Theo Crosby
Encyclopedia
Theo Crosby was an architect, editor, writer and sculptor, engaged with major developments in design across four decades. He was also an early vocal critic of modern urbanism. He is best remembered as a founding partner of the international design partnership Pentagram
, and as architect for the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe
in London. However, his role as éminence grise in British architecture and design from 1950 to 1990 helped effect much broader changes.
, at Witwatersrand University Johannesburg. From 1944 he participated in the Allied invasion of Italy
. His post-VE day travels around that country introduced him to a world—of urbanity and cultural generosity -- which he had never experienced in South Africa, and which opened his eyes to the power of the public realm. He settled in England in 1948, following the South African government's official sanctioning of apartheid. In 1949 he began work at the modernist architectural practice of Fry Drew and Partners
on Gloucester Place in London, combining this with studying sculpture in the evenings at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Here he came into contact with teachers Richard Hamilton
, Eduardo Paolozzi
and Edward Wright
, with whom he would later work on the exhibition This is Tomorrow
, and fellow students Alan Fletcher
and Colin Forbes
, with whom he would later form a design partnership. The Central, with its emphasis on cross-disciplinary work, would have a lasting effect on Crosby's view of the architect's role. He also formed links at this time with the modernist MARS Group
, and the Architectural Association.
. At first his main job was laying out the pages, for which he sought guidance from the Central School, but was "rebuffed". It was left to the painter Edward Wright to provide him with some instruction a couple of years later. He also "designed beautiful abstract covers, sometimes including the odd word to describe the theme du jour – “houses”, “roofs”, “Sheffield” – but rarely featuring photography or even buildings". During his tenure the early works of James Stirling
, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers
were published in AD, and it began to champion what came to be known as the "zoom wave".
Attaching himself to the Institute of Contemporary Arts
(ICA) in London, Crosby attended meetings of the Independent Group
there, and was particularly impressed by the group's discussions of the impact of mass communication and information theory on architecture and design. It was Crosby who suggested, and steered to completion, what would be the Independent Group's swansong—the watershed exhibition This Is Tomorrow
at London's Whitechapel Gallery
. Characteristically the exhibition was organized around twelve multidisciplinary teams. Crosby collaborated on his installation with graphic designers Germano Facetti
and Edward Wright, and the sculptor William Turnbull. The installations which garnered most attention, however, were those of Richard Hamilton, John McHale
and John Voelcker (with its Pop-Art imagery including Robbie the Robot), and Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson
and Nigel Henderson
(which featured a "primitive" pavilion studded with evocative ephemera). In AD Crosby wrote that the exhibition was "evidence of attempts towards a new sort of order, a way towards that integration of the arts that must come if our culture is not merely to survive, but come truly to life". It was, he said later, "my first experience at a loose, horizontal organisation of equals", and claimed it was the inspiration behind the distinctive organisation of Pentagram. In characteristic fashion, Crosby—alert to practicalities—sold the ads that made the memorable exhibition catalogue possible. In 1960 he showed his own sculpture at the ICA, alongside paintings by Peter Blake
and interventions by John Latham
.
Between 1958 and 1960 five issues of the "little" arts magazine Uppercase were published, with Crosby as editor.
Crosby also edited the ICA's Living Arts magazine, and persuaded the Institute to mount an exhibition—Living Cities—in 1963, to foreground the urban theories of the young Archigram group. He also found the money for the show (from the Gulbenkian Foundation), and featured it in a special edition of Living Arts Crosby has been described as a "hidden hand" during this period, uniting the separate spheres of Archigram, the Architectural Association, and Architectural Design, and thereby "creating a new circuit for progressive and 'international' notions".
The late '50s and early '60s saw Crosby add to his reputation as an architect through a number of temporary exhibitions. With Edward Wright he produced the Architectural Design magazine's stands at the 1955 and 1958 Building Exhibitions, and the congress and exhibition buildings for the 6th International Union of Architects
Congress, held in London in 1961, both of which combined architecture and graphics in a striking fashion. Such projects also reinforced his belief in the desirability of cross-disciplinary work in the arts. Later he remembered how, after completing the UIA project "we all felt very pleased with each other and have I suppose often wondered why such occasions, generous and spontaneous are so rare". Three years later he designed a pavilion at the Milan Triennale, for which he was awarded Gran Premio. Fletcher Forbes Gill, the design company that Crosby would subsequently join, produced the graphics for the pavilion.
, and he brought members of Archigram in to work under him. The Design Group focussed on three main urban projects (none of which were carried out as proposed): for Euston Station
; for a section of Fulham
in West London, and for the centre of Hereford
in south west England. The Euston project envisaged a city of towers to replace the Victorian station and Arch
, demolished in 1961-2. The Fulham Study was requested by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, and envisaged "an improbably massive redevelopment" of the area, which drew on the Smithsons' earlier projects for Sheffield and Berlin. At the same time a new form of prefabricated dwelling was experimented with, "the only constraint" upon which "was that it should stack up into a tower structure". For Fulham, the pod-like units were arranged in terraces (compared by Crosby to Georgian terraces) and towers. This housing system had "originated in discussions for the CIAM Congress 1955", and illustrated ideas shared with the Brutalists and Team X. Indeed, for all his subsequent questioning of modernist urban theory Crosby never lost faith in the Smithsons' call for an architecture "Without Rhetoric"
from the design partnership Fletcher Forbes Gill, Crosby joined to form Crosby Fletcher Forbes, reportedly after Fletcher and Forbes had considered extending their proposals for the corporate identity of Shell Petroleum to encompass the architecture of Shell gas stations. The decision to have an architect on the team was soon vindicated when Reuters
, having asked Crosby to redesign its boardroom, was then persuaded to work with Fletcher on a new corporate identity and logo. The team "had an ability to combine the formal restraint of Swiss modernism with the wit of the Madison Avenue advertising industry", which "set them apart from other British design firms"
In 1972 the three were joined by Kenneth Grange
and Mervyn Kurlansky, to form Pentagram, which was organized as a horizontal cooperative of equals, in which profits were shared, and staff and overheads pooled. Pentagram went on to build up a formidable worldwide reputation. Throughout the Pentagram years Crosby's passion for publication was expressed through a provocative series of "Pentagram Papers" (the title most likely a punning reference to the Pentagon Papers
, leaked in 1971).
exhibition "How to play the environment game" was an extensive, accessible primer on the manifold factors that determine the shape and appearance of the city. In this exhibition Crosby rehearsed many of the arguments he would deploy until his death against the strident modernism adopted during the 1960s: the need to value history and, in particular, the monument; the necessity of bringing back craftsmanship to the environment; the requirement to understand what grants a place identity; the importance of sensible regulation; and the need to retrieve the city from mere money interests. He admits to having been influenced in his critique of the modernist city by the writings of Jane Jacobs
-- a "prophet of sanity" to whom he devoted a section of the exhibition. After concluding at the Hayward, the exhibition travelled through England, Scotland and Wales, ending up in Stockholm.
It was in the Hayward exhibition too that Crosby introduced his notion of a "Pessimist Utopia": a Utopia
appropriate for a time when it seemed affluence and cheap natural resources could not be relied upon to continue; and which would have to be forged, not from grand ideologies, but from small things readily to hand. This was an argument expanded two years later in a pair of "Lethaby Lectures" jointly entitled "The Pessimist Utopia", which Crosby delivered to the Royal College of Art
, and subsequently published as a Pentagram Paper. Now fully under the influence of Jane Jacobs, and also of E. F. Schumacher
(whose Small is Beautiful
had been published two years before), Crosby argued that his own sphere, design—centred as it was on small enterprises—provided an attractive alternative to the bureaucratic model of decision-making then prevalent. In this, and in other respects, these lectures anticipated the enterprise culture of the 1980s and'90s.
" scheme in the UK—subsequently adopted, having been taken up by much larger arts organisations—and produced a Register of Artists and Craftsmen in Architecture.
In 1987 he was invited to become a member of a select group advising HRH The Prince of Wales on ways of promoting his agenda for architecture and urbanism. The group helped draft the Prince's influential speech to the 1987 Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's Annual Dinner (which kick-started his campaign for Paternoster Square
); helped shape his BBC television programme A Vision of Britain (later a book and V&A exhibition); and instituted his Summer Schools in Civil Architecture (1990–93), which evolved first into The Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture (1992–2001), and subsequently The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
Many aspects of the Prince's agenda had been earlier anticipated by Crosby: for example the critique of large-scale 1960s planning; the call for wider participation; the desire to re-incorporate art and craft in the built environment; and the acceptance of formal and stylistic "games" designed to minimize the effects of large-scale development. A number of the "10 Principles We Can Build Upon", which formed the core of the argument of A Vision of Britain (The Place, Hierarchy, Scale, Harmony, Enclosure, Materials, Decoration, Art, Signs & Lights, and Community) were indebted to Crosby.
Crosby's largely unhappy tenure as Professor of Architecture and Design at the Royal College of Art from 1990-93 was initially seen as a way of influencing architectural education in line with such principles. However, soon after he took up the post, the Prince decided, along with his advisers, that the better course might be to establish an independent Institute of Architecture. The RCA had been founded on the principle that architects and diverse craftspeople could be educated together, but Crosby's approach to the teaching curriculum was considered by many RCA students to be too traditional and limiting of creative freedom, and he met with much resistance, which took its toll on his health. He set out his "hopes and intentions" as Professor in his Inaugural Address as follows:
During this same period he tried (with Peter Lloyd-Jones) to generate interest in what he described as a "New Domesday Book
": a collaborative effort—beginning as an Inventory of Crosby's own neighbourhood of Spitalfields
-- to record the present state of British streets, to serve as data for architects working remotely from their sites; and to provide planning officers with a better sense of the importance of the ensembles present in British towns and cities. The enterprise didn't survive him, but since his death new technologies (such as Google Street View) have realized its ambitions to a greater extent than he could have hoped.
, and a highly-decorated structure housing a restaurant, all set within a piazza placed above an open-plan booking hall. For the Globe itself (to which he devoted 17 years of historical research), Crosby insisted upon natural materials (oak and thatch) and high quality craftsmanship, "Man-made materials [being] banned from the site"
Equally important to the project was Crosby's never-say-die attitude, and his belief in the power of demonstration. By 1990 activity on site had virtually stalled, after 20 years of effort by the project's main protagonist, Sam Wanamaker
. An approach was first made, at Crosby's behest, to The Prince of Wales, to see whether he could take over the patronage of the project from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh
, but protocol forbade it. The breakthrough occurred shortly after this, when Wanamaker was persuaded to construct some trial bays of the building, to hint at what a finished building would look like: a characteristic Crosby initiative, which helped to unlock sufficient public and private funds to realize the vision.
Some years before the conversion of Bankside Power Station
to become Tate Modern
, and the opening of the Millennium Bridge
link to St. Paul's Cathedral -- when the immediate neighbourhood of the Globe was visibly neglected—Crosby had the imagination to visualize his new complex standing at the centre of a new, vibrant, cultural quarter, which he referred to as "Shakespeare Village".
Other notable works include:
Other books include:
Pentagram (design studio)
Pentagram is a design studio that was founded in 1972 by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky in Needham Road, West London, UK...
, and as architect for the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe
Shakespeare's Globe
Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, an Elizabethan playhouse in the London Borough of Southwark, located on the south bank of the River Thames, but destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt 1614 then demolished in 1644. The modern reconstruction is an academic best guess, based...
in London. However, his role as éminence grise in British architecture and design from 1950 to 1990 helped effect much broader changes.
1940s and '50s: Architecture and Sculpture
Crosby studied architecture under Rex Martienssen, an acolyte of Le CorbusierLe Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
, at Witwatersrand University Johannesburg. From 1944 he participated in the Allied invasion of Italy
Allied invasion of Italy
The Allied invasion of Italy was the Allied landing on mainland Italy on September 3, 1943, by General Harold Alexander's 15th Army Group during the Second World War. The operation followed the successful invasion of Sicily during the Italian Campaign...
. His post-VE day travels around that country introduced him to a world—of urbanity and cultural generosity -- which he had never experienced in South Africa, and which opened his eyes to the power of the public realm. He settled in England in 1948, following the South African government's official sanctioning of apartheid. In 1949 he began work at the modernist architectural practice of Fry Drew and Partners
Maxwell Fry
Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, known as Maxwell Fry , was an English modernist architect of the middle and late 20th century, known for his buildings in Britain, Africa and India....
on Gloucester Place in London, combining this with studying sculpture in the evenings at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Here he came into contact with teachers Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
, Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
and Edward Wright
Edward Wright (artist)
Edward Wright was a painter, typographer and graphic designer.In the early 1950s he was a member of the Independent Group, and taught at the Central School of Art with Anthony Froshaug, Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi....
, with whom he would later work on the exhibition This is Tomorrow
This is Tomorrow
This Is Tomorrow was a seminal art exhibition in August 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.-History:...
, and fellow students Alan Fletcher
Alan Fletcher (graphic designer)
Alan Gerard Fletcher was a British graphic designer. In his obituary, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as "the most highly regarded graphic designer of his generation, and probably one of the most prolific"....
and Colin Forbes
Colin Forbes (graphic designer)
Colin Forbes is a British graphic designer. He is notable as a former head of the graphic design program at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts and as one of the founders of the Pentagram design studio....
, with whom he would later form a design partnership. The Central, with its emphasis on cross-disciplinary work, would have a lasting effect on Crosby's view of the architect's role. He also formed links at this time with the modernist MARS Group
MARS Group
The Modern Architectural Research Group, or MARS Group, was a British architectural think tank founded in 1933 by several prominent architects and architectural critics of the time involved in the British modernist movement...
, and the Architectural Association.
1950s and '60s: Editing and Exhibitions
Between 1953 and 1962, while establishing his own architectural practice, Crosby acted as Technical Editor (under Monica Pidgeon's editorship) of Architectural Design magazine, which was seeking to bring a more youthful, vital and progressive approach to the subject than the previously dominant Architectural ReviewArchitectural Review
The Architectural Review is a monthly international architectural magazine published in London since 1896. Articles cover the built environment which includes landscape, building design, interior design and urbanism as well as theory of these subjects....
. At first his main job was laying out the pages, for which he sought guidance from the Central School, but was "rebuffed". It was left to the painter Edward Wright to provide him with some instruction a couple of years later. He also "designed beautiful abstract covers, sometimes including the odd word to describe the theme du jour – “houses”, “roofs”, “Sheffield” – but rarely featuring photography or even buildings". During his tenure the early works of James Stirling
James Stirling (architect)
Sir James Frazer Stirling FRIBA was a British architect. He is considered to be among the most important and influential British architects of the second half of the 20th century...
, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers
Richard Rogers
Richard George Rogers, Baron Rogers of Riverside CH Kt FRIBA FCSD is a British architect noted for his modernist and functionalist designs....
were published in AD, and it began to champion what came to be known as the "zoom wave".
Attaching himself to the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
(ICA) in London, Crosby attended meetings of the Independent Group
Independent Group
The Independent Group met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London from 1952-55. The IG consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. They introduced mass culture into debates about high culture,...
there, and was particularly impressed by the group's discussions of the impact of mass communication and information theory on architecture and design. It was Crosby who suggested, and steered to completion, what would be the Independent Group's swansong—the watershed exhibition This Is Tomorrow
This is Tomorrow
This Is Tomorrow was a seminal art exhibition in August 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.-History:...
at London's Whitechapel Gallery
Whitechapel Gallery
The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, it was founded in 1901 as one of the first publicly-funded galleries for temporary exhibitions in London, and it has a long...
. Characteristically the exhibition was organized around twelve multidisciplinary teams. Crosby collaborated on his installation with graphic designers Germano Facetti
Germano Facetti
Germano Facetti was an Italian graphic designer who headed design at Penguin Books from 1962 to 1971.Born in Milan he was arrested in 1943 for putting up anti-Fascist posters...
and Edward Wright, and the sculptor William Turnbull. The installations which garnered most attention, however, were those of Richard Hamilton, John McHale
John McHale (artist)
John McHale was an artist and sociologist. He was a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies...
and John Voelcker (with its Pop-Art imagery including Robbie the Robot), and Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson
Alison and Peter Smithson
English architects Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson together formed an architectural partnership, and are often associated with the New Brutalism .Peter was born in Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England, and Alison was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire...
and Nigel Henderson
Nigel Henderson (artist)
Nigel Henderson was an artist and photographer.He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. In the early 1950s he was a member of the Independent Group, and taught at the Central School of Art with Anthony Froshaug, Edward Wright and Eduardo Paolozzi.He took part in the exhibition This is Tomorrow...
(which featured a "primitive" pavilion studded with evocative ephemera). In AD Crosby wrote that the exhibition was "evidence of attempts towards a new sort of order, a way towards that integration of the arts that must come if our culture is not merely to survive, but come truly to life". It was, he said later, "my first experience at a loose, horizontal organisation of equals", and claimed it was the inspiration behind the distinctive organisation of Pentagram. In characteristic fashion, Crosby—alert to practicalities—sold the ads that made the memorable exhibition catalogue possible. In 1960 he showed his own sculpture at the ICA, alongside paintings by Peter Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
and interventions by John Latham
John Latham (artist)
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a British conceptual artist who lived for many years in England. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences...
.
Between 1958 and 1960 five issues of the "little" arts magazine Uppercase were published, with Crosby as editor.
Crosby also edited the ICA's Living Arts magazine, and persuaded the Institute to mount an exhibition—Living Cities—in 1963, to foreground the urban theories of the young Archigram group. He also found the money for the show (from the Gulbenkian Foundation), and featured it in a special edition of Living Arts Crosby has been described as a "hidden hand" during this period, uniting the separate spheres of Archigram, the Architectural Association, and Architectural Design, and thereby "creating a new circuit for progressive and 'international' notions".
The late '50s and early '60s saw Crosby add to his reputation as an architect through a number of temporary exhibitions. With Edward Wright he produced the Architectural Design magazine's stands at the 1955 and 1958 Building Exhibitions, and the congress and exhibition buildings for the 6th International Union of Architects
International Union of Architects
The International Union of Architects is an international non-governmental organization that represents over a million architects in 124 countries. The UIA was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1948. The General Secretariat is located in Paris...
Congress, held in London in 1961, both of which combined architecture and graphics in a striking fashion. Such projects also reinforced his belief in the desirability of cross-disciplinary work in the arts. Later he remembered how, after completing the UIA project "we all felt very pleased with each other and have I suppose often wondered why such occasions, generous and spontaneous are so rare". Three years later he designed a pavilion at the Milan Triennale, for which he was awarded Gran Premio. Fletcher Forbes Gill, the design company that Crosby would subsequently join, produced the graphics for the pavilion.
1960s: Urban studies
For a short time Crosby headed up the experimental Design Group attached to the building contractors Taylor WoodrowTaylor Woodrow
Taylor Woodrow was one of the largest British housebuilding and general construction companies. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but merged with rival George Wimpey to create Taylor Wimpey on 3 July 2007.-Early years:Frank Taylor was...
, and he brought members of Archigram in to work under him. The Design Group focussed on three main urban projects (none of which were carried out as proposed): for Euston Station
Euston station
Euston station may refer to one of the following stations in London, United Kingdom:*Euston railway station, a major terminus for trains to the West Midlands, the North West, North Wales and part of Scotland...
; for a section of Fulham
Fulham
Fulham is an area of southwest London in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, SW6 located south west of Charing Cross. It lies on the left bank of the Thames, between Putney and Chelsea. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London...
in West London, and for the centre of Hereford
Hereford
Hereford is a cathedral city, civil parish and county town of Herefordshire, England. It lies on the River Wye, approximately east of the border with Wales, southwest of Worcester, and northwest of Gloucester...
in south west England. The Euston project envisaged a city of towers to replace the Victorian station and Arch
Euston Arch
The Euston Arch, built in 1837, was the original entrance to Euston station, facing onto Drummond Street, London. The Arch was demolished when the station was rebuilt in the 1960s, but much of the original stone was later located—principally used as fill in the Prescott Channel—and proposals have...
, demolished in 1961-2. The Fulham Study was requested by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, and envisaged "an improbably massive redevelopment" of the area, which drew on the Smithsons' earlier projects for Sheffield and Berlin. At the same time a new form of prefabricated dwelling was experimented with, "the only constraint" upon which "was that it should stack up into a tower structure". For Fulham, the pod-like units were arranged in terraces (compared by Crosby to Georgian terraces) and towers. This housing system had "originated in discussions for the CIAM Congress 1955", and illustrated ideas shared with the Brutalists and Team X. Indeed, for all his subsequent questioning of modernist urban theory Crosby never lost faith in the Smithsons' call for an architecture "Without Rhetoric"
1960s and '70s: Design
In 1965, on the departure of Bob GillBob Gill (artist)
Bob Gill , American illustrator and graphic designer. He played the piano at summer resorts in the Catskill Mountains, New York, to pay his school tuition. He attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art , Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts , City College of New York...
from the design partnership Fletcher Forbes Gill, Crosby joined to form Crosby Fletcher Forbes, reportedly after Fletcher and Forbes had considered extending their proposals for the corporate identity of Shell Petroleum to encompass the architecture of Shell gas stations. The decision to have an architect on the team was soon vindicated when Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
, having asked Crosby to redesign its boardroom, was then persuaded to work with Fletcher on a new corporate identity and logo. The team "had an ability to combine the formal restraint of Swiss modernism with the wit of the Madison Avenue advertising industry", which "set them apart from other British design firms"
In 1972 the three were joined by Kenneth Grange
Kenneth Grange
Kenneth Grange, CBE, MCSD, RDI, is a British industrial designer.Grange’s career began as a drafting assistant with the architect Jack Howe in the 1950s...
and Mervyn Kurlansky, to form Pentagram, which was organized as a horizontal cooperative of equals, in which profits were shared, and staff and overheads pooled. Pentagram went on to build up a formidable worldwide reputation. Throughout the Pentagram years Crosby's passion for publication was expressed through a provocative series of "Pentagram Papers" (the title most likely a punning reference to the Pentagon Papers
Pentagon Papers
The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967...
, leaked in 1971).
1970s and '80s: Revisionism
During the 1970s a number of factors led Crosby to review the fundamental tenets of modernist architecture and urbanism, causing him to look critically at his own efforts of the 1960s, and setting him at odds with many of his architectural colleagues. A profound sense that architecture and urbanism had become a "game" played between experts, which left the public on the sidelines, led him to champion public participation in planning. His 1973 Hayward GalleryHayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery is an art gallery within the Southbank Centre, part of an area of major arts venues on the South Bank of the River Thames, in central London, England. It is sited adjacent to the other Southbank Centre buildings and also the Royal National Theatre and British Film Institute...
exhibition "How to play the environment game" was an extensive, accessible primer on the manifold factors that determine the shape and appearance of the city. In this exhibition Crosby rehearsed many of the arguments he would deploy until his death against the strident modernism adopted during the 1960s: the need to value history and, in particular, the monument; the necessity of bringing back craftsmanship to the environment; the requirement to understand what grants a place identity; the importance of sensible regulation; and the need to retrieve the city from mere money interests. He admits to having been influenced in his critique of the modernist city by the writings of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States...
-- a "prophet of sanity" to whom he devoted a section of the exhibition. After concluding at the Hayward, the exhibition travelled through England, Scotland and Wales, ending up in Stockholm.
It was in the Hayward exhibition too that Crosby introduced his notion of a "Pessimist Utopia": a Utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
appropriate for a time when it seemed affluence and cheap natural resources could not be relied upon to continue; and which would have to be forged, not from grand ideologies, but from small things readily to hand. This was an argument expanded two years later in a pair of "Lethaby Lectures" jointly entitled "The Pessimist Utopia", which Crosby delivered to the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, and subsequently published as a Pentagram Paper. Now fully under the influence of Jane Jacobs, and also of E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s...
(whose Small is Beautiful
Small Is Beautiful
Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr...
had been published two years before), Crosby argued that his own sphere, design—centred as it was on small enterprises—provided an attractive alternative to the bureaucratic model of decision-making then prevalent. In this, and in other respects, these lectures anticipated the enterprise culture of the 1980s and'90s.
1980s and '90s: Traditional Values
In 1982 Crosby was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA: he was elevated to full RA status in 1990), and set up the Art and Architecture Society, to encourage greater cooperation across disciplines, and greater use of artists and craftspeople by developers. A&A championed a "Percent for ArtPercent for Art
The term "percent for art" refers to a program, often a city ordinance, where a fee, usually some percentage of the project cost, is placed on large scale development projects in order to fund and install public art. The details of such programs vary from area-to-area...
" scheme in the UK—subsequently adopted, having been taken up by much larger arts organisations—and produced a Register of Artists and Craftsmen in Architecture.
In 1987 he was invited to become a member of a select group advising HRH The Prince of Wales on ways of promoting his agenda for architecture and urbanism. The group helped draft the Prince's influential speech to the 1987 Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's Annual Dinner (which kick-started his campaign for Paternoster Square
Paternoster Square
Paternoster Square is an urban development, owned by the Mitsubishi Estate Co., next to St Paul's Cathedral in the City of London, England. In 1942 the area, which takes its name from Paternoster Row, centre of the London publishing trade, was devastated by aerial bombardment in The Blitz during...
); helped shape his BBC television programme A Vision of Britain (later a book and V&A exhibition); and instituted his Summer Schools in Civil Architecture (1990–93), which evolved first into The Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture (1992–2001), and subsequently The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
Many aspects of the Prince's agenda had been earlier anticipated by Crosby: for example the critique of large-scale 1960s planning; the call for wider participation; the desire to re-incorporate art and craft in the built environment; and the acceptance of formal and stylistic "games" designed to minimize the effects of large-scale development. A number of the "10 Principles We Can Build Upon", which formed the core of the argument of A Vision of Britain (The Place, Hierarchy, Scale, Harmony, Enclosure, Materials, Decoration, Art, Signs & Lights, and Community) were indebted to Crosby.
Crosby's largely unhappy tenure as Professor of Architecture and Design at the Royal College of Art from 1990-93 was initially seen as a way of influencing architectural education in line with such principles. However, soon after he took up the post, the Prince decided, along with his advisers, that the better course might be to establish an independent Institute of Architecture. The RCA had been founded on the principle that architects and diverse craftspeople could be educated together, but Crosby's approach to the teaching curriculum was considered by many RCA students to be too traditional and limiting of creative freedom, and he met with much resistance, which took its toll on his health. He set out his "hopes and intentions" as Professor in his Inaugural Address as follows:
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- "The new education for architects and designers and artists must aim for a public, rather than a private expression. We must design to include pleasurable work for others, and ... learn to transcend the industrial system ... [W]e have to invest in convivial work ... This means among many other things, to encourage art and craft of every kind, to make them part of the public realm; to make out of a necessity a kind of utopia where everything is beautiful ... That means more intelligence at every level"
During this same period he tried (with Peter Lloyd-Jones) to generate interest in what he described as a "New Domesday Book
Domesday Book
Domesday Book , now held at The National Archives, Kew, Richmond upon Thames in South West London, is the record of the great survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086...
": a collaborative effort—beginning as an Inventory of Crosby's own neighbourhood of Spitalfields
Spitalfields
Spitalfields is a former parish in the borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London, near to Liverpool Street station and Brick Lane. The area straddles Commercial Street and is home to many markets, including the historic Old Spitalfields Market, founded in the 17th century, Sunday...
-- to record the present state of British streets, to serve as data for architects working remotely from their sites; and to provide planning officers with a better sense of the importance of the ensembles present in British towns and cities. The enterprise didn't survive him, but since his death new technologies (such as Google Street View) have realized its ambitions to a greater extent than he could have hoped.
The Globe and other architectural works
Crosby's most enduring legacy (though he didn't live to see its completion) will undoubtedly be Shakespeare's Globe on the south bank of the Thames. Here he was able to put into effect many of his long-held convictions about building, including something he had recommended in his "Pessimist Utopia" lectures: breaking down a large-scale development into smaller, more visually comprehensible, parts. In addition to the "wooden O" itself, he provided a smaller theatre based on a design by Inigo JonesInigo Jones
Inigo Jones is the first significant British architect of the modern period, and the first to bring Italianate Renaissance architecture to England...
, and a highly-decorated structure housing a restaurant, all set within a piazza placed above an open-plan booking hall. For the Globe itself (to which he devoted 17 years of historical research), Crosby insisted upon natural materials (oak and thatch) and high quality craftsmanship, "Man-made materials [being] banned from the site"
Equally important to the project was Crosby's never-say-die attitude, and his belief in the power of demonstration. By 1990 activity on site had virtually stalled, after 20 years of effort by the project's main protagonist, Sam Wanamaker
Sam Wanamaker
Samuel Wanamaker was an American film director and actor and is credited as the person most responsible for the modern recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London...
. An approach was first made, at Crosby's behest, to The Prince of Wales, to see whether he could take over the patronage of the project from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh
Duke of Edinburgh
The Duke of Edinburgh is a British royal title, named after the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, which has been conferred upon members of the British royal family only four times times since its creation in 1726...
, but protocol forbade it. The breakthrough occurred shortly after this, when Wanamaker was persuaded to construct some trial bays of the building, to hint at what a finished building would look like: a characteristic Crosby initiative, which helped to unlock sufficient public and private funds to realize the vision.
Some years before the conversion of Bankside Power Station
Bankside Power Station
Bankside Power Station is a former oil-fired power station, located on the south bank of the River Thames, in the Bankside district of London. It generated electricity from 1952 to 1981. Since 2000 the station's building has been used to house the Tate Modern art museum.-History:The station was...
to become Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
, and the opening of the Millennium Bridge
Millennium Bridge (London)
The Millennium Bridge, officially known as the London Millennium Footbridge, is a steel suspension bridge for pedestrians crossing the River Thames in London, England, linking Bankside with the City. It is located between Southwark Bridge and Blackfriars Railway Bridge...
link to St. Paul's Cathedral -- when the immediate neighbourhood of the Globe was visibly neglected—Crosby had the imagination to visualize his new complex standing at the centre of a new, vibrant, cultural quarter, which he referred to as "Shakespeare Village".
Other notable works include:
- Alterations to Chalcot House, Wiltshire;
- Ulster Terrace conversion, Regent's Park, London (an early example of a new building behind a preserved facade);
- Unilever House interiors, Blackfriars, London, 1979 (a "test bed for the reintroduction of artists into the building process"; disposed of in the 2006-07 refurbishment of the building);
- NMB Bank interiors, Amsterdam, 1983-7;
- Battle of Britain Monument (project, with Pedro Guedes and Michael Sandle), 1987;
- Barbican Centre interior improvements, City of London (overtaken by 2005-06 improvements).
Other books include:
- An Anthology of Houses (with Monica Pidgeon, 1960);
- Architecture: city sense (1965);
- A Sign Systems Manual (with Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, 1970);
- The Necessary Monument (1970);
- Let's Build a Monument (1987);
- Stonehenge Tomorrow (with Peter Lloyd-Jones, 1992).