Domestic Architecture 1700 to 1960

10 Between the Wars, 1918-1939 - Part Three

The cosy semi-rural world of the Tudoresque villa was rudely shattered by a challenge from the aggressive, uncompromising Modern Movement. This was a European reaction to traditional styles which emerged in the 1920s, led by architects such as Le Corbusier (1887-1965), Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, (1886-1969). They rejected historical styles and any architectural decoration or whimsy. Ornament of any kind was to be banished as architecture searched for a purity and simplicity of design based on sheer functionalism. In achieving this traditional building techniques were abandoned in favour of reinforced concrete which enabled the architect to break all conventions of design. Cantilevered upper floors, large picture windows and flat roofs and the whole finished in stark white were the hall marks of the movement.
Some striking houses were built in the style – such as ‘High and Over’ (right) in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, designed by the New Zealand architect, Amyas Connell (1901-80). Completed in 1929 and followed by several similar houses, ‘High and Over’ received critical acclaim from within the architectural profession but never caught the popular imagination.
The Modern Movement never suited the British psyche – or the weather: it was seen as too impersonal and large areas of glass were either to hot or too cold for the English climate. Nevertheless, a few middle class apartment blocks around greater London were built in the Modern Style and some elements were applied to houses of conventional construction. To John Betjeman these were not ‘modern’, only ‘jazz’, with their flat, green tiled roofs, white rendered walls and wide metal windows which curved around corners (right). These, the so called ‘suntrap’ windows have given their name to this distinctive house type. The Suntrap house, however, never represented more than a minor footnote in the history of thirties suburbia, always something of a curiosity and ultimately, signifying the failure of the Modern Movement to win widespread acceptance before 1939.