Back from Coventry
WHEN THE SCOTTISH ARCHITECT Basil Spence was told in 1951 that he had won the competition to design the new Coventry Cathedral, he fainted, telephone in his hand. “He was extremely vulnerable, deeply sensitive, and curiously insecure,” Sir Hugh Casson, fellow architect and president of the Royal Academy, would remember.
Spence’s stunned shock was not misplaced. The decade-long Coventry project would earn him a knighthood, a score of other honours, and more major commissions. He was president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) before it was completed.
Coventry remains his monument. But when he died, in 1976, the then president of the RIBA, Eric Lyons, reflected what was an ambiguous judgment on his career, at a time when modernist architecture was falling out of favour. His buildings reflected the “spirit of vitality and enthusiasm” after the war, Lyons said. “Throughout history the architecture and architects of any period cannot be adequately assessed by their contemporaries,” he added, “but I am certain that the stature of this man will be recognised by future generations.”
Next week the exhibition Back to the Future opens at the Dean Gallery. It includes more than 200 exhibits, many from an archive recently gifted by his family to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland. They include original drawings and sketchbooks and film of Spence talking about his own buildings. The show marks the centenary of his birth, but it is also the first major exhibition dedicated to his career; 21 years after his death, will those “future generations” be convinced by his legacy?
Basil Urwin Spence was born in Bombay in 1907. At the age of 12 he was despatched to George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, a city he had never seen.
“Edinburgh is the most beautiful city in the world,” he later recalled. “I heard this first at the age of seven in India.”
Spence left his stamp on Edinburgh in a string of buildings, from the Scottish Widows building in Dalkeith Road to 1950s-style flats along the Canongate to the modernist Mortonhall Crematorium. In Glasgow his airport terminal has been outgrown but the “great umbrella of concrete vaults”, meant to open a gateway to flight, remain.
“If you are looking for the big post-war names in Scottish architecture, he is in the top three or four,” says Douglas Read, past president of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. The Royal Mile flats, Read says, “fit in without being fake-medieval”.
Across Britain, Spence’s projects ran from a nuclear power station to the University of Sussex campus to pavilions in the great exhibitions of the 1950s. But he left controversy in his wake. He was denounced for destroying the views from Hyde Park with the infamous 30-storey Knightsbridge Barracks block, and in Glasgow he was derided over the Hutchestown C buildings in the Gorbals - 20-storey towers, their maisonettes linked by communal balconies that he glowingly described as “hanging gardens”.
Spence, who trained as an architect at the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), struggled to pay his way after his father’s death and earned cash by drawing for architectural firms. From early on he was a passionate admirer of the modernist designs of the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. On his 1934 honeymoon in Germany, he and his wife Joan visited an exhibition in Stuttgart of Le Corbusier and the German architect Walter Gropius. While still teaching at the ECA, Spence made an appeal in The Scotsman for British architects to embrace Le Corbusier’s new style.
After serving in the army in the Second World War he returned to Edinburgh in 1945 and set up his own firm in Moray Place. His work on exhibitions, with the grandeur of his sea and ships pavilion at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and his role as chief architect for the Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow that year, earned him an OBE.
But the scarcity of work saw him looking south for work, and he moved his office to London after the Coventry commission. He kept an Edinburgh office, but spent his last years in Malta and Suffolk.
The new exhibition includes his original designs from the Coventry competition, a project that became the most potent symbol of Britain’s emergence from the pain of war.
“I have not tried to make an exciting building,” he wrote in 1955. “A cathedral should not arouse excitement, but a deep emotion.”
His design set the new building alongside the shattered remnants of the medieval cathedral, with its makeshift altar of broken stones set up after the bombing.
Spence’s body of work shows enormous and imaginative variety. There are the startling white and wood boxes of the Scandinavian-style home he designed for his family in Hampshire. The British Embassy in Rome was a personal favourite, while the Beehive, the executive wing of the New Zealand Parliament, also became famous.
In Scotland he was a consultant architect on Edinburgh University’s George Square for six years, his reputation not suffering as Sir Robert Matthew’s did when three sides of the square were levelled, to be replaced by modern blocks, including Spence’s lower-lying library.
An excellent salesman, he famously said of his Corbusier-inspired Gorbals project that “on Tuesdays, when the washing’s out, it’ll be like a great ship in full sail”. He was wrong. His “hanging gardens” were demolished in 1993.
Back to the Future: Sir Basil Spence, 1907-1976 is at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, 19 October until 10 February.
