Obituary. (View).

Peter Smithson died earlier this year. Peter Salter contributes a personal memoir on one of the most influential and inspiring partnerships of the second half of the twentieth century.

To know Peter Smithson, indeed the Smithsons, is to know them through their work. As a student and as an assistant in their office between 1980-1983, I have pieced together some personal reflections, fragments of their extraordinary talent and commitment to architecture.

Embedded in the two major publications of the Smithsons, Ordinariness and Light and the later book Without Rhetoric, is the idea that architecture should exist with explicit qualities and appropriateness and also with a reticence and quietness that can accommodate the different wishes and desires of its inhabitants. It is not an architecture that is functionally over prescribed or used with any sense of protocol. That is to say, it is an architecture in which the functional requirements are underpinned by qualities of space that come from a reading of the context, scale and possible materials that set a poetic and a clarity to the space which offers ease of use. Such judgements of appropriateness are often disarming. To read the context is to read the strategy of the building. The context is both a physical and a cultural understanding of the place.

The Smithsons were perhaps our greatest modern readers of context. As raconteurs their architectural reading is stratified by insightful anecdote. This is used not in any sentimental way but as a circumstance within which a strategy is formed. A tough context demands a strong idea. Robin Hood Gardens (1970) is perhaps the toughest of contexts for social housing. Situated at the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel, the environment is like the turbulence associated with some medieval earth working. The buildings sit like a sheltering battlement, a running bastion enclosing green space created from the earth mounds of excavated material. Sightlines across cranked walkways are at the scale of the site; sightlines between kitchen and play-deck are at a domestic scale. The making of strategy from the context is often very disarming in its clarity of intent. The strategy of the Alexandrina Library (1989) is derived from a site situated on the shores of the Mediterranean. The consequences of high ground water levels ma ke basement book storage undesirable. The strategy was to store books in the driest places above the ground water datum.

The interfolding of strategy with detail--where one scale of reading enriches the other--offers an architecture that is distinct and clear in its qualities. The Second Arts Building at Bath University (1980) occupies what some might call a back lot development. For the Smithsons the deck access promenade of the overall strategic plan was understood as some capacious carpet, in which their building forms a tassle at the extremity. The building looks like a tassle in plan but it is not--it forms a generous end to a route through buildings, measuring distance from the centre of the public promenade. The building's triangular form on the north side of the campus opens out from its narrow neck connection, to allow south-east and south-west sun-shine. The notion of layering that can be read in the strategy is found in the detail. The building of in-situ concrete is grooved with construction joints and weathering channels. Rainwater staining and Bath soot are encouraged in some places and suppressed in others. It i s the staining that can be expected of a building conceived as an outpost. The interior of the in-situ concrete work is lined with beech-faced plywood, while externally the concrete is layered with a beech hedge that in winter exposes the spandrils to the splash-back of the orange soils. The building has a running cornice that traces every angle in a visual displacement and juxtaposition, acting like a peaked cap that protects the eyes and allows distances to be perceived across the rolling down land of Claverton. Such details offer places of shelter for climbing plants. They identify the top edge of the building, carrying echoes of the scalloped parapets of Bath buildings stepping down steep streets of the Georgian city.

Bath Walks records a series of meanderings around the City of Bath, identifying architectural details and revealing new relationships between the patches of buildings and its streets. The walks reveal another theme in the Smithsons work, the necessity to understand distances as a physical measure and as a pace and scaling device, The running cornices and banding courses that accompany the visitor up the stepped entrance ramp of the university and past the Architecture School at Bath (1988), register not only heights but also distances.

The attention paid to the tops of their buildings as a registration of the sky through cornice details and eaves lines can be seen in the Smithsons' last commission for the reorientation and extension of the Tecta furniture factory (1990) with a new furniture museum in Germany, The internal arrangement of the factory has been reorientated to face the landscape. A new room in stainless steel at the parapet level of the factory registers the large sky of the agricultural landscape. In its material and its faceting, the room catches hold of the sky in much the same manner as the tree-lined horizon beyond.

Registers and measures are the Smithsons' tools to formulate and test strategies. Peter Smithson said that certain ideas are revisited in each project. As preoccupations they become refined and act on the strategy enabling it to become critical. In making the design, strategy drawings at a diagrammatic scale of 1:200 would be worked together with part plans and sections at 1:25 and sometimes at full size. It was the folding together of strategy and detail that enabled the consistency of idea to be read throughout the building. The 1:25 scale drawings were always interesting as they carried not only construction information but also measuring devices and emblems, in order to explore the scale and context of work. The sections had a quality of exploration, of looking round the project for anchors and ideas. These sections carried a microcosm of the detail of the building. Such exploration in drawing was also evident in lectures to students. Peter spoke as though finding his way. Site information was folded int o things that he had read or experienced in the same way that strategic information was layered with detail. In a lecture about the house at Ansty Plum, Peter spoke of climbing the path and determining a place to pause, sitting with Alison to take in a view before proceeding up to the house. The subject of the lecture, Ansty Plum was folded into a memory of climbing the path to Delphi paced by classical remains and views across the open valley. The formal quality of that walk among the carved stones of antiquity was matched by the formal hat worn by Alison at Ansty Plum. Figures in the drawings and figures in photographs were always important means of 'connecting' the design.

The notion of making an architecture for others to inhabit, in which they could find their own accommodation, is not an abdication of responsibility, it is generosity. Every project demonstrated this need in the strategy of the building and its spaces.

The Smithsons' favourite picture of the Economist Buildings (1964) shows a solitary figure in a howler hat crossing the plaza. It reinforces the urban quality but also registers the scale of the buildings. The Economist towers offer three different scales of fenestration. The smallest bank tower offers the largest scale to the StJames's Street. The more discreet tower at the back of the site is an apartment building of domestic scale. The office tower on the side street is the scale mediator. This fenestration of mullions forms an arcading at plaza level. The series of scales become part of a sequence of spaces critical to the reading of the architecture of the plaza and its thresholds.

The way in which people might occupy the spaces was critically important to the Smithsons. Even with the minimum of prescription, the spaces still had to work, and their qualities had to be effective for those who occupied the building.

The emblems inscribed on drawings, whether they were elaborate sun figures, classical masks (1984) for the Bath buildings or peacock feathers for the Tehran Library (1977) accompanied by elaborate domes, each held the idea and became a prompt and. sometimes a memorandum towards a measure or a test of the design. The carpet building of the Kuwait City project (1970) carries the emblem of horse riders galloping across an event space lit by flaming torches - used as a cultural touchstone and presumably a need to remember the scale of space that allows a horse to gallop and to stop. The competition project for Milibank (1976) has a formally seated Japanese emperor collaged on a low angled isometric projection - presumably reminding the architect of a borrowed landscape view. The emblematic drawing carries the idea of a depiction of events very similar to the postcards sent to the office from Urbino, which showed the awkward perspectival projections of early religious paintings of the Visitation, with the virgin surrounded by fragments of the dwelling.

What is important is a reading of the site, a reading of the drawing or a reading of the building. In their own house the Smithsons inhabited spaces built for a different occupancy. To read this disjuncture, the conversion identified all new work by using plywood as the construction material. This included the blocking of existing door openings and the insertion of new pieces.

Perhaps one of the last lectures given by Peter Smithson was a reflection on the reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion. This was discussed many times by Alison referring to pictures of lost components and newspaper cuttings. Peter spoke again of Ruskin's view of the veneers on the facade of the Redentore in Venice, the use of such thin marbles being justified by reference to the transportation difficulties of the time. The marble veneers of the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion had a different detail and relationship to the roof plane because the original roof was of timber, as a temporary structure, while the reconstructed roof is of concrete.

The Smithsons always worked with both physical and cultural ideas of materials and spaces. They remain an inspiration to generations of architects for their presentation of a way forward for the discipline and for their humanity.