Dr Elizabeth Darling

This is the first of a pair of articles in which we argue that what we term the ‘centre-idea’ was fundamental to British modernist architecture and planning thought from the mid-1940s onwards. We locate this idea’s roots in the pre-1939 British voluntary sector, specifically the activities of the Peckham Experiment and the Pioneer Health Centre which housed it. We evidence its long-term influence on post-1945 architecture and planning in the invitation to the Experiment’s co-creator George Scott Williamson to speak at CIAM’s eighth Congress in 1951. The paper begins with a discussion of the Experiment, an architectural setting which was understood to effect new forms of human relationships and subjectivity suited to a democratic, post-imperial modernity. We then consider other environments to show how this ‘centre-idea’ was widespread in progressive circles by the late 1930s. The paper concludes by discussing the community centre as an emerging building type increasingly supported by the state. This coming together of the British state, modernist architecture and progressive voluntarist thinking by the outbreak of war in 1939, would mean that the ‘centre-idea’ had a significant impact on reconstruction debates and post-war planning; the subject of our forthcoming companion article.

This paper considers the effect that military service in the First World War had on the
approach to design and practice that the architect Wells Wintemute Coates (1895–1958)
developed from c. 1928 onwards. It argues that his experience in the Canadian Field Artillery,
and more especially as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, influenced his design praxis and
embedded in him a fundamental conception of architecture as a set of tools (framework,
space, equipment), centred around the body of the inhabitant, and designed to facilitate
their daily life. His early familiarity with aircraft, which were manufactured from the
newest of materials such as plywood and aluminium, also left him with an abiding
concern to use the most up-to-date materials in his designs and to develop an appropriate
form of aesthetic expression for them. The article explores the background to his approach,
and how it was enacted in designs at 1, Kensington Palace Gardens, London (1932), Lawn
Road Flats, London (1934) and in the studios he designed for the BBC’s Broadcasting
House, London, in 1932. It concludes by considering how wartime experience also affected
Coates’s understanding of the persona of the professional architect.

This article is the second part of a discussion of what we term the ‘centre-idea'. This idea, we argue, was fundamental to British modernist architecture and planning praxis from the mid-1940s onwards. It represented an active spatial environment in which people could develop their selves and their interests at a time of expanding democracy, which required new forms of community association. We locate this idea’s roots in the pre-war British voluntary sector, specifically the activities of the Peckham Experiment and the Pioneer Health Centre which housed it, and evidence its long-term influence on post-war architecture and planning theorisation. The article begins its discussion in wartime Britain and it traces how the ‘centre-idea’ was absorbed into the committees, plans and discussions which underpinned post-war reconstruction. It also documents how a CIAM dominated by Anglo-American theorists developed the idea into a particular understanding of, and approach to, modernist design and planning. These two strands are brought together in an analysis of their realization in a series of now state-sponsored projects, which include the Design Centre and the South Bank Arts Centre.