Date: 17 December 07
Author: By Dr Miles Glendinning
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Sir Basil Spence (1907-76) was arguably the most publicly celebrated British architect of the 20th century, as well as one of the most prolific. Although his active years as an architect corresponded almost exactly with the heyday of modern architecture, he was actually a hybrid character.
Spence’s buildings were representative of several key currents in post-war British architecture: from the 1960s he was running three major offices – two in London, one in Edinburgh – and was involved in almost every major area of post-war building, including government and office buildings, schools, universities, civic centres and airports; these collective, social building complexes exemplified the Welfare State years and the ascendancy of Modernism within architecture. But, as a renowned church architect, and a lover of traditional artistic beauty, Spence also kept one very substantial foot in the pre-Modern architectural world of hierarchical stateliness. Indeed, it was his design of the new Coventry Cathedral, which he won in a very prominent competition in 1951 and finally completed in 1962, that brought him his greatest international fame.
Spence was born in Bombay in 1907 to Indian colonial parents of Scottish descent. At 12 years old, he was sent to live with an aunt in Edinburgh and attended George Watson’s College, before studying architecture at Edinburgh College of Art between 1925 and 1931; in 1930-1 he was on a placement at Edwin Lutyens’s office in London. His architectural education was firmly rooted in the late 19th century tradition which combined Beaux-Arts stately rationalism with the artistic ethos of the Arts and Crafts movement; already he was famed for his seductive drawing skills.
During the 1930s, after graduating, Spence worked as a part-time lecturer at ECA and entered into partnership with his colleague William Kininmonth; the two designed a number of Edinburgh private houses. During the war, while many socialistic architects in public offices secured reserved status, Spence was in active service in the British Army Camouflage Unit between 1939 and 1944 as a Major (promoted to Staff Captain during the final year of the war). Subsequently Spence founded his own practice, Basil Spence and Partners, in Edinburgh. In 1951, he also set up office in London and his Scottish office became known as Spence Glover & Ferguson. Early projects from the late 1930s to the early 1950s included pavilions and stands for both English and Scottish industry exhibitions.
During the earliest post-war reconstruction era Spence was hugely successful, his design verve adding a more flamboyant touch to national programmes otherwise dominated by others’ anonymously collective and repetitive work. In school design, for example, while the modest Herts primary Schools of the late 40s won wide public recognition, Spence designed more lavish solutions in schools like Duncanrig Secondary School in East Kilbride, Kilsyth Secondary, and Thurso High School. He also specialised in university buildings (helped in many cases by his partner Jack Bonnington), as at the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh (masterplanned in 1955), Nottingham, Liverpool, Durham and, of course, Sussex (from 1959), the first of the post-war New Universities programme.
The social housing that had been a feature of his pre-war career also featured in his later work and includes small projects for the fishing communities of Dunbar and Newhaven, as well as the monumental 20-storey concrete slabs of Glasgow’s Hutchesontown-Gorbals C (1960-6). But Spence himself valued most highly the grand ‘national’ projects that came in the wake of Coventry. His design for the British Embassy chancery in Rome (1959-63; built 1968-71) responded to a sensitive and prestigious site through a mix of traditional imagery and modern lightness: the ‘modern palazzo’, faced in Roman travertine in reflection of the late 1950s’ movement away from functionalist austerity towards ‘enriched forms’, was raised above flowing parkland landscaping on slender stilts.
By contrast, Spence’s almost exactly contemporary Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks in Central London was really a chunk of city, embedded in the wider urban fabric. It adapted the dense, avant-garde ‘megastructure’ formula of the 60s to house one of the most traditional, elite units of the British Army on a highly constrained site, including a tower block of soldiers’ family flats.
Honoured by the state and his profession, Spence became a household name, with prominent positions in bodies like the Royal Academy, the RFAC and the RIBA. But contemporary avant-garde critics as well as historians of Modernism were, and still are, uncertain how to treat him. His exuberant public persona, including a voracious skill in exploiting the mass media, and the forceful, sometimes even scenographic forms of his buildings are rather at variance with the ethos of anonymous collectivity and public service that dominated early post-war architecture up to the mid 50s; the same qualities began, from the late 50s, to attract increasingly vociferous criticism from a younger architectural generation, who communicated using bold and much more individualistic utopian and metaphoric language.
Arguably, though, the way in which Spence bridged the gap between the sometimes inaccessible world of Modern architecture and more popular or commercial approaches, as well as reaching back to a more traditional era of craft skills and private pupillage, makes him of greater importance than this always artificially restricted elite of poetic hero-figures, in illustrating the way post-war modern architecture worked.
Coventry Cathedral - Interior view of baptistery, font and window.
British Embassy, Rome - North west elevation showing pool and fountain.
British Pavillion, Expo 1967
Coventry Cathedral - Sketch perspective of cathedral from south east 1951.
The Gorbals, Glasgow - View from ground level of hanging balconies in Area C with child in foreground, 1965
Images: Crown Copyright RCAHMS 2007
© Dr Miles Glendinning
A series of free talks and lectures accompanies the exhibition 'Back to the Future; Sir Basil Spence 1907-1976' currently showing at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh until Feb 10th 2008.
Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks: Sir Basil Spence and the Architecture of Modern Military Ceremony
Mon 21st Jan, 2008.
Gymnasium - Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Art Galleries), Edinburgh
Miles Glendinning, Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies at Edinburgh College of Art, explores Spence's ingenious and controversial design for the Knightsbridge barracks for the Household Cavalry (1959-70).
The Architect and the Artists
Mon 4th Feb 2008 12.45-1.30pm
Dean Gallery
Basil Spence considered art to be an essential component of architecture. Philip Long, co-curator of the exhibition Back to the Future, traces the architect's extensive involvement with figures such as Graham Sutherland, Jacob Epstein and John Piper.
Basil Spence and adventures in exhibition architecture
Tue 5th Feb 2008 12.45-1.30pm
Hawthorden Lecture Theatre, National Gallery complex, Edinburgh
Brian Edwards, Professor of Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, explores the methods used by Spence to develop new ideas through the medium of temporary exhibition architecture including the controversial British Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal.
For further information about the Basil Spence exhibitions, special events and the archive, visit www.basilspence.org.uk
