Alison and Peter Smithson

Alison Smithson (22 June 1928 – 14 August 1993) and Peter Smithson (18 September 1923 – 3 March 2003) were English architects that together formed an architectural partnership, and are often associated with the New Brutalism (especially in architectural and urban theory).

Peter was born in in County Durham, north-east England, and Alison was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. They met while studying architecture at Durham University and married in 1949. Together, they joined the architecture department of the London County Council before establishing their own partnership in 1950.

Peter Smithson studied architecture at the University of Durham between 1939 and 1948, along with a programme in the Department of Town Planning, also at Durham, between 1946 and 1948. Alison studied architecture at the same university between 1944 and 1949.

They first came to prominence with Hunstanton School which used some of the language of high modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe but in a stripped back way, with rough finishes and deliberate lack of refinement. They are arguably among the leaders of the British school of New Brutalism. They were associated with Team X and its 1953 revolt against old Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) philosophies of high modernism.

Among their early contributions were streets in the sky in which traffic and pedestrian circulation were rigorously separated, a theme popular in the 1960s. They were members of the Independent Group participating in the 1953 Parallel of Life and Art exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and This Is Tomorrow in 1956. Throughout their career they published their work energetically, including their several unbuilt schemes, giving them a profile, at least among other architects, out of proportion to their relatively modest output.

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