Date: 02 October 07
Author: By Miles Glendinning
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The three turbulent decades after World War II saw a fundamental reorientation of British and Scottish national life. Externally, decolonisation and loss of great-power status was compensated for by the attempt to construct a new network of cultural influence based on the Commonwealth. Internally, a new focus was provided by the crusade of social reconstruction and welfare state-building.
Architecture was a key accessory in this transformation. That was only to be expected, as, unlike the other ‘arts’, it has always been closely bound up with power and the ‘establishment’. The particular form that connection took after 1945 was Modern Architecture. Closely bound up with socialism, this was a 20th-century internationalist movement which developed strong interconnections with disciplined nationalism.
In 1940s and early 50s Britain, Modern architecture was applied to the new national crusade of social reconstruction in the form of ‘coordinated planning’ by the State, modelled on the war-effort philosophy: here, the iconic figure was the ‘public’ architect-planner controlling a vast integrated State design organisation, and working as much through committees and plans as by direct personal design. In the late 50s, the focus of their activity within Britain increasingly shifted to the general consolidation of Modernist ‘public architecture’, through overarching establishment posts or hybrid private-public consultancy work; and they also began propagating its ideas abroad, especially as part of a new formula of post-imperial cultural and economic development within the Commonwealth.
The career of Sir Robert Matthew (1906-1975) – the most prominent Scottish architect of the 20th century - occupied the heart of this reformist quarter-century: his CV reads like a roll-call of the top jobs in the Modernist architectural establishment. It was always especially through the careers of ambitious Scots that the evolution of ‘Britishness’ could be most precisely gauged, and indeed the tenacious and forceful Matthew would doubtless have become a colonial governor or a field-marshal had he lived a century earlier.
Born in a family steeped in arts-and-crafts architectural traditionalism (his father having been partner to Sir Robert Lorimer), the young Robert Matthew responded to the 1930s crises by turning to socialism and international modernism. After a meteoric rise within Scottish government architecture, in 1946 he vaulted into the single most influential post in the shaping of ‘social architecture’ - that of chief architect of the London County Council, where he had charge of projects such as the Royal Festival Hall, the Lansbury Festival of Britain housing project, and the pioneering high-rise flats at Roehampton. Matthew was at the centre of all these revolutionary LCC innovations, including even the design of the Festival Hall, where new documentary evidence has suggested that he (rather than his deputy Leslie Martin) played a decisive role in the devising of the innovative ‘egg in a box’ auditorium section. When he left the LCC in 1953 for private practice and a university chair back home in Scotland, the London authority had become a world-renowned hotbed of collective social architecture, fostered by Matthew through the innovative system of decentralised architectural ‘group’ working.
From the mid 50s, Matthew led the move to disseminate these doctrines of social mass building across private practice, shaping such programmes as the new universities through private-public consultancies, and promoting Modernism through the reorganisation of architectural education. This shift in his work was epitomised by his controversial New Zealand House project (1954-62) - the first prominent tower block in central London, containing a new High Commission for New Zealand – but soon both the Edinburgh and London branches of his practice RMJM had begun to mushroom, with talented younger partners coming to the fore. This was the context for the 1965/6 commission to build Stirling University – the only ‘new university’ in Scotland – whose design was devolved by Matthew in its entirety to a team led by partner John Richards.
In parallel to the Stirling work, Matthew himself was engaged personally in a very different, less well-known new university project, as part of his longstanding work to introduce a modern regional planning system to the rapidly modernising statelet of Northern Ireland. From 1966, Matthew took a lead role in the planning of Ulster’s only new university, at Coleraine – the last significant project he himself designed personally - at the same time as Richards’s team was working on the first phase of the Stirling University project. The two initial, multi-purpose projects were both system-built for the sake of urgency, but otherwise they could not have been more different: the restrained, highly-regular horizontality of Richards’s Pathfoot Building, conceived on the basis of strongly held architectural principles of rational design, contrasted starkly with the loosely-planned, rambling, almost picturesque character of Matthew’s Phase 1 building at Coleraine; the almost traditional monumentality of the complete Stirling complex, in its lavish parkland setting, was also very different from Coleraine ‘Phase 2’, planned by Matthew in a nervously irregular megastructural form, with integrated ‘library spine’.
At the same time as all this welfare-state design work, Matthew increasingly turned to the old Scottish speciality of overseas ‘imperium’. He became a key architectural diplomat, propagating the ideals of modernist design and planning in international organisations often charged with the tensions of the Cold War and decolonisation: in this context, he attempted to reconcile Modernist concepts such as low-cost mass housing or regional planning with the cultural traditions, and quest for national identity, of Third-World countries.
From the late 1960s, he was also faced with the need to respond to the growing crises of Modernist architecture and the planned economy. Where some ‘great men’ of his generation, such as Holford or Spence, sank into relatively quiescent retirement, Matthew blazed up into a final burst of frenzied self-renewal, refocusing his efforts back home in Scotland, where he returned to his family architectural ‘roots’ in conservation by leading the drive to ‘save’ the classical Edinburgh New Town, and at the same time launching into a final ‘crusade’ of global environmentalism.
Matthew’s career, in addition to being of major significance in its own right within postwar Scottish and British architecture, as an exemplar of the Modern architect as organiser and reformist, rather than as ‘iconic designer’, also personifies the socialist and modernist attempt to reformulate and revitalise ‘British destiny’, and to create a ‘modern Scotland’.
Main image: Robert Matthew's Turnhouse Airport, seen after its completion in 1956.
Concept drawings by Matthew showing one of several alternative arrangements for the Edinburgh University Arts Redevelopment (implemented 1960-66).
Cashlie Power Station, Glen Lyon (one of three in his 1950's 'stone vernacular' style).
Concept drawing by Matthew for his Queens's College Dundee project (built from 1956).
Publication
Matthew’s career, in all its vast diversity, is now to be the subject of one of the most comprehensive biographical monographs on any British 20-century architect. Miles Glendinning’s Modern Architect: the Life and Times of Robert Matthew, will be published in spring 2008 by RIBA Publishing. (Advance enquiries: contact enquiries@ribapublishing.com)
Image Copyright: Miles Glendinning
