Peter and Alison Smithson

Alison Smithson (22 June 1928 – 14 August 1993) and Peter Denham 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 Margaret Gill was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Peter served in the Madras Sappers and Miners in India and Burma, then returned to finish his architectural studies. 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.

Of their three children, Simon, Samantha and Soraya, one, Simon, is an architect as well.

Alison Smithson was also a novelist; her A Portrait of the Female Mind as a Young Girl was published in (1966).

Peter Smithson studied architecture at King's College (now Newcastle University), University of Durham between 1939 and 1948, along with a programme in the Department of Town Planning, also at King's, 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.

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