Building A Better Tomorrow: Architecture in the 1950's: The Festival of Britain by Robert Elwall, R.I.B.A.
The Festival of Britain's ostensible purpose was to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition and to display the British contribution to art, science, technology and industrial design since 1851. Its real aim, like the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, however was to boost the morale of a nation wearied by war and the rigours of post-war austerity and to restore faith in the future by providing proof that Britain could indeed 'make it'.Despite shortages of materials, labour and money, and in incredibly quick time, 19 pavilions, 13 cafe-restaurants, a concert hall, cinema and various administrative offices were erected on a small 27 acre site on the South Bank - a tremendous feat of organization and teamwork that owed much to experience gained during the war and the coordinating control of the Design Group and Architectural Council under the chairmanship of Hugh Casson and Howard Lobb. For the first time a large-scale exhibition was planned to tell a sequential story - that of the British Isles and its people - with the individual pavilions being treated as separate chapters in the unfolding narrative. This story-telling approach, which had its origins in the war and the work done by the Ministry of Information, was to dominate British submissions to future international buildings was entrusted to a new generation of largely untried architects whose average age was under 45 and whose work was characterized by Casson as ' gay, ephemeral, frail and elegant', a suitably 'off-rations' modern antidote to the drabness of post-war existence.
While the extensive use made of glass prefigured the dominance of the glass box type of pavilion at the Brussels Expo in 1958 such as Edward Mill's British Industries Pavilion, no new structural techniques were introduced at the Festival. However, it did afford younger architects, hitherto starved of opportunities, the chance to experiment on a comparatively lavish scale with materials and methods in the main unfamiliar to them. Similarly no new architectural language was born at the South Bank. The influence of the Exhibition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Stockholm, 1930), as well as of more recent developments not only in Sweden but also in Italy was clearly discernible, and even Ralph Tubbs, the architect of the Festival's most radical structure, the Dome of Discovery, regarded his work not as something innovative, but as the culmination of what the MARS Group had sought to achieve in the 1930's. If the style itself was not new, however, then the public acceptance it gained as a result of the exhibition certainly was.
As Misha Black, coordinating architect for the upstream section, remarked, "What had been the private pleasure of a few cognoscenti suddenly virtually overnight achieved enthusiastic public acclaim."
The true significance of the Festival lay less in its buildings, which a new generation of architects soon dismissed as 'flimsy' and 'effeminate', than in providing the British public with its first experience of an integrated environment created, in the words of the Architectural Review, "wholly in the spirit of modern architecture", and in which as much attention was paid to the space between the buildings as to the buildings themselves. The Festival thus offered an alternative to the Beaux-Arts tradition of exhibition planning, the conservatism of which was often at odds with the architecture on show, by adopting a more informal, picturesque approach that emphasized the delights not of the monumental vista but of surprise, contrast and changes in scale and texture. The detailed attention given to all aspects of landscaping, the skilful use of sudden changes in level, the creation in fact of a modern 'townscape' were the triumphs of the exhibition eagerly latched on to by the creators of the New Towns and rebuilders of city centres such as Coventry at home and the organizers of international exhibitions such as the Montreal Expo 1967 abroad.
Extended captions to five images:
1. Powell & Moya, Skylon, South Bank Exhibition, 1951 Festival of Britain./ 2. Ralph Tubbs, Dome of Discovery, South Bank Exhibition, 1951 Festival of Britain./3. Fry Drew & Partners, Thames-side Restaurant, South Bank Exhibition, 1951 Festival of Britain./4. R.D. Russell & R.Y. Goodden, Lion & Unicorn Pavilion, South Bank Exhibition, 1951 Festival of Britain./5. South Bank Exhibition, 1951 Festival of Britain.
1. The aluminium-plated Skylon, dramatically soaring 250 foot into the air and as, the contemporary joke went. like Britain, without visible means of support - in fact it was supported by a complex arrangement of steel cables and splayed pylons - provided the Festival with a highly imaginative and beautiful symbol of the hope that Britain would break free from post-war austerity. Powell & Moya's design, which was chosen from 157 entries in a competition for the Festival's vertical feature, had, as the Archbishop of Canterbury remarked "the supreme merit of serving no useful whatsoever" and when the exhibition ended it was dismantled and sold for scrap.
2. When constructed the Dome of Discovery, 365 foot in diameter and 93 foot high, was the largest dome in the world and appeared to contemporaries as if it had just escaped from a Dan Dare comic strip. Ralph Tubbs later remarked that "the dome was rather esoteric, using a design based on the poetry of mathematics and requiring a revolutionary structure. It was a triumph of engineering skills (the engineers were Freeman Fox and Partners) which, although suppressed for many years, can now be seen again in the work of high-tec architects." Like Skylon, the Dome was built of aluminium, a material then in its exploratory stage. The interior, consisting of a series of reinforced concrete galleries, was much less imaginative than the exterior and rather spoilt by the cluttered display.
3. The Festival saw the introduction of few new structural techniques. One of the more interesting experiments was to be found in the Thames-side Restaurant, designed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, the roof of which compromised a double skin of aluminium with a cork sandwich which could be speedily assembled on site by using methods customarily employed in riveting aircraft. The idea for this had suggested itself to the architects when cooperating with several aircraft factories on the manufacture of prefabricated kitchens. The jaunty, nautical style of the restaurant, particularly evident in its railings, boardwalks and striped awning, exuded an appropriately festive air.
4. The Lion & Unicorn Pavilion was a rare instance at the Festival of both structure and display within being designed by the same team. R.D. Russell and R. Y. Goodden had been involved in the Britain Can Make It exhibition in 1946 and their pavilion, which resembled a Dutch barn, was the one building besides the Dome of Discovery to be frankly expressed as an envelope for exhibits. The chief features of its well-proportioned exterior were the arched lamella oak roof (wood while indispensable for display was otherwise little used in the buildings on the South Bank as it was in such short supply) and the distinctive series of eye-shaped windows. The pavilion's display on the British character was described by Misha Black as "a delicious romp".
5. Each of the exhibition's coordinating architects awarded himself one building to design. Misha Black chose the Regatta Restaurant and the decoration of the Bailey Bridge over the Thames, executed in conjunction with Alexander Gibson, one of Black's associates in the Design Research Unit. The restaurant epitomized the Festival's attempts, not entirely successful, to unify architecture and art. Black writing, "I set out to show how a building could be a neutral ambience for the work of artists." These included Victor Pasmore, John Tunnard and Laurence Scarfe while the garden boasted Cypress, a sculpture by Lynn Chadwick. The restaurant also exemplified many townscape features including changes in level to provide differing views and an informal arrangement of sculpture, planting and water to give textural variety and counterbalance the strict geometry of the architecture.
As the Architectural Review remarked, the Festival details - lettering, signage, furniture, wallscape, planting, etc - were of remarkably high standard providing "an object lesson to town-planners, borough engineers and others responsible for the design of roads and their furniture, public spaces and their layout". Of particular note were Ernest Race's Antelope Chairs and Maria Shepherd's plant pots which quickly became ubiquitous symbols of 'Contemporary' style.
postscript: although the Royal Festival Hall was not strictly an integral part of the South Bank Exhibition, it has since been recognised as being part of 'Festival' architecture, so the following two captions have been added to complete the picture:
The only permanent legacy of the Festival of Britain's South Bank complex, the Royal Festival Hall, has proved one of the country's best and most-loved post-war buildings. That this is so is a tribute to its young, relatively inexperienced, design team who had to work at great speed against a backdrop of severe materials' shortages and bad weather. The hall is important, therefore, not just for its design qualities and its status as Britain's first major public building to be designed wholly in the modern idiom, but also for its production process which placed a new emphasis on teamwork and a more technocratic approach to building. Design work began in 1948 and continued as building progressed to fulfil a brief which called for a large concert hall for 3,000 people with a smaller twin (soon abandoned) together with restaurant, meeting rooms and exhibition gallery. The hall was thus envisaged not just as a concert space but as a social centre, and the problem was to accommodate all these functions on a restricted site. ( J. Leslie) Martin's* solution as ingeniously to raise the auditorium on a series of circular, reinforced concrete columns, leaving the foyers free to sweep underneath, and so create a dramatic interplay between the auditorium's solid mass and the light, transparent treatment of the surrounding elements. This was the 'solid egg in the transparent box' which gave the hall its remarkable sense of spatial dynamism and its ability to appear at once monumental yet informal.
* of the London County Council Architects Department, together with Robert Matthew, Peter Moro, Edwin Williams..
The hall is notable throughout for its carefully considered detailing masterminded by Moro with the assistance of designers such as Robin Day who was responsible for the seating. The underlying rationale of Martin's design was emphasized by differing decorative treatments, the dark Derbyshire marbles of the auditorium's outer walls, for example, being set off against the the cool, bright colours of the circulation areas. These were in turn contrasted with the rich warm hues inside the auditorium. The shoebox shape of the well-lit auditorium was determined by acoustical requirements worked out after extensive scientific testing by Hope Bagenal with Bill Allen and P H Parkin of the Building Research Station. The cantilevered boxes, reminiscent of the balconies at Highpoint 1 (1935) by Tectron, for whom Moro had briefly worked, were disparagingly compared to drwaers hurriedly pulled out in a burglary, but did not fulfil an acoustical function by breaking up the walls' flat planes. The acoustics were judged god if rather dry. Less good was the paucity of backstage accommodation, scheduled for completion in 1953, but only eventually provided during the a massive and insensitive remodelling in the 1960's which also saw the frontage recased and extended towards the river. Recent alterations have attempted to undo some of the damage caused to the original conception, but the status of the hall as an icon of post-war idealism and civic service remains unchanged.