Smithson

English architectural partnership formed in 1950 by Peter Smithson (b Stockton-on-Tees, Yorks (now in Cleveland), 18 Sept 1923) and his wife Alison Smithson [n?e Gill] (b Sheffield, Yorks, 22 June 1928; d London, 16 Aug 1993). They met at the University of Durham. Peter Smithson's studies were interrupted by wartime military service in India and Burma. After World War II he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools (1948-9). Married in 1949, they both worked for the London County Council's Architects' Schools Division (1949-50). Their winning entry for the Hunstanton School (Norfolk) competition (1949-50) aroused international attention. For the Smithsons it constituted a protest against current architectural attitudes by which they rejected British informality, labelled by Architectural Review as the New Empiricism, already widely found in British post-war housing and in the industrialized school building programmes of which the Hertfordshire programme was to play a leading role. The Hunstanton School (completed 1954), with its exposed steel frame with glass and brick infill, had been influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's new Illinois Institute of Technology campus (1945), Chicago. The Hunstanton School was to form part of the beginnings of a new intellectual enterprise, an attempt to achieve a directness and a comprehensibility and respect for materials and structure; this approach would become known as 'NEW BRUTALISM'.

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