‘Son of a Brutalist’
My father Tom Ellis was a Brutalist architect. He was a partner in the firm Lyons Israel Ellis Gray in London that helped build the British postwar Welfare State. The firm had its heyday in the period from 1945-80 designing schools, public housing and medical research buildings and were regarded as one of the leading architectural practices in London during that time.
Tom and Rosaleen Ellis on board a cross Channel ferry from Dover to Calais enroute to Rome, 1965.
Amongst their best known buildings are the Old Vic Annexe in Waterloo, London, that is now the National Theatre Studio; the College of Engineering and Science for the University of Westminster; Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth, Shropshire; and Wyndham Court housing in Southampton, all of which have been listed Grade II by Historic England.
The firm was also a training school for a number of distinguished architects who started their careers after leaving. These included Jim Stirling and his onetime partner James Gowan; Alan Colquhoun and his partner John Miller; Neave Brown who went on to work for the London Borough of Camden; and Richard MacCormac. They all worked in the practice at one tiome or another in the 1950’s and 60’s and claim to have gained valuable experience in the design and challenges of running a job. In two cases Lyons Israel Ellis helped by giving them projects to start their own practices. Stirling and Gowan were given part of a housing project in Preston that LIE were designing; and Colquhoun and Miller were given a school in East Ham that LIE were too busy to accept.
I grew up watching my father draw and sketch at home and learned from him about the pioneering architects of the Modern Movement. Tom had an extensive library of books and magazines and he would show me how to understand and interpret work by some of his heroes, Le Corbusier, Gunnar Asplund, Alvar AAlto and others. He taught me to recognize what made a good plan and wrote an influential set of articles called The Discipline of the Route.
On other occasions he took me on what he referred to as ‘Corb Crawls’ to Paris to visit the famous Le Corbusier designed houses such as Maison La Roche, the Jaoul Houses, the Villa Savoye, and the Stein house at Garches.
Le Corbusier’s post war architecture at the Jaoul Houses and the factory at St Denis with their exposed concrete frames and rough brickwork influenced my father and he would pore over the photographs and plans in Corb’s Oeuvre Complet to understand the intricacies of the details and construction. These influenced the designs for the Old Vic Annexe warehouse project and the school in Bridgnorth that he designed with Alan Colquhoun.
Other sources included Melnikov’s Rusakov Club (1928) in Moscow, with its functional expression of the raked form of the auditorium that influenced two of his projects, the Wolfson Institute Lecture Theatres in Hammersmith and the Lecture theatres for the College of Engineering and Science for the Central London Polytechnic. Tom would discuss these designs with Jim Stirling when he would visit our house for dinner and I am sure this must have in turn influenced Jim in his designs for the Leicester Engineering Building (1956).
He also admired Alvar Aalto’s work and spoke at Aalto’s reception when he was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 1956. Tom also admired Gunnar Asplund and visited him in Stockholm just before the War. One of my treasured posessions is a watercolour painting he did of one of the courttrooms in the Gothenburg City Hall.
I followed my father’s career as an architect, studying at Cambridge under Sir Leslie Martin at a time when Modernism was still in ascendance. I worked in his office for a few years after graduating in 1970 before moving on to work with Richard MacCormac and then emigrating with my Californian wife to San Francisco in 1977, where I have lived and worked ever since.
I look back in admiration on my father’s work and his commitment to building the Welfare State. I visited many of the buildings he spoke about including on a memorable journey with three fellow students from Cambridge when we drove on a 6,000 mile trip across Europe from London to Moscow and back. In Moscow we saw Le Corbusier’s Centrosoyus Building, Melnikov’s Club and his own idiosyncratic house, before driving up to Leningrad, as it then was, through Finland to see many of Aalto’s buildings, and then back via Stockholm and Gothenburg where I visited the City Hall and courthouse that Tom had painted thirty years earlier.
I taken a different path from my father’s, focusing on urbanism and place making. Tom’s work was seeking a new architectural language to respond to a new society. It was based on functionalism and a belief in truth to materials and methods of construction. I look back on my father’s era as part of the broad sweep of architectural history that has now absorbed Modernism and Brutalism. Jim Stirling wrote that Modernism was a revolution, just as the Renaissance was, but that these are minority events in the larger picture and that architects can now look both backwards as well as forwards in their search for architectural inspiration and sources.