An exploration of published and unpublished writings of Alison and
Peter Smithson, considering them in the context of the debates and
discourses of postwar architecture. The English architects Alison
Smithson (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003) were
ringleaders of the New Brutalism, active in CIAM and Team 10, and
influential in English Pop Art. The Smithsons, who met as
architecture students, built only a few buildings but wrote
prolifically throughout their career, leaving a body of writings
that consider issues in architecture and urbanism and also take up
subjects that are "not quite architecture" (the name of a series of
articles written by Alison Smithson for the Architects'
Journal)-including fashion design, graphic communication, and
children's tales. In this book, M. Christine Boyer explores the
Smithsons' writings-books, articles, lectures, unpublished
manuscripts, and private papers. She focuses on unpublished
material, reading the letter, the scribbled note, the undelivered
lecture, the scrapbook, the "magic box," as words in the language
of modern architectural history-especially that of postwar England,
where the Smithsons and other architects were at the center of the
richest possible range of cultural encounters. Boyer is "writing
around" the Smithsons' work by considering the cultural contexts in
which they formed and wrote about their ideas. Boyer explains that
the Smithsons were intensely concerned with the responsibility of
the architect to ensure the quality of place, to build with lyrical
appropriateness. They reached back to the country landscapes of
their childhood and, Boyer argues, mixed their brand of New
Brutalism with the English Picturesque. The Smithsons saw
architects as both inheritors and passers-on. Their writings offer
juxtapositions and connections, resembling an association of
interactive loops, ideas waiting to be transmuted into built form.
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