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Cleaning Up: The Opening of the Hoover Factory

24/4/2023

Hoover Factory, Perivale. Image from RIBApix.

The Hoover Factory in Perivale, Ealing was officially opened on May 2nd 1933. Designed by the firm of Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, already well known at that time for their factory buildings on the ‘Golden Mile’ in Brentford, it has become a welcome landmark to many motorists and passengers along Western Avenue. Ten separate buildings were completed between 1932 and 1938 for Hoover, the ones facing the road ornate in their decoration, the ones hidden away much less so. The building has divided critics over the years with Nikolas Pevsner famously calling it “ perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road typical of the by-pass factories”. Nevertheless the Hoover building was listed in October 1980, only months after its predecessor, the Firestone Factory in Brentford, had been demolished.

Hoover Factory Details. Image from Facade.

The Hoover company originated in Ohio, originally dealing in harness and leather goods. A suction cleaner was developed in 1907, and became the companies central focus when the decline in horse transport affected their other product lines. A small manufacturing premises in London was established in the 1920s, but within a few years a bigger factory was needed. A site on Western Avenue was chosen due to its road and rail links with London and the rest of the country, and also due to the availability of housing for its workers. The company desired an eye-catching building along the main road, and Wallis, Gilbert & Partners were already well known for working with American companies like Firestone as well as producing buildings that made heads turn.

The design of the first part of the scheme was overseen by architect Frederick Button, including the main office block facing Western Avenue. The block was designed in 1931, and stretches for 220 ft along the road, finished in generous glazing and decorated in coloured tiles. At either end are two staircase towers with quarter moon windows inspired by the work of Erich Mendelsohn. The main entrance doorway is spectacular, a riot of colour and patterns, designed to impress visitors and passers-by alike. The workers at the factory did not use this entrance, instead using the more circumspect door on the west side.

Upper Hallway, Hoover Factory. Image from Form and Fancy.

The decoration of the main block is largely informed by ancient Egyptian motifs, popular since the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter in 1922. References to various deities, including Amun and Mut, are used, as well as Horus-eye shaped paving. Some people have seen North and Central American influences in the decoration, and linked it to Hoover’s origin in the Midwest of America, but no documentation of this has been found. Visitors and the directors using the main entrance would be guided up a sweeping staircase decorated by a metal representation of the fan motif used on the exterior, to a waiting area painted in more neutral colours.

Hoover Factory Frontage. Image from Facade.

A third floor and extensions were added to the main block in 1935, with more office space provided, and a couple of years later the canteen was moved to a separate building, designed by chief assistant John W. Macgregor. This can be found to the left hand side of the main block when facing it. The three storey canteen and garage block is constructed of reinforced concrete, and features a long vertical v-shaped window at the front, curved steel windows and a small deco clock. The Hoover factory did not just advertise its wares to the road in front, but also to the train line at the rear with a neon sign of the slogan “Beats as it sweeps as it cleans”. The building was also used in posters and adverts for the Hoover brand. Thomas Wallis was quite honest about the commercial aspect of his designs, telling the RIBA in 1933 that “ A little money spent on something to focus the attention of the public is not money wasted but a good advertisement”. The factory became part of popular culture with Elvis Costello writing and releasing a song about the building in 1980.

After Hoover left in the 1980’s, Tesco took over the buildings, converting the rear into a supermarket and letting out offices in the front. The main block has now been converted into apartments. A planning dispute flared up in 2019, when developers submitted plans to build a 22 storey residential building right behind the factory. Significant opposition objected to the plan, and eventually a new proposal with reduced height was passed.

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Anatomy of a House No.9- Duke's Head Yard

17/4/2023

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Anatomy of a House No.9

Studio House, Duke’s Head Yard, Highgate
1937-40
Tayler & Green

Studio, Duke's Head Yard, Highgate (1937-40) by Tayler & Green

The subject of our ninth Anatomy of a House is of interest for its design, its patron and for the architects behind it. The house is known as the Studio House, located in Duke’s Head Yard just off Highgate High Street in the heights of North London. The architects were Herbert Tayler and David Green, a partnership both in work and at home. After meeting as students at the Architectural Association, they would work and live together for 60 years. Tayler and Green would become more well known in the postwar years for their work for Loddon Rural District Council, but the house in Duke’s Head Yard was their first big commission.

The Studio area at Duke's Head Yard. Image from RIBApix.

The house was commissioned by Roger Pettiward, a cartoonist known by the pen name of Paul Crum. As Crum, Pettiward drew cartoons for Punch, Night & Day and London Week, as well as painting under his own name. Pettiward had also travelled to Mato Grosso in Brazil in 1932 to search for the missing explorer Major Percy Harrison Fawcett, to no avail. Pettwiard had inherited his fathers estate in Finborough, Suffolk in 1933, but sold it 3 years later and commissioned Tayler and Green to design a house and studio in Highgate for him and his family. Pettiward only got to live in the house he commissioned briefly. In March 1940 he joined the Beds and Herts Regiment and was killed two years later on the raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942.

The ground floor plan for Duke's Head Yard.

The roof terrace at Duke's Head Yard. Image from RIBApix.

The house itself is a great piece of International Style modernism, functional yet stylish. The house was built behind the Pettiward’s existing house on Highgate Hill, on the site of a coach house. It is three storeys high with a roof terrace and also a cellar. The house is built in brick, and has large strip windows to allow light into the second floor studio area. This space occupies almost the whole of the second floor with uninterrupted views to the north-east and north-west. The roof terrace has a small sitting room, with glazing on three sides which can be opened in good weather. On two sides of the terrace there was obscured glass for privacy.

Unlike the usual white walled look of the era's modernist houses, the Studio House was painted dark red on three sides and grey on the other, with the window frames in white. At the rear is a spiral staircase housed in a semicircular staircase tower. Inside, the house had flooring of oak plywood squares and fitted furniture including “cupboards, shelves, seating, lighting, heating pipes, mirrors, food lift, picture rails”. The house was listed in 1985, with the listing noting that the interior “survives remarkably intact”.

Other modernist studio houses of the era include Augustus John’s Studio house at Fordingbridge by Christopher Nicholson (1933), Dora Gordine’s house and studio for herself in Kingston (1937), Denys Lasdun’s house at 32 Newton Road, Paddington for F.J. Conway (1938), and Brackenfell in Cumbria (1938) by Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight for painter and designer Alistair Morton.

An example of Tayler and Green's work for Loddon UDC in the postwar years. Image from RIBApix.

Tayler and Green’s subsequent work was quite distinct from the Studio House. They moved from London to Lowestoft in 1941 and began their work for Loddon RDC, producing house types that responded to the locality and needs of the local population. Between 1945 and 1976, the duo produced over 700 houses spread over 26 villages in the area. The houses were usually in terraces or grouped together in units, traditionally styled in brick with pitched roofs. Their other projects include similar social housing in Basildon, Cambridge and Suffolk, and a factory in Uxbridge and house in Kingston for businessman A.G. Imhof. The pair retired in 1973 and moved to Altea in Spain, where they built themselves a house. Green died on 3rd October 1998, and Tayler on 3rd February 2000.

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Architect of the Week: Peter Caspari

5/4/2023

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Peter Caspari. Image from the Globe & Mail.

Peter Caspari (1908-1999)

Like many of the European emigre architects of the 1930s, Peter Caspari’s career had three acts. The first was his early years practicing in Berlin, before the second act brought him to London for 17 years, before the final act saw him go on to make a major impact on the urban fabric of Toronto. Caspari was born in Berlin on 22nd April 1908, and he graduated for his architectural studies in 1931. The start of his career saw him working for Erich Mendelsohn, an obvious influence on some of his later work, and also coming into contact with the Nazi architect Albert Speer. He fled Germany in 1933 for Switzerland after participating in protests against the Nazi regime during his student years. He then moved to Britain, arriving in July 1933.

Kingsley Court, Willesden Green, 1934. Image from Modernism in Metro-Land

In London he first worked for Davis Estates, a speculative housing company, and its subsidiary the Central London Building Company, designing houses and apartment blocks. It is this part of his career that is of the most interest to us. He designed a number of houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb, as the arts and crafts suburb expanded and gently embraced modernism. Unlike the white walled houses designed by G.G. Winbourne found in Lytton Close, Caspari’s HGS houses fitted in perfectly to the prevailing Neo-Georgian environs. His houses on Norrice Lea (22-34 & 42), Litchfield Way (11,15,37 & 39) and Church Mount (22) are all in unrendered brick, usually with pitched, tiled roofs and wooden window shutters. The more moderne elements include vertical staircase windows and curved door bays. The windows on these houses also tend to have a strong vertical or horizontal emphasis.

Woodgrange House, Ealing 1949. Image from RIBApix.

He also designed a series of apartment blocks all around the suburbs of London. The most accomplished is Kingsley Court (1934) in Willesden Green, an apartment block set on a triangular plot next to the railway line, whose curves betray an obvious influence to Mendolsohn. Other apartments of interest by Caspari include Coleman Court in Wandsworth, (apparently one of the first reinforced buildings of its type in the UK), Glyn Court in Streatham, West End Court in Hampstead and Crescent Court in Surbiton. All these apartment buildings mix elements of the moderne; Crittall windows, art deco lettering, brick banding and curved corner windows, in an arrangement that wouldn’t frighten genteel suburbia.

Stanmore Assembley Hall. Image from A Different World by Charlotte Benton.

As war broke out Caspari applied to join the Pioneer Corps, the alternative would have been internment as an enemy alien. He later studied Military Engineering, and was stationed in Cambridge and then Mill Hill. After being discharged Caspari resumed his architectural practice in London, designing some houses, offices in Ealing and an assembly hall for Stanmore synagogue. He became disillusioned with life in postwar Britain and after a fact finding trip to North America, moved onto to Canada, where he would start the third act of his career in Toronto.

City Park Apartments, Toronto, 1959. Image from Spacing.

He began by working for the firm of Mathers and Haldenby before going it alone. His City Park of 1956 was the city's first postwar apartment block, and his buildings from the 1970s, such as the CIBC Tower and Sheppard Centre helped turn Toronto into an international city. He often took a dual role as both architect and developer, which brought into constant battles with Toronto's planning authorities, but his determined attitude often won out. Caspari retired in the early 1980’s and died in 1999.

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Cleaning Up: The Opening of the Hoover Factory

Anatomy of a House No.9- Duke's Head Yard

Anatomy of a House No.9 Studio House, Duke’s Head Yard, Highgate 1937-40 Tayler & Green

Architect of the Week: Peter Caspari

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Anatomy of a House No.9

Studio House, Duke’s Head Yard, Highgate
1937-40
Tayler & Green