Study and Travel 1920s–1930s

It is too easy to let life pass on, over us, instead of entering into it, becoming truly alive, and turning it into something dynamic and fit to interpret great meaning and purpose.¹

Alan Powers sees the 1930s as the defining decade for British Modernism.² Through Mary Crowley’s diaries, we gain access to a creative world which, for some among this particular generation and social class, was thrilling. The diary entries are richly descriptive: they have an urgent tone, eager to record, so as not to forget, the sights, sounds, smells, thoughts and observations that might otherwise dissipate with time. Here we find fine descriptions and sketches of landscapes and buildings, and while thoughts and comments on these weave through the travel journals, Mary’s feelings about her self, her place in the world and her relationships with others are rarely stated. Travel has always been an imperative for young architects and this period of the early 1930s, a significant moment for Modernism in Europe, led her to visit significant growth points. However, travel for a lone young woman, even an architecture student, was not at that time an easy matter. Holidays had generally been taken with her parents and while these were mainly for leisure and pleasure, occasionally, due to her father’s keen interest in architecture and design and especially in environments for the young, there were outings to view significant sites facilitated by introductions from contacts at home.

In general, opportunities to visit and to draw sites of specific interest were seldom missed. Through such activities we glimpse something of Mary’s early reaction to Modernism a response which would have been expected of any student of architecture at the time. For example, on returning from Switzerland to take up her place at the Architectural Association (AA), Mary travelled with her mother via Paris and on the way took a detour by taxi, to view one of the new houses designed by Le Corbusier, viewed from the outside only. This was possibly the recently completed Maison Planeix which combined an artist’s studio and family living space.³ One gets the impression, however, from her frequent commentaries on the textures and colours of brickwork that the white walls of Modernism never quite won her over. This, as we shall see, was reflected later in a shift from concrete to brick and from prefabrication to traditional methods in the schools she became directly involved in planning.

2.1 Mary Crowley in the1930s. DLM personal collection

London, and especially Bedford Square in Bloomsbury was Mary’s base, a city that according to the architect Maxwell Fry was at the time, ‘a living centre of the arts’.⁴ For five years from 1927 to 1932 Mary studied architecture at the AA. The AA, formally established in 1890, was at this time the most prestigious architectural school in the country with an international reputation. She was one of a cohort of 59, of whom 11 were female students.⁵ The AA had only recently, in 1917, opened its doors to women and there was still a prevailing expectation that architectural students would be young middle-class males.⁶ Female contemporaries among the students across the year groups during Mary’s five year training included Elisabeth Benjamin (1908–1999), Jessica Albery (1908–1991), Jane Drew (1911–1996), Judith Ledeboer (1901–1990),⁷ and Margaret Justin Blanco White (1911–2001). The cohort also included Max Lock (1909–1988) and John Brandon-Jones (1908–1999). Many of these fellow students were to become life-long friends.

During this period, in the UK, Europe and beyond, architecture was regarded as a thoroughly male profession and when women succeeded, which was rare, it was believed that their designs should do nothing to undermine their femininity. In Germany, at the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius, women were barred from architecture courses and confined to textiles and weaving.⁸ In England, the social expectations of women in practice are illustrated by the experience of Elisabeth Scott, who had become the first woman to qualify at the AA in 1924 and who went on to win the highly competitive commission to design the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. Both Mary Crowley and Judith Ledeboer admired Scott who in turn ensured that they both had the opportunity to work alongside her on this major theatre project.⁹ Scott had to tolerate suggestions made in the press at the time that as a woman she could not really have been responsible for a theatre design regarded as, strong, direct and bold: the implication being that a man must have been responsible for the main decisions. A journalist commented, ‘it seemed almost incredible that she could have produced something that was so extremely opposed to her own personality’.¹⁰ The landscape designer Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900–1996) recalled that ‘Elisabeth was gentle, unassuming, determined, and with a personal integrity that acknowledged her associates’ help’.¹¹ This judgement implies personality traits in common with Mary who displayed similar characteristics throughout her life. It could well underline how, to succeed in this field, women were forced by social and cultural expectations to tread a very fine line with regard to their gender identity. How far this wider climate impacted on Mary’s career as a female architect needs consideration in the context of her career, dominated by domestic projects and designing environments principally used by women and children. The field of education, whose professional body was predominantly female, provided a form of architectural practice more acceptable to clients and the general public than more general architectural commissions.

At the AA, Mary proved to be a very able student from the start, abler than the majority of her male counterparts studying exactly the same syllabus. It became the norm for her to be awarded merits and distinctions for coursework. She gained merits for five subjects taken during her first term in the autumn of 1927: only her model let her down. Best in year was achieved by fellow student Edward Wilfred Nassau Mallows (1905–1998).¹² Possibly this arose from Mary not sitting her first year exams: the records showing her ‘away’, perhaps owing to illness, which must have reduced her final marks.¹³

2.2 An Educational Centre for Arts and Sciences by Mary Crowley, fifth year. Architectural Association Archives 16

During her second year, Mary achieved highest marks in the first term, studying Greek architecture and Greek and Roman History.¹⁴ John Brandon-Jones joined Mary’s cohort having spent some time in practice as a 17-year-old assistant to the office of the architect Oswald P. Milne, and soon proved to be a student of distinction. In the first term of the third year, the syllabus included a design for the construction of a school hall and Mary, not surprisingly, gained merits for this work. This laid the ground for her final year thesis, ‘An Educational Centre for Arts and Sciences’ (Fig. 2.2). Mary’s thesis was one of only four to pass with distinction and through this she became the first female architect ever to win the end of year first prize.¹⁵

It was a stimulating period for study at the AA when its syllabus was beginning to be influenced by Dutch and Scandinavian developments, certainly reflected in Mary’s travels as well as in her life long architectural philosophy. At this time the school became the first to receive recognition of its diploma for full professional qualification. Teaching at the AA during these years were the landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900–1996),¹⁷ Howard Robertson (1888–1963),¹⁸ and Frank Yerbury (1885–1970).¹⁹ Robertson became principal of the School in 1926 and later director of education from 1929 to 1935. Yerbury was the School administrator until he resigned in 1937 to spend more time developing the Building Centre, a concept that he had nurtured at the AA.²⁰ Yerbury was also a talented photographer with a special interest in documenting the Modernist movement in Europe. As such he profoundly influenced the direction taken by the AA during the 1930s and became the prime source of information on and contact with the contemporary architecture and leading architects in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

2.3 Studio portrait of Mary as student at the AA. IOE Archives, ME/A/1/11

At this time, Mary was living with her parents and she commuted daily from Welwyn Garden City to King’s Cross. In her spare time she taught herself to drive the family Jowett.

She was an excellent and hard-working student as her marks indicate. Yet, though pleased to be pursuing training that fitted her talents well, she was also somewhat troubled about the overall point and purpose of her life and occasionally a longed for simplicity spilled into her diary entries.

Why this striving after effort, this doubting, this everlasting sense of just missing things nearly in our grasp, this feeling of never getting any further? Why can’t we be content to accept one day after another for what it brings, to notice how the clouds pass; how the flowers suck in the sun, letting it pass through them, transform them, smell good smells; and above all to enjoy being with others, noticing things they like, careful never to hurt them.

This intense reflection on time and materiality and the challenge of being alive in the present may have been influenced by Zilliacus who became fascinated by, and sympathetic to psychotherapy in his educational projects. But it also reflects a restlessness experienced by other highly educated women of the time from Quaker backgrounds. A contemporary, Francesca Wilson (1888–1981) struck a similar tone as she reflected on her motivation to carry out relief work after the First World War

I wanted foreign travel, adventure, romance, the unknown … The main force driving me … has been first of all a desire for adventure and a new experience and later on a longing for an activity that would take me out of myself, out of the all too bookish world I had lived in.²¹

Students enjoyed a good social life and a great deal of fun at the AA as many contemporary accounts testify.²² There was serious work but this was accompanied by development of strong and lasting friendships in an atmosphere of laughter and music provided by a gramophone in one of the studios. Mary, who read avidly, at this time was consuming Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and Bruno Taut’s Modern Architecture as well as discovering the sculpture of Carl Milles (1875–1955), whose work first came to an international audience when it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1927. Meeting Milles and his wife Olga at their home and garden in Stockholm in the summer of 1930 was to have a profound influence on Mary as we shall see.²³

The annual AA pantomime was an artistic and dramatic highlight, taken very seriously by staff and students as images preserved from the time illustrate. Mary was invited to participate at the end of the first term of her second year of study and took a role again in the next two productions. In Mary’s case, this demanded a dramatic transformation of character and offered the opportunity to reflect deeply on the way that she presented herself in the world and how others saw her.

Last week, I made myself into somebody else, someone with sleek hair, with a curl under each ear, with painted cheeks and arched eyebrows and ear rings. She wasn’t me; she was someone they seemed to think was attractive and someone who could twist people around her little finger, perhaps. They told me I ought always to look like that. Yes, perhaps if I chose I could come out of myself and act like that rather dazzling earringy person and not be mistaken for ‘M’ and ‘pure’! But if I do not choose, that is that. It’s interesting, perhaps, to know that I could if I wished.²⁴

This reflection is revealing given the usual reserve and self-effacement that those who knew her throughout her life recalled. In her own way she was an attractive woman as evidenced by the many male admirers she had to deal with during these years. In addition to the ongoing relationship with Laurin Zilliacus, she received the attentions of Geoffrey Jellicoe, John Brandon-Jones and Ernő Goldfinger (1902–1987) who were perhaps each able to see in their different ways that dazzling person ‘lurking within’.²⁵

2.4 Mary Crowley appearing in the annual AA pantomime, 1928. Architectural Association Archives

The AA was a hub of activity attracting architecture students from across the UK and there were regular opportunities to socialize with visiting students from other cities. On one such occasion Mary dined with visitors, enjoying conversation with the AA Librarian and architect Hope Bagenal (1888–1979)²⁶ after which taxis were taken to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) galleries where the crowd danced from 1.00am until 5.20am, ‘the best of our dances being of course, that there are more men than women!’²⁷ And there were exhibitions to attend such as the Dutch Art Exhibition at Burlington House in January 1929 where Mary took note of the colours and light and of Van Gogh’s ‘relentless brilliance of colour and movement’.²⁸

Her views on the training she received were mixed. Mary joined the AA at a time of international flux and excitement at major changes in approaches to architecture while the syllabus she encountered was still organized along the lines of the classical Beaux-Arts model. Her early years of study coincided with a growing interest in Continental Modernism especially after the first English translation of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (Vers une Architecture) was published in 1927. This book was widely reviewed and discussed causing a ferment of interest and diversity of reactions.²⁹ Such a context explains Mary’s critical assessment of the education she received at the AA. She was appreciative of the teaching and the atmosphere but with hindsight was critical of the rather conservative and traditional approaches to training, feeling a lot more could have been achieved and a richer education encountered, as occurred following a ‘revolution’ at the school shortly before the war. The several prizes, awards and medals received for her work she lightly dismissed as inevitable ‘if you simply got on with things’, an attitude quite in character as she was known for a continuing reluctance to acknowledge her own talents and real achievements. One of her awards was earned in her final year: the French medal from the ‘Société des Architectes’.³¹

2.5 Mary Crowley receiving the French medal from the ‘Societe des Architects’, July 1932.³⁰ Architectural Association Archives

Her final thesis, an educational centre for a town of 25,000 inhabitants won a distinction. The site chosen was nearby the recreation grounds at Welwyn Garden City, near her family home. The scheme was envisaged as an extension on a larger scale of such experiments as those she was familiar with through her father’s career, and she mentioned both the school system of Gary, Indiana that Ralph Crowley had visited in 1913 as well as the recently constructed Sawston Village College in Cambridgeshire (1927–1930), the first of Henry Morris’s celebrated series of colleges and ‘the most prophetic expression of what a community school might mean’.³² In Mary’s scheme, the buildings were to include a hall for meetings, concerts and theatricals with full-scale film projection facilities. The hall had removable seats that could be stored under the stage to facilitate dancing and other entertainments while folding French doors opened out onto a terrace and court. It contained a small public library ‘to be open all day to the public for lending and reference’ near to the students’ entrance and ‘divided into bays with glass partitions’. There was to be a special children’s room within the library ‘with clear-storey lighting over covered ways’. The plan contained handicraft rooms; workshops equipped for carpentry, metal work, art work as required; gymnasium and changing rooms for both sexes with shower baths; lecture rooms and staff rooms; first aid and music rooms; and classrooms for housewifery were to be adjacent to an infant welfare centre ‘so that the rooms can be used for afternoon classes for mothers as well as for evening classes.’ The welfare centre was to have a cross ventilated waiting room with a South West aspect and French doors out to gardens. It would have its own entrance complete with pram shelters and a basement for storing mechanical equipment.³³

It was assumed in the plan that there would be an adjacent ‘post-primary’ school for boys and girls and that the building would be available for use of this school during the day and used for adult education in the evening. The notion that education and welfare might be mutually supported in a progressive educational environment characterized by functionality was familiar in the discourses Mary knew through her father’s networks. An intergenerational space embracing the community for education, instruction and entertainment was essentially a statement about social justice and the building of a healthy and knowledgeable citizenry. Mary’s thesis drew more from educational progressivism than from aesthetics and demonstrated her growing understanding of the potential for an educationally informed architecture.

STUDY TOURS

Holland, Easter 1930

Holland was attractive at this time for those keen to see modernist developments in housing and public buildings. The old, set alongside the new, provided a rich and varied pallette. Mary and her family were not alone in admiring the domestic and public buildings of the Dutch towns and cities: the architect Norah Aiton (1904–1989) also knew Holland well. By her mid-twenties, Aiton had visited that country at least five times (in 1919, 1920, 1924, 1925, and 1927/8), spending one undergraduate summer working in the offices of P. J. H. Cuypers.³⁴ Mary travelled with her father to Holland over ten days at Easter in 1930. She may have prepared for her journey to Holland by reading A Wanderer in Holland by Edward Verrall Lucas (1868–1938) whose work, as a fellow Quaker, would have been known to the Crowley family.

On this occasion, they lodged at The American Hotel in Amsterdam, a noteable building by the architect Kromhout, where by chance Frank R. Yerbury (1885–1970) was also staying, preparing his second book of photographs on modern Dutch architecture.³⁵ Like Mary and her contemporaries at the AA, Yerbury was at this time enthusiastically turning to Scandinavia and to Holland for examples of the emerging Modernist style.³⁶ On this trip, Mary and her father accompanied Yerbury to view some significant new developments of housing schemes on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Yerbury also arranged a meeting at Volendam between Mary, her father and a group of other architects including E. R. Jarrett from the AA who were also intent on visiting and viewing Dutch architectural innovation. Mary recorded amusement in her diary at the contrast between the traditional architectural surroundings of their cosy hotel and the collective interests of the group meeting there: ‘I like the way we come to a remote fishing village away from everywhere in Holland and find six architects in the same inn!’³⁷

Travelling by bus, the group went to see the ‘new architecture’ at Hilversum. Hilversum, in 1930, was developing fast due to the influence of the recently appointed city architect Willem Marinus Dudok (1884–1974). Several schools were under construction as was the Town Hall, later regarded as Dudok’s finest work.³⁸ Mary may have seen Dudok’s Rembrandt School, completed in 1920. Here was an early effort to humanize and de-institutionalize the school using traditional materials with close attention to scale and the provision of good quality courtyard interiors. If the group had entered the school they would have noted the series of recessed alcoves along the corridor to provide spaces for small group work and she would have enjoyed the internal exposed dark brickwork and colourful plastered walls.

In the neighbouring housing the brickwork and clean lines appealed, ‘the houses seem rational and reasonable and a lot of them very attractive’.³⁹ But there was more than a straightforward attention to the functional. Unlike the housing developments that were familiar in England, here Mary observed that the ‘details are more carefully thought out; there is better woodwork and more space sacrificed so that the architect can enjoy himself a little’. Given these remarks, we can see that Mary was not convinced by Le Corbusier’s diatribe on style and rational morality. Rather, the social housing in Hilversum may have reminded Mary of her own family’s commitment to the Garden City movement in England during her childhood. Here, she found good examples of municipal housing grouped around garden and communal areas.

In contrast to the modernist architecture of Dudok’s Hilversum, Mary had a clear fondness for the traditional domestic architecture and landscape found, for example in the small town of Middelburg which became one of her favourite places to stay in Holland. She returned to the same hotel at Middelburg several times during this period.⁴⁰ Always observing and recording the features of her immediate environment, we are able to glimpse what she valued and these were often objects or designs offering aesthetic pleasure. In her travel journal, for example, she describes the interior of one of the hotel toilets which was long and narrow and has a ‘quite wonderful collection of blue and white tiles about 4 feet up the walls. Hardly any two are alike and every thinkable bird or beast is painted on them. It is a little museum in itself.’ Later, as a school architect, she and her partner David would delight in incorporating blue and white ceramic tiles by the ceramicist Dorothy Annan into Woodside school at Amersham, each one different from the other so that the eyes of children might be drawn to them in curiosity. Annan produced tiles decorated with birds and other small creatures for the splashboard of classroom workspace sinks as well as for water fountains in the school.⁴¹

She enjoyed enormously what Middelburg had to offer, a large prosperous town full of quaint squares where she took time to note in her diary the attractive scene of young children, closely observed, inhabiting the squares and playing informally.

In the centre of the square is a great group of chestnut trees just come out into leaf and having that new freshness about them and yesterday there were lots of schoolchildren playing in groups, pretending to have gym – classes, or hopscotch or resting round the stone group, or merely chatting. Here and there were groups of boys of 11 or 12 with their bicycles lounging in a self-conscious way smoking cigarettes – one even had a cigarette holder. Occasionally a bicycle would dash around the square …

Her diary paints images of ‘an absolute peace which is not a dead and forgotten peace but one which is alive’.⁴²

Here, Mary reflected on her enjoyment of A Wanderer in Holland, particularly the chapter on Middelburg: ‘As E V Lucas says, everything here is curved and rounded. There is no sharpness anywhere. All the town is planned on circular shapes.’ Even the entrance to the W.C. in the hotel, she noticed, was curved. She appreciated the many town squares and the most perfect square of all was ‘the one with the 1882 anchor house’ where she spent the morning sketching.

At The Haague, she was impressed by the recently constructed Christian Science Church by Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934), a brick building somewhat in the style of the Hilversum Town Hall. However, since she was traveling with her father, thoughts of visiting and observing environments designed for education were never far away and while staying at a vegetarian hotel in Delft, Mary and her father visited local schools.

They discovered two ‘extraordinarily attractive schools’ near the gasworks. One a kindergarten, very simple but delightfully worked out, built in a grey coloured brick with blue paintwork and another ‘delightful one, larger and built around a court, with shiny tiled roofs and orange tiles and white coloured windows’. As was to become a life-long practice, Mary sketched these in her notebook.

The AA Study Tour in Scandinavia, July 1930

it was really rather a landmark.⁴³

Before the early 1920s, the academic and architectural interests of students attending courses at the AA had been guided towards developments in Dutch design but this began to shift towards an interest in Scandinavia where significant relationships between the AA and the Nordic countries were developing. Sweden’s Crown Prince Gustav Adolf VI (1882–1973) was interested in modern developments in architecture and in 1923 visited the AA, touring the studios, inspecting the curriculum and looking at students’ work. From this visit, there developed a joint commitment to bring together a more formal exchange between the work of the AA and Swedish architects. Frank Yerbury, then secretary of the AA was also a council member of the Anglo-Swedish society. Yerbury took up the invitation and within a few months had visited Sweden to make contacts and to make arrangements for a major exhibition of Swedish architectural work to be hosted by the AA. While in Stockholm, Yerbury saw the recently completed City Hall (Stadhus) which he declared to be ‘perhaps the finest modern building in the world … a veritable exhibition of a modern school of craftsmanship’.⁴⁴ The building, designed by Ragnar Östberg (1866–1945) was built on a prominent site overlooking Riddarfjärden between 1911 and 1923 and was a remarkable achievement in blending renaissance and modern art forms.

When the Swedish exhibition eventually opened at the London RIBA galleries in May 1924, unsurprisingly, a model of the Stockholm city hall formed the centrepiece. All this interest and exchange activity stimulated further commitments and the destination of the annual AA study tour the following year, 1925, became Stockholm. Yerbury’s recent contacts ensured that on embarking at the docks, the group was met by Östberg in person, who warmly greeted the students and personally guided them around his spectacular building.

Not only was London coming to appreciate Scandinavian Modernism, but its influence was also reaching across the Atlantic. By this time, the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950) had settled in America following his success in an architectural competition and in 1928, his old friend Ragnar Östberg was also unsuccessfully courted by various American schools of architecture to join them as visiting professor.⁴⁵