Wells Coates

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Wells Coates
Born
Wells Wintemute Coates

(1895-12-17)December 17, 1895
Tokyo, Japan
DiedJune 17, 1958(1958-06-17) (aged 62)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity of British Columbia, East London College
OccupationArchitect

Wells Wintemute Coates

Hampstead, London
.

Early years

The oldest of six children, Wells Coates was born in Tokyo, Japan, on December 17, 1895, to Methodist missionaries Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates (1864–1945) and Harper Havelock Coates (1865–1934).[1]

The young man's desire to be an architect was inspired by his mother, who had herself studied architecture under Louis Sullivan and planned one of the first missionary schools in Japan.[2]

Coates spent his youth in the Far East, and voyaged around the world with his father in 1913. He served in World War I, first as a gunner and later as a pilot with the Royal Air Force. He attended the

East London College where he studied engineering (obtaining a PhD in 1924).[3]
Among his first jobs in England was as a journalist and then with the design firm of Adams and Thompson in 1924. He established his own firm in 1928.

His childhood experiences in Japan would play an important role in his aesthetic sensibility that he brought to his architectural work, and this sensibility found a fitting outlet in the

Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which produced the famous Athens Charter, and was one of the founders, with Maxwell Fry, of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS)
, the British wing of CIAM.

Between 1932 and 1936 Coates was in partnership with an English architect David Pleydell-Bouverie and designed together the Sunspan House for the 1934 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition held at Olympia, London.[4]

Role as a Modernist

The Isokon Building
Embassy Court in Brighton

Wells embraced

Isokon building (also known as Lawn Road Flats), completed in 1934. Indeed, the architectural critic J.M. Richards suggested that he improved on Corbusier, coming "nearer to the machine à habiter than anything Corbusier ever designed". The building was compared to the exterior of an ocean liner by the novelist Agatha Christie, who lived there for a time, so clean and striking was the design.[5]

The apartment building was the brainchild of

Modernist architecture and furniture. With simple living spaces strongly influenced by Coates' Japanese experience, and including built-in Isokon furniture, Isokon was "an experiment in collective housing designed for left-wing intellectuals".[6] It became a haven for Germans and Hungarians escaping Nazi persecution and hosted many famous personages including Agatha Christie, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer.[7]

Isokon was ahead of its time: it won second place in Horizon Magazine's 'Ugliest Building Competition' in 1946, and would not be recognized as one of England's most important Modernist buildings for another decade. The building fell into disrepair by the 1990s but it changed ownership in 2001 and was fully restored by 2004.

Later achievements

Ekco radio display, showing Coates's most popular design, the AD-65 on the right
Ekco model AD 65 radio (1932)

An inventive genius, Coates revelled in introducing new ideas in his work. Among his innovations was the '3-2'

British Broadcasting Corporation, and among his technical designs was a microphone stand featuring an overhead counterbalanced arm that enabled the microphone to be moved to any part of the studio while remaining perfectly balanced. The design became a standard piece of equipment at the BBC.[8] Coates also designed the distinctive and influential round bakelite cabinets used by EKCO for some of its radios during the 1930s. Featured in the V&A permanent collection, the Museum notes of the design of Model AD-65: "the severe geometric shape defined the visual vocabulary of radio design for many years".[9]

The thirties were his most prolific era. The Isokon was immediately followed by Embassy Court in Brighton (1935) and 10 Palace Gate, Kensington (1939). These were the only apartment buildings he would design.[10] He also had several private home commissions.

This view of 10 Palace Gate illustrates Coates' 3-2 architectural plan.

During World War II, he again served with the RAF, this time working on fighter aircraft development, for which he was later awarded an OBE.[11] Following the war, he, like some other well known architects including Gropius and Breuer (by then working in America), contributed to the British post-War housing effort by introducing an early scheme for modular housing he called Room Unit Production.

In 1949-50, he designed the building of the

National Film Theatre in October 1952, until its demolition in 1957 as the NFT was relocated a stone's throw away from its original site, under Waterloo Bridge.[12]

He also designed a remarkable boat, called the Wingsail. It had a rigid sail design mounted on a catamaran hull. Though he formed a company to market the design, it was not a success, as both the sail and the catamaran were ahead of their time.

He is less well known for his planning work. In 1937, he undertook planning for a

Iroquois New Town on the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario which were also not implemented (the design was awarded to others).[14] He also prepared plans for a Toronto Island Redevelopment Project,[15]
and was a participant in the Project 58 urban redevelopment scheme for Vancouver.

Final years in Canada

Coates began coming back to Canada in the early 1950s, about the time of the Iroquois project, finally settling there in 1957. In 1955 and 1956, he taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard with Walter Gropius but he was not happy there. He returned to Vancouver after two years, where he worked on Project 58. His last assignment was to design a monorail rapid transit system for Vancouver, dubbed the Monospan Twin-Ride System (MTRS). Once again, he was ahead of his time. The project was abandoned, but would be rejuvenated years later in another form known as SkyTrain.

Wells Coates died of a heart attack in Vancouver on June 17, 1958, at the age of 62. Coates was married to Marion Grove in 1927. They had one child, Laura, and separated in 1937.[16] Coates' grandson is Matt Black of the electronic music duo Coldcut.[17]

Further reading

English Heritage blue plaque at 18 Yeoman’s Row, Knightsbridge, London

The University of East Anglia Library in Norwich has materials relating to his life and work. A list of the holdings is available online.[18] Additional reference materials from the CIAM period are held at the CIAM Belgian Section of the Getty Research Institute.[19]

Coates' daughter, Laura Cohn, published a biography of her father called The Door to a Secret Room (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1999)

Sherban Cantacuzino
and published by Gordon Fraser, London.

References

  1. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38547. Retrieved 2024-02-21. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  2. ^ [1] The Friends of Embassy Court
  3. Queen Mary, University of London
    Archives.
  4. ^ Sherban Cantacuzino: Wells Coates: A Monograph, Gordon Fraser, London 1978, p. 18 and p. 57
  5. ^ [2] Open 2 (Open University)
  6. ^ [3] Chloë Théault, The historical myth of London during the 1930s
  7. ^ [4] V&A Museum, Isokon Penguin Donkey Bookcase
  8. ^ [5] Design Museum, Wells Coates, Architect and Designer
  9. ^ Wells Coates, 'ECKO Model AD-65' radio, 1932
  10. ^ [6] Friends of Embassy Court
  11. ^ [7] Ibid.
  12. ^ Wells Coates, 'Planning the Festival of Britain Telekinema', in the Journal of the British Kinematograph Society, April 1951, pp.108-119
  13. ^ Wells Coates at archINFORM
  14. ^ [8] UBC Carol Coates Fonds
  15. ^ [9] Canada Architecture, Cumulative Index of the SSAC-SEAC Journal, Vol. 6 (1980)- Vol. 24 (1999)
  16. ^ Wells Coates: Marion, Wellscoates.org. Accessed February 7, 2017.
  17. ^ Daniel Wittenberg, (July 9, 2014) Plaque unveiled to mark 80 years of Hampstead modernist icon the Isokon Building, Ham&High, Archant Community Media Ltd. Accessed February 7, 2017.
  18. ^ [10] East Anglia Library
  19. ^ [11] Getty Research Institute

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wells Coates.
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