’s mother wanted to acquire it as Sewell was a family name. Naturally, she turned to her newly qualified daughter to plan the scheme. Mary is credited as architect of these houses, although Mary’s brother-in-law Cyril Kemp did some drawings and Brandon-Jones offered some collaboration on the scheme, recognized as a particularly fine expression of modernist domestic architecture of the time.17 They were designed for her parents, sister and brother in law, Cecil Kemp, and a family friend, Rowland Miall and occupied in 1936.
One of the Miall children, William, recalls,
The home at Tewin was a delight. Three households in the Garden City, the Crowleys, the Kemps, and ourselves had decided to share a 1½ acre plot called Sewells Orchard in open country outside the village. We were all Friends (Quakers) Ralph and Muriel Crowley were to have the middle part of the plot, and would share it with their architect daughter, Mary. Elfrida, another daughter who was married to another architect, Cecil Kemp, would have the lower part of the plot and we would have the upper part. The two architects collaborated together to produce three rather similar and very modern houses which attracted a good deal of architectural attention and comment. Groups of architectural students would sometimes turn up on Sunday mornings and hope to be shown around.18
3.2 Sewell’s Orchard, Tewin. Completed 1936, listed 1981. IOE Archives, ME/A/7/3
3.3 1–3 Willow Road, Hampstead, London, by Ernő Goldfinger (1939). RIBA Photographic Collection
Ernő Goldfinger designed a similar group of three houses at 2 Willow Street, Hampsted in London, the middle of which he and his wife occupied until their respective deaths. These houses bare a strong similarity to the houses at Tewin and it is perhaps no coincidence that Mary Crowley and Ernő Goldfinger worked together on various projects during the years that saw the planning and design of both sets of family houses.
Mary described the design as rather Scandinavian, especially the mono pitched roof that she thought had been realized very well by a local builder from Welwyn Garden City, a friend of the family. The Scandinavian influence was clearly a result of her many visits to Sweden and Denmark over the previous decade. By this time, the mid 1930s, she was even beginning to describe herself as Scandinavian, ‘there’s a simplicity and a friendliness of Scandinavia that just becomes part of you’.19 However, she believed that the houses were recognized by the architectural community not especially for their appearance but because their completion coincided with an exhibition surveying modern development in European housing. The exhibition was hosted by the Building Centre in November 1936. An elevation of the house designed for the Crowleys became an installation in this important exhibition.20 While the exhibition was in preparation, Mary had worked with Justin Blanco-White,21 her closest professional friend, on a book, Housing: A European Survey for the Building Centre.
The houses at Tewin were recognized as significant statements on modern architecture and were also featured alongside other developments including Kensal House at the MARS group’s 1938 Exhibition of the Elements of Modern Architecture. The MARS group exhibition was a significant statement by a new generation of architects and it attracted an audience of seven thousand spectators including Le Corbusier.22 This exhibition was organized initially by the Hungarian-born Bauhaus emigré László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) before he left Britain for the USA, handing the responsibility over to Misha Black (1910–1977). Individual MARS Group members designed different sections of the exhibition. The introductory essay to the catalogue was written by George Bernard Shaw.23 Ernő Goldfinger was responsible for the mother and child section and his interest in children and education is evidenced in his design of the children’s section of the British Pavilion one year earlier as part of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Fig. 3.4).
In the final years of the decade, Mary began to work on the design of flexible spaces for family and nursery accommodation in various combinations with her friends from the AA at Goldfinger’s Offices in Bedford Square. This was interesting work that kept her tuned to the world of childhood and education however she had to contend with Goldfinger’s rather mercurial temperament. Like other architects she worked alongside during this period, Goldfinger was interested in a more permanent arrangement, which Mary resisted.
The schemes that they worked on together reflected the approach of the MARS group – to discover architectural solutions to social problems. The results included some of the earliest uses of prefabricated parts for school design including a flexible nursery school designed on a unit system, ‘a completely prefabricated building with each wall made of wooden wall units (6 ft. wide) bolted together, weather-boarded on the outside and fibre-board on the inside’.24
3.4 British Pavilion, Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris 1937: the children’s section with furniture and toys by Abbatts. RIBA Photographic Collection
In 1934 the Nursery School Association had commissioned Goldfinger to design a cheap standardized nursery classroom in timber – known as the expanding nursery – and he and Mary revised the design in 1937 so that the parts could be multiplied and used to extend to the desired number of units, an early form of prefabrication which was to become so significant in post-war school building design.25 It provided for flexibility through three alternative layouts to accommodate 40, 80 or 120 children and its 6 foot component modules were intended to be manufactured by the joinery company Boulton and Paul. A prototype was erected but its mass production was never realized.26
It was here, at Goldfinger’s offices in Bedford Square in 1938, that David Medd first came into contact with Mary Crowley. By his own account, she was working on Goldfinger’s adaptation of the heliograph, a machine that projected light drawings. David was making a delivery and noticed a striking image, ‘a vision’ that he retained in his memory until the end of his life.27
In the last year before the outbreak of war there was an expectation of considerable population disruption and the need to provide emergency accommodation for evacuated children. In response, The Building Centre proposed a competition for architects to design a camp for children that might be easily transformed into holiday accommodation in peace time. Ernő Goldfinger, Mary Crowley and her friend Justin Blanco-White submitted an imaginative and innovative proposal using prefabricated standardized units that drew a lot of interest.28 Mary’s influence on the scheme can be detected not so much in the advanced engineering but in the attention to atmosphere, well-being and opportunities for play. The units were grouped ‘to form semi-enclosed gardens, with flowers, pools and trees, where children could sit and read and rest’.29 The entry won second prize and acclaim in the architectural press. ‘They submitted a most competent set of drawings and models for two alternative schemes. Their analysis of the problem was thorough, their solutions exciting and imaginative.’30
After the war Goldfinger went on to design two more schools in London using his own prefabricated concrete techniques; Westville Road Primary School, Hammersmith (1950) and Brandlehow Nursery School, Putney. We might conjecture that Goldsmith had learned much of value from his young assistant before the war that was eventually realized in the planning of these schools.
Mary’s interest in education, therefore, was maintained at a time when she might have turned to housing. Her father’s continued professional involvement as well as his circle of friends sustained the association in Mary’s mind between Modernism and progressive education. Ralph Crowley was a close friend and admirer of educationalist and art patron Henry Morris who served as County Secretary for Education in Cambridgeshire between 1922 and 1954. The Cambridgeshire village colleges founded by Morris were pioneering in their educational aims and one at least, at Impington (1939), purposively combined modern education with modern architecture through the combined efforts of Morris, Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry.31
Competitions were a standard means by which young architects could show their mettle. In 1937, The News Chronicle organized a competition for the design of a new secondary school. Whether Mary considered entering, we do not know but one of her ex-colleagues at the AA, Denis Clarke-Hall entered and won with his design for a new girls’ High School at Richmond in Yorkshire. Clarke-Hall suggested that the 1930s ferment of ideas and styles emanating from the AA coincided with the beginnings of an interest in schools. He admitted knowing ‘absolutely nothing about schools when drawing up the scheme’ for the competition.32 However Mary’s constant interest in education and school buildings was kept alive by interesting and far-reaching developments closer to home in the new Cambridgeshire village colleges which she visited with her father.
We’d go together and he was interested as much as I was in all the education that was going on there and education as part of the community and doing something interesting and rather different.
Many of Mary’s friends were also in their early 20s and were finding partners and marrying during these years but Mary resisted even though there were ample opportunities to follow suit. As an attractive and talented young woman she was courted by several admirers among whom were architects, educators and designers including Geoffrey Jellicoe, who proposed marriage in 1934, and fellow student at the AA John Brandon-Jones, with whom she did measured drawings of Wren’s Winslow Hall in Buckinghamshire for the Wren Society and at Hatfield Road33 (Fig. 3.5). It seems she needed to find some really engaging work before she could settle her personal life.
3.5 Mary Crowley and John Brandon-Jones measuring Hatfield Road. IOE Archives, ME/A/3/7
During the war years Mary eventually found planning work within schools, as will be discussed below, but was still unsure as to where her future should lie, always striving to find her own path to offer the best service and contribution to society. She also offered her skills and services in a voluntary capacity to the Middlesborough Survey along with several close friends with whom she had trained at the AA. The leader of this group was a very talented architect and planner Max Lock (1909–1988) who had been a contemporary of Mary’s at the AA and was now carving out a career for himself in urban redevelopment and participative planing. However, Lock fell deeply in love with Mary and naturally sought her returned affection, to no avail. He hoped for Mary to change her mind and throw in her lot with him for over a decade (1937–1946), once declaring ‘our friendship seemed to me, an unfinished monument.’34 Lock was a Quaker and argued in his many appeals for Mary’s affection, that this was among the many things that they had in common suggesting a potentially rich and rewarding partnership for life. They both had an understanding of the riches of Scandinavian design and appreciated the Swedish commitment to social welfare: Lock had been among the group from the AA who visited Stockholm in 1930 and he made a visit there again in 1937. Mary and he had become close friends and supported one another as pacifists as war broke out, when, as Lock remarked, ‘architecture seems such a second string to play at such time as this’.35
3.6 Mary Crowley with Max Lock, 1930s. IOE Archives, ME/A/8/1
For Lock, Mary’s presence and contribution to the Middlesborough Survey, brief though it was, was especially valued. He was ‘terribly impressed’ with the way she worked and ‘loved having’ her in the group.36 The cooperative working and skills sharing would have suited her well. Her gentle rejection of him as a possible husband and partner, in spite of all their common interests, background and political views, was clear and direct by this time but nevertheless, correspondence suggests some persistence on his part until at least the beginning of 1946.37
Lock never married. His letters make it clear that Mary was his chosen partner for life and he never found her equivalent.38 He was aware during these years of intense romantic interest that a major hindrance to his ambitions with Mary was her continued thwarted relationship with Laurin Zilliacus and he had hoped to save her from what he considered to be a source of great unhappiness. Finally acknowledging that they would remain lifelong friends but no more, Lock told Mary in a letter, ‘it has always saddened me to know you have had so much unhappiness, especially when it seemed you had everything else beside that one great satisfaction of your life’.39
The Middlesborough Survey proposed the building of primary schools to support the new estates planned for 28,000 people who would be housed over the following 15 years. Mary may well have influenced the parts of the report that described the provision of schools and the inadequacies of existing school buildings in the light of the 1944 Education Act.40 But while the survey learned from Mary, her involvement is also significant in the development of her own career as Lock’s practice worked as a multi-disciplinary collective, and sought to engage politicians and citizens with the planning process together with experts, something which also typifies the Hertfordshire project and later work at the Ministry of Education.41
Mary continued a close relationship with Bedales during the 1930s and 1940s and made regular visits. She continued to believe in its original progressive principles and derived strength in her convictions from those who continued with the school’s work. For a time, she was invited to make a more permanent home there through the invitation of Ken Keast, a teacher who had come to Bedales, on Mary’s advice, after suffering a traumatic experience supervising a group of schoolboys, several of whom had died on a school trip. Keast was also in love with Mary and seeing her as a future wife, appealed for her returned affection from the spring of 1936 until the outbreak of war but, as with the many suitors during these years, his hopes were thwarted.42
Continued contact with Bedales also provided a connection with the world of education, its contemporary progressive experiments and Modernist design. During the 1930s Mary regularly visited Bill Curry, a former teacher at Bedales and his wife Ena. On the day that war broke out she was staying with the Currys at their home, ‘High Cross’ at Dartington, near Totnes.43 Curry was then the head of the recently-established experimental school at Dartington Hall. The architectural style of the house proclaimed the headmaster’s values. It was modern with a strong orientation towards the future and international in both foundation and outlook. However, it was not Curry but rather John Newsom, also a mutual friend of Henry Morris and the Crowleys, who finally provided the opportunity for concentrated work in the field of education during the opening year of the war.44
Newsom just called at Sewells Orchard, found Mary sunbathing on the lawn and said ‘would you like to come and work on trying to do something about school meals in Hertfordshire Education Dept?’45