WELLS COATES: A MONOGRAPH

Sherban Cantacuzino

8.5 x 12 hardcover book with 119 pages heavily illustrated with photographs, drawings and plans of Wells Coates' architectural and industrial designs from 1928- 1957, including the Isokon building (aka Lawn Road Flats), Embassy Court in Brighton, 10 Palace Gate, Kensington, the Festival of Britain's Telekinema, the EKCO bakelite radio cabinets, the Wingsail sailboat and more. Also includes insight into contemporary work by Amyas Connell, F. R. S. Yorke, the Tecton Group, Maxwell Fry, Serge Chermayeff, Christoper Nicholson, Erno Goldfinger, Raymond McGrath, Frederick Gibberd, Gilbert Scott, E. McKnight Kauffer and others.

An excellent snapshot of the magical land of Hampstead -- the English incubator of Modernism in the 1930s centered around Hampstead Heath. At varying times in the 1930s, Marcel Breuer, Wells Coates, H. S. Ede Naum Gabo, Margaret Gardiner, Geoffrey Grigson, Walter Gropius, Barbara Hepworth, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, Adrian Stokes, John Summerson, Erno Goldfinger and Jack and Molly Pritchard were all neighbors in that emerging hothouse of creativity.

Wells Wintemute Coates OBE (1895 ­ 1958) was an architect, designer and writer. He was, for most of his life, an expatriate Canadian architect who is best known for his work in England. His most notable work is the Isokon building in Hampstead, London. Coates spent his youth in the Far East, and voyaged around the world with his father in 1913. He served in World War I, first as a gunner and later as a pilot with the Royal Air Force. From 1921 to 1924, he attended the University of British Columbia where he obtained BA and BSc degrees, and in 1924, he moved to London where he studied engineering (obtaining a PhD). He established his own firm in 1928. His childhood experiences in Japan would play an important role in his aesthetic sensibility that he brought to his architectural work, and this sensibility found a fitting outlet in the current European Modernist Movement. He attended the 1933 Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which produced the famous Athens Charter, and was one of the founders, with Maxwell Fry, of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), the British wing of CIAM.

Wells embraced Le Corbusier's architectural mantra that buildings should be "machines for living" (machine à habiter). The machine á habiter ideal was best-reflected in his Isokon building (also known as Lawn Road Flats), completed in 1934. Indeed, the architectural critic J. M. Richards suggested that he improved on Corbusier, coming "nearer to the machine á habiter than anything Corbusier ever designed." The clean and striking building was compared to the exterior of an ocean liner by the novelist Agatha Christie, who lived there for a time.

The apartment building was the brainchild of Jack and Molly Pritchard, who in 1931 established Isokon, a design firm featuring Modernist architecture and furniture. With simple living spaces strongly influenced by Coates' Japanese experience, and including built-in Isokon furniture, Isokon was "an experiment in collective housing designed for left-wing intellectuals." It became a haven for Germans escaping Nazi persecution and hosted many famous personages including Christie, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Isokon was ahead of its time: it won second place in Horizon Magazine's "Ugliest Building Competition" in 1946, and would not be recognized as one of England's most important Modernist buildings for another decade. The building fell into disrepair by the 1990's but it changed ownership in 2001 and was fully restored by 2004.

During World War II, he again served with the RAF, this time working on fighter aircraft development, for which he was later awarded an OBE. Following the war, he, like some other well known architects including Gropius and Breuer -- by then working in America --contributed to the British post-War housing effort by introducing an early scheme for modular housing he called Room Unit Production.

In 1949-50, he designed the building of the Telekinema for the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition. This 400-seat, state-of-the-art cinema, specially designed to screen both film (including the first 3-dimensional films) and large-screen television, proved one of the most popular attractions of the South Bank Exhibition in the summer of 1951. Operated and programmed by the British Film Institute, it re-opened as the National Film Theatre in October 1952, until its demolition in 1957.

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