Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain

INTRODUCTION

ON A BITTERLY COLD DAY IN MARCH 1931, THREE travellers left the railway station in the provincial German town of Dessau, in the Free State of Anhalt. Dressed in long, dark overcoats and trilby hats, they made their way along a short street of 19th-century wooden-framed houses, bracing themselves against the biting wind. Turning a corner, they stopped in their tracks. Before them lay the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school of art, architecture and design founded by Walter Gropius. They gazed at the complex of stark, geometric buildings, linked by an aerial glass bridge. It was a powerful vision of the future.1

One of the three, the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard, reached for his cine-camera. Sensing this was a moment for posterity, he filmed his friends, architects Wells Coates and Serge Chermayeff, as they strode ahead of him towards the Bauhaus. Then through the camera's lens, he avidly devoured the buildings' architectural details, sweeping back and forth across the vast glass curtain wall, cantilevered steel-framed balconies, flat roofs and grey and white concrete facades. The shots were unsteady, as his hands shook with excitement. The school building, which had only opened just five years earlier in 1926, was now virtually deserted, under threat of imminent closure by the local Nazi party. In the Director's office they were told that 'Dr Gropius was no longer there, in fact no-one was there.'2 Disappointed, but 'greatly impressed with the building as a building', the trio explored the site, peering into empty workshops, classrooms, theatre, offices, student apartments and refectory, absorbing everything, including the radical serif-free font of the typography proudly proclaiming the art school's name:

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As snow began to fall, the men made the short journey to the nearby suburb of Törten. They wandered through the streets of small, low-cost, prefabricated houses that Walter Gropius had designed for industrial workers, leaving tracks of dark footprints in the gathering white.

Years later Pritchard recalled the significance of the visit: 'It had a very powerful impact on me. I did not know it then, but both the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius were to have an enormous influence on much of my future.'3

In fact, the Bauhaus, its ideas and protagonists would influence not just Pritchard's life, but also play a key role in the story of 20th-century design and architecture - in Britain and across the globe. Pritchard's cine footage, rediscovered in 2016, contains some of the earliest-known moving images of the art school, and was certainly the first to be brought back to Britain. It represents the beginning of an important dialogue between the ideas of the Bauhaus Masters and a group of pioneers of British Modernism, which will form the narrative of this book.

Founding members of the British Twentieth Century Group, Pritchard, Canadian Coates and Russian-born Chermayeff were part of a small, but growing band of individuals in Britain embracing the new architecture at the start of the 1930s. The movement was already well established in continental Europe - particularly in France, the Netherlands and Germany, where the Weimar government had been swift to realize the economic imperative of marrying art and industry.

The three men had travelled from London to Stuttgart on the Orient Express, ostensibly on a business trip, but the journey became something of an architectural pilgrimage, taking in many of Germany's new modern developments - department stores, factories, private houses and residential estates.4 In Stuttgart they toured the experimental 1927 Weissenhof Estate, the work of 17 architects and a showcase for the new techniques and materials of International Modernism. Erich Mendelsohn, one of the founders of the influential Der Ring group of architects, showed the trio over his Metalworkers' Union building in Berlin and entertained them at his spectacular new lakeside home, Am Rupenhorn.5 While in the city, they also visited the vast Großsiedlung Siemensstadt Estate and Bruno Taut's monumental flat-roofed, horseshoe-shaped Hufeisensiedlung, built to house 3,000 members of the Gehag trade union.6 They had seen, at first hand, Modernism not just as a style breaking with the past, but as the realization of a new Utopian vision, that architecture could improve the lives of ordinary men and women in the 20th century.7

Pritchard filmed most of the Modernist landmarks they visited and Chermayeff also kept a photographic diary of their trip to Germany, which he published in a jaunty article in Architectural Review (AR) in November that year.8 The publication, and its stablemate Architects' Journal (AJ), both owned and edited by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, played a key role in disseminating Modernist ideas and imagery in late 1920s and 1930s Britain, but prior to the visit of Pritchard and his colleagues, relatively little was known about the Bauhaus. The earliest mention of Walter Gropius and the foundation of the Bauhaus (at its first location, in Weimar), appeared in the July 1924 edition of AR in a series about German architects.9 At the time of the trio's visit the only image of the Dessau Bauhaus that had been published in Britain was a single photograph in Bruno Taut's 1929 book Modern Architecture, accompanied by the legend: 'House for Students at Dessau'.10 The series of 14 Bauhaus Bücher (1925-30), edited by Walter Gropius and designed by Lászlo Móholy-Nagy had not yet been translated into English, so information about the school, its architecture and teaching methods was scarce and the proto-Modernists received only scant details from German magazines brought back to London, a few continental journals in the library of the Design and Industries Association, and the first-hand accounts of individuals such as Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, founders of Dartington Hall School in Devon, who had visited the Weimar Bauhaus in the early 1920s.11

On their return to London, Pritchard, Coates and Chermayeff no doubt discussed their experiences with their friend, the influential architecture critic and bon viveur, Philip Morton Shand. A fluent German speaker, he travelled extensively on the continent as a correspondent for both AR and AJ and first wrote about the Bauhaus in June 1931, after the trio's visit to Dessau. He was also instrumental in bringing Walter Gropius to Britain, first for an exhibition of his work at the Royal Institute of British Architects in May 1934 and, a few months later, to seek refuge from Nazi persecution. Morton Shand's role in the story is a key one, as a translator of Gropius's work and an early champion of plywood furniture.

Inspired by what they had seen in Germany, in autumn 1931 Jack Pritchard and Wells Coates set up Isokon, a company whose aim was to create mass-produced unit housing and furniture. Following discussions with Jack's wife Rosemary 'Molly' Pritchard, a Cambridge graduate and trainee psychiatrist, they abandoned their earlier plans to build a pair of houses in Hampstead. Instead, Molly drew up a new brief for Coates to build an apartment block of 'minimal' flats, aimed at young, middle-class professionals with an annual income of around £500 per year. Considering both domestic and spatial reform, she asked: 'How do we want to live? What sort of framework must we build around ourselves to make that living as pleasant as possible?'.12

Their conclusion was a community of small, serviced apartments with built-in furniture, into which tenants could move, bringing just 'a rug, a vase and a favourite painting'. 13 Completed in summer 1934, Wells Coates's Lawn Road Flats, or Isokon Building (as it later came to be known), is believed to be Britain's first reinforced-concrete apartment building and a Modernist manifesto in both a material and philosophical sense. Hampstead was the perfect locus for this experiment in social living, being home to key figures in the English avant-garde and a focal point for cultural refugees from Nazi Europe.

In a fitting coda to that snowy day in Dessau in March 1931, Pritchard went on to offer accommodation in the flats to three giants of the Modern movement, the Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer, who fled Germany as its political climate worsened. Pritchard employed them in his fledgling Isokon Furniture Company, to which they brought their considerable experience of industrial design. During their short stay in Britain between 1934 and 1937, they also worked on a wide range of other architectural and design projects, leaving their mark on British housing, education, retail, furniture, interior design and art. However, frustrated by the lack of opportunities in pre-war England they left London for the USA, where their work and teachings influenced a new generation of American architects and artists. After their departure, another Bauhäusler, the former metalwork professor Naum Slutzky, moved into the Lawn Road Flats and spent the rest of his life and career in Britain. Through his teaching work he championed the Bauhaus philosophy of marrying art with industry at the Royal College of Art and Birmingham College of...