How four architects set the agenda for late 20th-century modernism on a quiet creek in Cornwall

[Celerity]

https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/the-classics-creek-vean-pillwood-house/



To celebrate the recent release of Issue No.3 of The Modern House Magazine, we’re sharing a story from our series that celebrates the very best and most influential examples of British modernism, The Classics. For issue No.3, our Editor, Charlie Monaghan, and Lead Photographer, Elliot Sheppard, discovered how four ambitious young architects came together in the early-mid 1960s to design a house on a sleepy Cornish creek – setting their intention for redefining modernism in the latter half of the 20th century. Two members of the group would become some of the biggest names in architecture to this day, while one would build another house on the same creek that embodied their high-tech vision. To see this story and many more in print, pick up your set of issue No.2 and No.3 today.



Charlie: If you had big ambitions in architecture in the early 1960s, Yale University’s department of architecture was a good place to be. The faculty was chaired at the time by Paul Rudolph, a leading American modernist who had been taught by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius at Harvard. On the Yale campus were buildings by Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, the latter having joined the faculty in 1947 – a time in which his colleagues would’ve included Josef Albers and Philip Johnson, still making appearances at Yale in the 1960s. A new library by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was about to start construction. Serge Chermayeff and Vincent Scully were professors. The best architects in the world were teaching in buildings that represented the most experimental architecture of the time. In 1962, a group of Brits were just about to graduate. Their names were Norman Foster and Su and Richard Rogers.



They had arrived in 1961 from an austere postwar Britain that hadn’t embraced modernism in the way the United States, fuelled by economic prosperity, was doing with unfretted fervour. Richard had arrived in the US by sea, on the Queen Elizabeth. “It had towered over Southampton,” he later recalled. “In New York, it was dwarfed by the buildings.” America was big, bold and modern – a glamorous, energised contrast to war-scarred Europe. The trio were in their element, inspired and invigorated by the US architectural scene.



Penniless but eager, they relentlessly toured works by Frank Lloyd Wright, blagging or sneaking their way into buildings such as Fallingwater. They went to see Kahn talk in Philadelphia, forged close relationships with Chermayeff and Johnson, and drank martinis with James Stirling at Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York. It was the experience of being immersed in architecture, as much as their education, that was formative for the ambitious trio.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. There have to be better examples. I would not like living in those. Seem like industrial warehouses

[Celerity]

2. to each their own

[Historic NY]

3. Meh....concrete w/o sealing is an allegerists nightmare..

they ripped down a good portion of a brutalist public building in Orange Co. NY. I held some m,eeting in a new firehouse and suddenly was overcome with whatever was going on in the building. I discovered the contractors left piles of concrete dust in an electrical trench and behind steel structure that spread it what the HVAC was working.

[yonder]

4. I generally like the design but the use of CMU walls is a drawback, IMO.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Vegetation needs to grow a lot higher.

Some kudzu would help.