Ever wondered who coined that wistful yet sinister phrase "streets in the sky"? Ever wondered whatever happened to the space-age house of the future? Ever wondered why so many architects talk rather than build? Meet Alison and Peter Smithson, post-war masters of architectural hype. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the Smithsons were one of the trendiest design couples in Britain. Critics hung on their every word. Then they lost the plot, got old and died, and now they are getting an exhibition at London's Design Museum. It's not a reappraisal, and it's not the caning they deserve, but it's a start. The Smithsons, both fiercely intellectual, embodied the post-war architectural avant-garde in Britain. They were attached to the hot 'n' happening Independent Group of pop artists at the ICA. They drove trendy cars and wore weird clothes. They were a bit disrespectful about Le Corbusier, widely regarded as God by the architectural elite. They proposed a personality-led alternative to the sterile post-war "international style" of modernism. Oh yes, the Smithsons were manifesto architects, signature designers, colourful characters in an age of drab uniformity. But today, it's all a bit puzzling. They didn't build much, and a lot of it went wrong. Why was everyone convinced they were so good? Why do some people still refer to them with reverence?
Alison was always the mouthy one, inclined to wear bizarre self-designed clothes. She once wrote a book called "AS in DS" about the view through the windscreen of her Citroen DS (pronounced Déesse, as in Goddess, which may well be how AS saw herself). The great and mischievous British architect James Stirling got her measure. At a party once he shut her up by taking hold of her ludicrously exaggerated collar and tying it over her head. She threw a glass of wine over him, but Jim was used to that.
Three important projects of theirs survive: the late 1940s Hunstanton School in Norfolk, the mid 1960s Economist Building in London's St. James, and the early 1970s Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist complex of council-house slabs in East London. Their all-plastic 1956 "House of the Future" for the Ideal Home exhibition was also influential. There are some other bits and pieces, but that's about it, really. The Smithsons never hit the international big time like Stirling, their contemporary and sparring partner. Their project to build the British Embassy in Brasilia was axed. But unlike Stirling they theorized endlessly.
The Design Museum is taking a very specific line: the house. The show looks at the 1956 House of the Future project - like a Dan Dare version of Barbarella, which means no sex - and their last project, the "Hexenhaus" for a client in Germany. The future of the house turned out to be less Dan Dare, more Black Forest. The Smithsons (Alison died in 1993, Peter in 2003) always promised far more than they could ever deliver. They are a warning to all the architectural hypemeisters at large today: in the end, posterity ignores your blather and judges you only on what you build.
