SIR HUGH CASSON , CH, KCVO, PRA, RDI, architect; born May 23 1910, died on August 15, 1999 aged 89.
His joint memorial service (with his late wife) was held at St. Paul's Cathedral on Monday, November 29, 1999.
Director, Architecture, The Festival of Britain; was knighted 1952; was a lecturer at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1975, elected to the Royal Academy 1970 and its president for 12 years,during which time he (quote) "proceeded to knock the stuffiness out of the prestigious arts institution". Prince Charles, a devoted pupil and friend observed that Casson "sketches with pen and watercolour in the same way that other people hum tunes"; described as "artistic English architect and tireless arts booster" (Details quoted from from "TIME" magazine for August 30,1999 on the B'ham. - Munich flight!)
"The nation was alerted to possibilities and opportunities hitherto undreamed of. But the real achievement of the South Bank was that it made people want things to be better, and to believe that they could be. It was noticably unboastful and nobody was taught to hate anyone. Beneath the flags and the fireworks it had, in retrospect, a spiritual quality which is good to remember." ( Sir Hugh Casson on the South Bank Exhibition from his article "Period Piece" in "A Tonic to the Nation". )
"He was not an outstandingly good architect, but he was a figure in the architecture world whom no one could have replaced, and there were moments when his particular combination of talents - which at other times pulled against each other - added up to exactly what was needed. One such occassion was the Festival of Britain in 1951, when he served as director of architecture. Its success, and especially the success of the South Bank exhibition was largely due to Casson's ability to persuade a team of assorted architects to work harmoniously together, and to his imagination, dedication and diplomacy. To these he added - well in advance of his time - his flair as an urban landscapist: a manipulator of spaces, structures, vegetation, vistas and enclosures to create a modern urban equivalent of the English tradition of picturesque landscape. He deservedly received a knighthood for his work. Townscaping, to which the Festival of Britain was a pioneering contribution and which has since become a recognised part of the architect's vocabulary, was more Casson's natural medium than building. ".
( Taken from "The Times", August 17 1999 )
"LOOKING BACK AT A NATIONAL TONIC" from "Country Life" - November 11,1976 By Hugh Casson
" 'A Tonic to the nation'. That at any rate is what Gerald Barry called it. (He was the man who thought up the idea of the Festival and rightly was given the job of running it!) Certainly we all needed something to cheer us up in those disenchanted post-war years. True we had survived a war. Behind us also by now were the great reform programmes of the National and Labour governments, the 1944 Education Act, the National Health Service, the Town and Country Planning Act. Yet Utopia seemed as far as away as ever and the rationing of food, clothes and building materials was sharper-edged even than it had been in the war. We were more than ready for a reassuring word or an encouraging event.
The time then for the Festival (if a tiny bit late) was right, and the peg - the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 - seemed reasonably appropriate and after a couple of years of desultory debate the Government in 1948 gave the go-ahead . It was to be not an international trade fair but a national celebration, a show that presented ourselves to ourselves. An organisation similar to the present Arts Council was swiftly set up. Herbert Morrison became the Minister in charge to whom a non-party Council reported, assisted by advisory panels of specialists in the Arts and Sciences. Finally a small executive was established under Gerald Barry to run the show.
I joined in September 1948. "There won't be any building", said Barry. "It's just keeping an architectural eye on things, but it looks like being fun." Fun it certainly proved to be and not just for those of us in the engine room. It was genuinely nationwide.All over the country the Festival was celebrated in locally organised events of every size and kind.
The centrepiece of the official programme was the South Bank exhibition in London- two small versions of which toured the country, one of them aboard the converted aircraft carrier "Campania" . There were supporting shows at Belfast (agriculture), Glasgow (industry), Kensington (science) and Poplar (architecture). There was also an unprecedented (for England) explosion in national patronage of the arts - opera, films, painting, poetry, sculpture and crafts. In sum, a lot of people enjoyed themselves and it was all a great success-achieved let us remember against two preparatory years of almost universal derision and hostility. The press, either snooty or abusive was against it throughout. The establishment suspected it was all a smokescreen for advancing Socialism. The Left decided it was middle class; the academics that it was populist; Sir Thomas Beecham said it was imbecile; Evelyn Waugh that it was pathetic;Noel Coward that it was not worth more than a mild giggle. But Morrison and his Council stood firm, and we in the Festival office were any way far too busy to despair.
Our main concern was the South Bank Exhibition- 27 acres of treeless and derelict mud flats, split in half by a railway bridge, but bang in the centre of London and commanding splendid views of the river's curve. The theme we were given - largely devised by Ian Cox - was the British development in the Arts, Science and Industry. The job of putting this story into visual terms was given to the Design Group- three architects and two designers. These were later to be assisted by an army of designers and engineers, landscape artists, typographers, painters, sculptors and scriptwriters- all comparitvely young and experienced. We had to work hard and fast and we did. We were given the site in Autumn 1948. By Christmas the Master Plan had been approved. By the following March the architects had been given their briefs, their sites and their budgets. By May their sketches were in, and on July 29, work had started on site. It was open on time and virtually within its budget. In five months it was visited by over eight million people-something, I think everyone concerned should be proud of.
Just think of the problem. A narrative story to be told in separate chapter/pavilions (agriculture, industry, transport, recreation, and the like) each demanding a different site and budget, each to be separately scripted, designed, built and filled. Yet it was to be composed into a coherent complex with a common visual language and to be equipped with all the essential services of a great exhibition-gardens and cafes, lavatories, open air displays, fountains, bandstands, seats and litter bins, plus of course, all the behind-the scenes facilities.
Nothing could start until it had been approved and costed - whether fireworks or cleaners overalls, fodder for exhibition cattle or fees for scriptwriters, models of Viking ships or crockery for restaurants. One of the principal organisational difficulties was where to put anything on this cramped and busy site-bricks or concrete mixers, cranes or huts. For two years every inch of the site seemed to be either dug up or in constant use. When the exhibits arrived it was an even worse nightmare of controlled confusion. Every object-cricket bats, railway engines or prize sheep- had to be labelled, installed, catalogued and protected, and all the crates and packing had to be cleared away promptly. It was all by any standards a remarkable achievement.
But was it anything else? Was it really a tonic, as Barry claimed or, as some critics suspected, a tranquilliser- a political device to distract the national from its discomfort? Was it an architectural milestone or just a rehash of Paris and Stockholm? A true release of creative activity or another retreat into our national artistic hideyhole of whimsy and nostalgia?
A bit of everything no doubt. Certainly it was a bit priggish. There was a whiff of Workers Educational Association, a touch of didatics about the South Bank Exhibition. (You would expect that from the background of the people running it.) It was also "professional" rather than participatory. (It had to be-you cannot get an exhibition up to that speed by holding public meetings to discuss attitudes and content.) Some of it perhaps- as Robert Lutyens said in a sadly dismissive article in "Country Life"- was "fearfully silly". Yet though modestly self congratulatory it was not boastful nor noisly nationalistic. Nobody was taught to hate anybody. It was intelligent (in Bertrand Russell's sense of being the rational execution of something conceived in passion) and it was light hearted and visually it was certainly a knock-out.
The South Bank became- as we had intended it to become-not just a complex of buildings but a "popular place", relaxed , enchanting, informal, human in scale. The solution, it seemed, suggested itself. On such a small site, and with an unpredictable variety of building, axial planning and formal symmetry even if desired were physically impossible. So the South Bank was arranged with deliberate informality - with "rooms" of different uses and character opening one out of the other, rather like some roofless Victorian Mansion.
Such a planning device requires dexterity and skill in the use of recognisable but unobtrusive barriers- using changes of level and paving texture and planting or water barriers to delineate areas and to guide the visitors from one section to the other. There were no "Keep Off" notices, and interestingly, no vandalism. Sculpture and murals were not stuffed into a hallowed Pavilion of Art but were made frankly part of the general scene. All the details -lamp posts and litter bins, direction signs and cafe furniture-were as carefully considered as the buildings. It became in its way, a pattern book for our new urban landscapes, and its influence-with all its faults- is with us still.
Could we do it all again? Of course and better. There is today much more design talent about. The annual flood of designers from the new art schools positively foams with talent and energy. Dockland is empty and just waiting for some hot waterbottle to warm it up for future use. We all long for more places to walk about in free from noise and motor cars, to listen to music in the open air, and to be bewitched by the unexpected or the beautiful. Who would run it this time? Again the Herbivores (as M. Frayn termed the Festival Team), or the Others? Jonathan Miller,as it were,or Lew Grade? I wonder."
Adventure of the South Bank (from the "Daily Mail" Festival of Britain Preview and Guide) by Hugh Casson
This is the story of an adventure in building - and it is a true story. It begins about two years ago. The scene is the South Bank, a grimy and battered film-set of a place lying almost in the shadow of Big Ben but for generations left neglected and decaying.
The characters - several hundred of them - are architects and engineers, technicians and building workers in all trades, script-writers and sculptors, typists and lorry drivers, scientists and painters, canteen cooks and gardeners.
With slide rule and shovel, with typewriter, chisel, spanner and saw, they have between them transformed these 27 acres of dilapidated wharves and derelict housing into a new world of gaiety, colour and enchantment. And they have taken only about 22 months to do the job.
Some of the buildings which make up this new world are more daring and novel than anything that has ever been attempted anywhere before.
Nor is this all. Within the same period of time, uopn the same site, the two projects of the London County Council have also been successfully completed, a new 3,000 seat Concert Hall, which can surely claim to be the finest in Europe, and a new embankment which - completed three months ahead of schedule- has reclaimed for London's use something like 4.5 acres of Thames mud.
All this has been achieved under the most difficult site conditions, in the worst weather this country has experienced for years, and at a time when materials and labour were desperately scarce.
Its completion is due not only to the skill and imagination of the architects and designers concerned, but to the resource, ingenuity, and hard work of everyone concerned, both on the site itself and in offices and workshops all over the country.
For nearly two years now Londoners and visitors have looked across the river and watched the Exhibition grow.
It was in the summer of 1948 when, after many alternative sites had been investigated, the choice finally fell upon the South Bank.
It was a bold but inspiring decision, for this site, contained within the great curve of the Thames as it thrusts northwards between Westminster and Waterloo Bridges, lies in the very heart of London.
Its advantages were obvious. It possesses a magnificent river frontage. It is easy to get to from all parts of the city - both vital assets to an exhibition site. Moreover, it is as rich in history as it is dramatic in its placing.
But there were disadvantages too, of course. It was comparitively speaking, small. It was cut in half by a railway bridge and a public right of way. It was without trees.
But even these disadvantages could be turned to good account. A large exhibition is too often more exhausting than exciting and, as for the railway bridge- well, as you have read elsewhere in this issue, the exhibition story was anyway to be told in two chapters and the bridge made an appropriate division between them.
An exhibition exists only to be looked at. If it fails to arouse the visitor's interest from the start, and cannot hold his attention to the very end, then it has been built to no purpose.
This then was the problem. Our solution was based on four simple decisions.
First, that the site should be linked visually, and if possible in fact, with the North Bank.
This has been done by means of the Bailey Bridge built for us by the Royal Engineers. This takes off from the North Bank at the foot of Northumerland Avenue - within a few hundred yards of Trafalgar Square itself- and delivers the visitor into the heart of the Exhibition.
Secondly, we agreed that in a site so small as this, huge avenues and grandiose vistas were not for us, even though we wanteed them. So we have grouped the buildings round a series of courtyards, each different in colour and form and silhouette, so that in passing from one to the other the visitor is presented with a constantly changing series of views and the total size of the site is disguised by the variety of its seperate parts.
Impressive views have not been forgotten, but they are placed at strategic points where London herself provides them- up river to Westminster, and down river past Somerset House to St. Paul's.
Our third decision was that the main Exhibition structure- our Eiffel Tower, as it were- should be a saucer dome. This of course would have to be the largest dome in the world. And there, after many difficulties, it stands to-day, a triumph of british design and technique, and completed two days ahead of its 14-month schedule.
Our last decision was that once the master plan had been prepared and the individual buildings sited, each building should be designed by a seperate architect, who would be given his programme, his site and his budget, and otherwise as free hand as possible.
These recommendations were agreed to by the Festival Office and in April, 1949, the architects' first sketches arrived. Weeks passed, while they were examined and if necessary, amended. Estimates had to be made, structural systems checked.
Most of these buildings, remember, are extremely unorthodox both in appearance and in method of construction. And this is what as it should be.
Exhibitions have always been the nursery of new ideas. They are the architect's laboratory where his experiments are carried out, and if successful, the results later incorporated into normal and more permanent buildings.
I suppose that every exhibition designer hopes that his particular job will be more handsome and original than its predecessors. He wouldn't be a very lively designer if he did not. But we in the Festival office believe that the South Bank Exhibition will be unique, for three reasons.
First, this will be the only Exhibition of such a size ever designed in narrative form, telling a continuous story throughout the whole of its extent.
Second, the Exhibition will be selective in content and will show nothing that is not entirely British and which does not do this country the highest credit for quality of design and workmanship.
Thirdly, also we believe for the first time the buildings in which this story is told will not be buildings in the normal sense of the word. They are not, so to speak, merely decorative pavilions, with labels on the outside saying Industry, Fashion, Agriculture, or whatever it may be, but actual three-dimensional expressions of the story they tell.
The story, for instance, of the origins of our island is told in a cave-like structure covered with rocks and turf without, dim, haunted and mysterious within; that of Agriculture in a great Dutch barn, open on one side to an informal garden; that of mining at the bottom of an immense towering shaft; that of shipbuilding and the sea in a semi-open air assembley of steel ribs, canvas and spars, so designed that at suitable points in the story the visitor passes into the open-air and becomes physically conscious of the sun and the wind.
Obviously this new conception of exhibition building may look very exciting, but it has its dangers. Where everybody shouts for attention no one is heard. But, as you will see when you walk around among these structures of polished wood and gleaming metal and glass, you will. I think, feel that each one of them, however inventive or original in itself, fits happily in with its neighbours.
There are some thirty main buildings on the site, excluding smaller cafes and management offices, and they have been grouped upstream of the railway bridge round the Dome of Discovery and Skylon and downstream of the bridge, round the Royal Festival Hall and the Shot Tower.
The starting points for both groups, the first of which tells the story of the Land of Britain, the other of the People of Britain, are placed opposite each other on the main fairway and adjoining the Waterloo Station entrance.
The climax of the upstream story is reached in the Dome of Discovery, a saucer of aluminium rising 90 ft above the ground. Here wil be illustrated British pre-eminence on discovery and exploration, not only by land and sea but into the very nature of the living world.
The Dome is a structural adventure as typical in its bearing to this century as was the Crystal Palace of 1851. Huge arches of aluminium leap from side to side of the steel ring which encircles the rim of the saucer.
The Dome itself is sheathed in aluminium, and supported on a series of hinged raking spars, so designed that they will take up without effort the bewildering series of stresses to which a building of this size is subjected under various temperatures and in different kinds of weather.
As daring and novel as the Dome is its neighbour, the Skylon, the design for which was won in competition by two young architects.
This is a silver pointer balanced upon a cradle of cables, towering like a suspended exclamation mark 290 feet above the ground. At the other end of the fairway the Waterloo Station entrance is spanned by the largest laminated timber arches in Europe.
Between these buildings stand huge exhibits- a railway engine, a giant buoy, electrical plant, the bows of a 4,000 ton merchant ship.
Downstream the atmosphere is quieter and more relaxed, for here is told the story of the British people, how they live and spend their leisure. The buildings are smaller, materials more traditional. There are more gardens and places in which to rest. But even here there is plent of experimental design.
Here is what is beliveved to be the first Telecinema in the world, presenting large-screen television and incorporating all the latest ideas as well in film projection.
At the summit of the old Shot Tower stands the aerial of a radio-telescope connected to the Dome of Discovery, and through which radio signals can be transmitted to and received from the moon.
A miniature replica of the Crystal Palace stands at the foot of the tower, surrounded by pools and trees, an elegant reminder of the centenary we celebrate this year.
So, past the bandstand in its garden, past the restaurants and the pools, demonstration Sports area, and thence along the Seaside promenade, which lies between the Royal Festival Hall and the river, until the visitor eventually returns to his starting point on the main Fairway.
By now perhaps it is dusk, the buildings and flags are floodlit, the lights twinkle in the trees, and the gas flames leap between the fountains.
So the pace quickens as the opening day approaches. Floodlights, radio circuits and loudspeakers are tested. Demonstrators make last-minute adjustments to the machins in their care.
Opening ceremonies are rehearsed, proofs of programmes and catalogues checked and re-checked. Flowers are bedded out, sculpture lifted into place. Everywhere paint is being touched up, floors polished, roads swept. For us in the Festival office the South Bank is nearly over.
The next adventure -that of seeing it in all its expected magic- is yours.
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