Abstract
This paper reinterprets Highpoint II, an apartment block designed in London in 1938 by the Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton. Lubetkin had received favorable press for his 1934 Penguin Pool in Regent’s Park Zoo and his 1935 tower block Highpoint, but by 1938 was accused of abandoning the social programme of international style architecture by having designed a structure that critics dismissed as decorative. The architect was now seen as having violated the strict tenets of modern architecture, and indeed the new structure looked different. International style detailing yielded to an earthy brick, and classical caryatids framed the entryway. The sense that Lubetkin had abandoned modernism’s ideals seemed hard to dispute, and many critics used Lubetkin’s shift to declare that modern architecture in England had simply failed to take root. Several years earlier, architects Eric Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut had both suspected this was the case. This paper, however, looks anew at modern architectural theory, formalist theories of art and architecture, modernist urban planning, and the cultural climate of thirties London in order to suggest a new reading of Lubetkin’s work. Instead of seeing the work he completed in the aftermath of Highpoint as having negated the important ideas behind international style architecture, we will see that Lubetkin was in fact continuing his drive to create architecture with social content, work that had implications beyond the scale of the building to the city at large.
Presenters
Deborah LewittesAssociate Professor, Art & Music, City University of New York/Bronx, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Communications and Linguistic Studies
KEYWORDS
Modern Architecture, Formalism, International Style, Berthold Lubetkin, London
