Peter Smithson

Architect, with his wife and partner Alison, of rich inventiveness

Peter Denham Smithson, architect: born Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham 18 September 1923; Banister Fletcher Professor of Architecture, University College London 1976-77; married 1949 Alison Gill (died 1993; one son, two daughters); died London 3 March 2003.

The inspired architect-poet Peter Smithson died with a numerological sense of style on the third day of the third month of the third year of the 21st century. He had been the other half of the great ideas team of post-war British architecture; his inseparable partner and wife, Alison Smithson, died a decade earlier.

Like Le Corbusier, whom they unequivocally admired ("Mies is great, but Corb communicates," as they once put it), the Smithsons created such a richly layered palimpsest of buildings, projects and poetic propositions, that their ultimate cultural legacy is, as yet, only partially fulfilled. In this regard, a new generation is already beginning to discover that these talented architects who realised relatively little none the less bequeathed a whole world of concepts and inventions that may now become a fertile point of departure for the architecture of this century.

Producing over 70 architectural projects and diagrammatic urban hypotheses in the space of 50 years, not to mention an equal number of sometimes overlapping texts, essays, manifestos, sundry intimate artworks, landscapes and even a novel by Alison, the Smithsons led a life of intense creativity. They were equally involved with the mores of their time, whether these were expressed in terms of automobiles, houses, furniture, fashion, or the changing format of their own domestic environment. With their unique artistic persona, they were as essential to the overall tone of the 1950s and 1960s as any other cultural hero of that epoch, be it John Osborne, Mary Quant or the Beatles.

Smithson was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1923 and attended the local grammar school. He trained as an architect at King's College, Newcastle, part of Durham University, where he met his future wife, Alison Gill. He graduated in 1948, after four years' war service, and joined the London County Council as an assistant architect in 1949. The following year he and Alison set up in private practice.

I first met Peter Smithson in 1953 when I was a student visiting the site of the New Brutalist, steel-framed Hunstanton School in Norfolk, just as it was nearing completion. Smithson cut a particularly dashing figure in those days, driving over the rough ground of the unfinished landscape in his Willys Jeep accompanied by Alison and their close colleagues the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and the photographer Nigel Henderson. This was the same quartet who had just mounted the "Parallels of Life and Art" exhibition at the ICA Gallery in Dover Street (1952) and who, four years later, would collaborate on an installation for "This is Tomorrow" at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Based on a typical Bethnal Green backyard shed, complete with old bicycle wheels on the roof and other homely junk, it was certainly the most iconoclastic, proto-Pop Art contribution to the exhibition.

Besides their lifelong penchant for evocative imagery, often accompanied by somewhat unusual analogies, the Smithsons in the early 1950s were on the cutting edge of late modern architecture. This is evident from one remarkable project after another, from their cantilevered, shell-concrete Coventry Cathedral design of 1951 to their highly ingenious, faceted, introspective site plans for Sheffield University (1953) and Wokingham Infants School (1956). All of this inventiveness culminated in their Berlin Hauptstadt competition entry (1957) of which their Economist Building in St James's, Westminster, of 1964 was a prototypical fragment, as pertinent to London as to their hypothetical, multi-levelled townscape for bombed-out Berlin.

The Economist complex was in many respects a consummate moment in Peter Smithson's career. Of reinforced-concrete skeleton construction, with its structural mullions faced in roach-bed Portland stone, it was both a diminutive American high-rise and an exemplary contextual exercise. With its five-storey, corner bank building fronting on to St James's Street and its Boodles Club ladies' extension to the rear of the site, it harmonised with the multifarious scales of the surrounding streets in a masterly way. Forty years later, mellowed by time, it shines forth in the heart of the city like a canonical monument.

The beauty and the calm conviction of the Economist Building bring one to lament the loss of Smithson's more brilliant projects which, had they been realised, would have changed the face of English architecture. These include surely his submission for the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral; and the pagoda-profiled proposition for the British Embassy in Brasilia that after four years was arbitrarily cancelled by the Government in 1968.

Apart from their perennial competition entries, the bulk of the Smithsons' realised works, both before and after this denouement, were of a more modest scale, wherein the architect's susceptibility to the given genius loci often came to the fore, from the modest houses they designed for their own occupation in Soho (unbuilt) and Fonthill in Wiltshire, to the structures that they built in the 1970s and 1980s for Bath University, wherein the buildings derived much of their expression from the partial or total exposure of a trabeated frame.

The concrete structural mullions of St Hilda's College, Oxford, of 1970 also exemplified this manner, although in this instance the tectonic rigour was softened by a screen of timber trusswork hung between the frames that imparted a somewhat medieval character to the overall form. In this respect, one notes that the Smithsons' affinity for the long tradition was Gothic rather than Classic.

From 1956 to 1968, the evolution of the Smithsons' architectural polemic was central to the cultural debate taking place within the continental, neo-avantgardist group known as Team X. Despite this carefully cultivated cosmopolitan orientation and their hyper-awareness of what was happening elsewhere in Europe and the United States, Peter and Alison none the less retained a unique feeling for the native tradition, for its topography, history and myth. Thus, they invariably evoked these latent aspects whenever it was at all possible: their appraisal of Bath for being an intact 18th-century pedestrian city; their affinity for the 19th-century British engineering tradition dating back for them to the pioneering Stockton and Darlington railway of 1825; or their proposal for transforming a slag-heap near Middlesborough into a park-like belvedere overlooking the industrial landscape of the river Tees.

Towards the end of his active career, Smithson's feeling for the plastic potential of the wry diminutive structure was as sharp as any of the more ambitious works he had projected at a larger scale. Hence the polished prototypical furniture pieces and the solitary, single-storey timber follies that he and Alison designed for the Germany furniture company Tecta Mobel from 1986 onwards, culminating in an exquisitely detailed timber porch for the canteen façade of Tecta's Lauenförde factory in 1997.

With his flowery ties and shirts bought at Liberty & Co and his pale grey, lightweight suits, Smithson in his maturity was as much of a dandy as he had been sartorially street-smart in the early 1950s. Genial, provocative and oscillating in his demeanour from witty and mildly confrontational, to disarmingly charming and playfully sardonic, Smithson was a master of the repartee and the felicitous turn of phrase. By the mid-1990s he was already a cultural veteran, one who was now intermittently occupied in meticulously editing the archive of an exceptionally rich life.

As he put it in the introduction to the first volume of their complete works, The Charged Void: architecture (2000), "Transmission can happen without there needing to be an obvious connection; so the sense of fellowship spans history, the creative artist feeds off whatever he needs." A more fitting epitaph for a great architect would be hard to devise.

Kenneth Frampton

My first meeting with Peter Smithson was less than five years ago – a blind date on a deserted country railway station on the inspired suggestion of a shared friend, writes Niall Hobhouse. He had agreed to give advice on a small but pressing domestic architectural problem. To some extent I was another victim of the formidable reputation and my main concern then was that the project might be beneath consideration. It was, as somebody remarked unhelpfully, like asking Matisse for advice on repainting the dining room.

I was unprepared for many things – for the cravats worn with flowery shirts, the courtesy and humour (mischief-making, actually), for the examination of the client undertaken like a great clinician, for the resolute refusal to propose anything until other projects in the studio had been completed and, above all, for the seriousness with which Peter considered any architectural problem, however small.

A year later the problem of the kitchen had given way to a problem of car parking and, finally, to the proposal, made by Peter with immense diffidence, that we should build a tower in open parkland. This was a reprise of a project for Siena eight years before and was a solution to no problem that I had identified, but so clearly a response to Peter's passion for the English landscape that it acquired an immediate momentum.

Peter was determined to do it properly; this, as I learned, meant doing it slowly. The original cor ten steel became oak, the trees had to be identified and felled, the craftsmen interviewed and charmed, the engineer sent back to recalculate and details of fixings settled. The engagement with the business of making was complete. Our working relationship consisted mostly of teasing each other about causes of delay. "Niall is testing my longevity": a reported remark that assumes retrospective poignancy. But then, when we were uncertain at the last moment of the position of the tower – a discussion left to the end by mutual agreement – it was Peter who insisted that we take the time it deserved and give it two more bitter January meetings.

When the tower finally went up last June – on Alison's birthday, mirabile dictu – Peter conducted a meticulous inspection: a delighted field marshal suspended from a moving platform 60 feet in the air but in fact, as somebody said, halfway to heaven.

Our next meeting, had his health permitted, would have been to look again at our location and the landscaping; so that, even now, the building remains a work in progress.