H. T. Cadbury-Brown

Henry Thomas Cadbury-Brown RA (20 May 1913 – 9 July 2009), also known as H.T. Cadbury-Brown and Jim Cadbury-Brown, was an English architect. He was educated at the Architecture Association where he was influenced by the architecture of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. After graduating he worked for architect Ernő Goldfinger and became his lifelong friend. He went on to set up his own successful practice.

His involvement with the Modern Architecture Research Group (MARS) led to friendships with other modernist architects and opportunities for work including the 1951 Festival of Britain. He may be best known for his design input into the Royal College of Art.

Education and early work

Cadbury-Brown was born in Sarratt in Hertfordshire and boarded at Westminster School. From his childhood he was known as "Jim" after a family friend who had died in the First World War. Although there was family pressure for him to join the Navy, friends suggested architecture as he had shown an aptitude for maths and drawing. At the behest of the architect F. R. Yerbury he enrolled into the Architecture Association in 1930, aged 17. His first design projects were quite traditional, but after his introduction to the work of Le Corbusier by a friend his work became much more modern. The German magazine Moderne Bauformen exposed him to German modernism and the work of Walter Gropius. He respected the simplicity of the German designs and their grounding in realism rather than the intellectualism of other modernists.

In 1934 as a fourth-year student Cadbury-Brown met Ursula and Ernő Goldfinger and was delighted by their furniture and collection of paintings. After graduating he spent a year working at Goldfinger's office and became an admirer of his work and lifelong friend. He learnt first-hand about the composition of materials and detailing They went on to share offices and to design a display for the British Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair.

Like many of the designers at the MARS Group exhibition, Cadbury-Brown would later be chosen by Hugh Casson to help design some of the pavilions at the Festival of Britain. In 1947 the sixth meeting of CIAM was hosted by MARS in Bridgwater, Somerset and Cadbury-Brown as secretary had a role in its organisation. MARS at that time was under the leadership of the architectural critic J M Richards who set the theme of the conference to architecture that appealed to the "Common Man". who was born in the United States on 28 March 1922. As a young American architect in London she was advised that it was unlikely that she would find work, but through her friendship with a cousin of Helena Rubinstein she was introduced to Goldfinger, where she worked as an unpaid intern. At that time she was already married to an English constitutional lawyer, Bill Dale, but after an amicable divorce she married Cadbury-Brown in 1953. Elizabeth joined Cadbury-Brown's office where she was able to use her considerable detailing skills.

Selected projects Festival of Britain

Cadbury-Brown had met Hugh Casson when the latter had been training at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Cadbury-Brown was asked to design two pavilions (The Land of Britain and The People of Britain), the Turntable Café and a major promenade on the South Bank side of the River Thames called the "Concourse".

His design for the main esplanade placed studded lights either side of the concourse with "flame fountains" at the far end.

Ashmount School The Ashmount School in Islington was designed as a joint junior and infants school. On a sloping site separate three and two-storey blocks for the juniors and infants respectively are linked by their assembly halls, kitchen and dining rooms. As a function of the sloping site all of the blocks other than the junior block share a common roof.

The school uses an early example of all-glass curtain walling called the Hill System. Rather than use the common opaque, blue spandrel panels on the façade, Cadbury-Brown chose instead to just use glass panels. The corners of the building are glazed whilst the top of the curtain wall at the roof edge is neatly finished without a projecting edge (although the final detail was realised in felt rather than as designed in steel). Although the fireproof cladding for the columns behind make the building frame less visible, the building has been compared to those by Mies van de Rohe. The design has been considered comparable to the Eames House and Hunstanton School by Alison and Peter Smithson.

Although the buildings were locally listed in 1999, they have been under threat of demolition since 2005.

House in Aldeburgh For many years, the Cadbury-Browns had a holiday home near the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh. Cadbury-Brown had designed a studio for Benjamin Britten in the early days of the Aldeburgh Festival and Britten had acquired a site opposite the parish church to build an opera house upon it. When this idea did not come to fruition, Britten converted the maltings at Snape and Cadbury-Brown bought the site.

After the house was completed in 1964 he sold part of the garden to Britten's colleague, the musician Imogen Holst and designed a house for her too. In 2000 the original house was Grade II listed.

His own home displayed a Japanese design influence which he attributed to Junzo Sakakura's Japanese pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition. The structural elements and the inter-relationship of the spaces were two things that he thought were important.

Although the Holst house was built on a smaller budget this is not apparent in the setting of the houses with each house carefully designed in relation to its garden. The design was not realised and Cadbury-Brown was not keen on the actual memorial by Maggi Hambling.

The initial design set the supporting columns back from the façade but expressed them externally by recessing some of the storeys. This created horizontal bands on the façade that were aligned with the terracotta ornament on the Albert Hall.

In the final design the stair cores were moved near to the ends of the building to give views out on both the north and south façades. These, in conjunction with double-height galleries added to the top floor created a vertical rhythm to the façade. The number of recessed storeys was reduced to just one on the ground floor which gave the impression that the whole building was supported on the expressed columns. Verticality was further emphasised with the proportions of the windows which were slender and divided by precast concrete mullions. The stair towers have been compared with those of Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the western end of the Glasgow School of Art.

List of selected projects

Footnotes