The building that brought him into the public eye were the Isokon apartments in Belsize Park. Designed for Jack & Molly Pritchard of the Isokon furniture company, the building provided inexpensive flats for young professionals, with 22 flats for single people, named “minimum” apartments, as well as a penthouse apartment occupied by the Pritchards. During the development of the Isokon, Coates formed a working partnership with David Pleydell-Bouverie. Pleydell-Bouverie was born in 1911 into a well to do family (he was the grandson of the 5th Earl of Radnor). Together they developed the Sunspan House idea for the 1934 Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in Kensington. Coates had previously developed his “Isotype” housing idea in 1927, which had some features that would show up on the Sunspan house, such as the curved glass section.

Lubetkin had come to Britain in 1931, establishing Tecton, an architectural co-partnership that would later be home to Denys Lasdun, Lindsay Drake, Carl Ludwig Franck, Godfrey Samuel and others. Their first set of buildings were those at London Zoo, housing penguins and gorillas rather than people. The success of those structures, and the Highpoint flats in Highgate, led them to be the preeminent modernist designers of interwar Britain. 

Russell Thomas Francis Skinner was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1908, training at the Architectural Association before becoming a founding member of Tecton. He was a committed modernist at a time of deep distrust to the “new style” coming from the continent in British architectural circles, and a member of the Communist party. The house at Gidea Park was Skinner’s first completed building, at the tender age of 26.

Skinner wasn’t content with designing houses for the well heeled, and in 1938 travelled to civil war-era Spain to study the effects of aerial bombardment with the aim of better designing air shelters. During World War II he served with the Royal Engineers and also volunteered to join the bomb disposal unit. When Tecton was disbanded in the early postwar years, Skinner declined an invitation to join Le Corbusier in his work at Chandigarh, India, and formed Skinner, Bailey and Lubetkin, continuing the social housing work started for Finsbury Borough with estates in Bethnal Green and Hackney. Skinner retired in the 1970s, living in Suffolk whilst teaching himself Russian and researching local architecture. He passed away in January 1998. ​

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 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. 

Tabori’s life before Camden was as interesting as his later designs. He was born in Hungary in 1940, and was imprisoned after the 1956 Soviet invasion, due to the activities of his family. He was released after six months and fled to Britain to reunite with his relatives. Here, through family connections, he got a job with architect Cecil Eprile, (known for his synagogue designs) and studied architecture at Regent St Polytechnic. There, he was taught by some of the period's bright young things, including James Stirling and later Richard Rogers. Stirling got him a job with fellow Hungarian Erno Goldfinger, with whom he worked for during two different periods. Goldfinger was a great influence on Tabori, and took time to mentor his young assistant’s work.

Rogers was also an influence on Tabori, especially with his focus at the time on mass housing and prefabrication. Tabori would later help with drawings for Team 4’s Creek Vean house in Cornwall. Another star name, Denys Lasdun, was the external examiner for Tabori’s thesis, and was impressed enough to offer him a job. Tabori worked for Lasdun for 3 years, a period in which the partnership was designing the new University of East Anglia campus. Tabori took over detailing the precast concrete units needed for the project from Ted Cullinan, who had left to set up his own practice, working closely with the engineering consultants Arup.

Tabori also designed the Oakshott estate in Somers Town (1972-6). The design is related to the Highgate project with stepped terraces, this time in an L-shape around a green space. The original brief had the estate finished in concrete but due to the department's workload, the project was given over to outside architects to finish. First it fell to Roman Halter, but he resigned due to ill health, before James Gowan was given the job of completing the estate, Gowan added the red brick finish we see today. Tabori’s third project was a small scheme on the junction of Mill Lane and Solent Road in West Hampstead (1981). Moving with the contemporary rejection of concrete, Tabori produced a design in red brick, with external walkways decked out in bright blue railings. Tabori also worked with Arup Associates on feasibility studies exploring the possibility of building homes, offices and shops over railway lines in built up areas. After a serious car crash, Tabori resigned from Camden and went to work in private practice.

Despite its bucolic location, in a meadow surrounded by pine trees, the house was very much something from the machine age. It was constructed of corten steel, a relatively unused material then (John Winter’s corten house in Highgate was completed two months before Fieldhouse). The steel frame held large windows of clear or brown “Spectrafloat” glass allowing 360 degree over the surrounding landscape. Corten steel is designed to develop a rust-like texture. Wolton chose it for this reason, wanting it to blend into the terrain, “It's a wild building and does not want to be tamed in any sort of way”. 

The other architects were mentioning when talking of the design of interwar car showrooms was that of Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, famed for the factory designs along the arterial roads mentioned earlier. The company designed the Daimler Hire Garage in Bloomsbury in 1931, a four-storey building containing a garage, offices, coach station and car park, designed in a similar modernistic style to Cameron Kirby’s showrooms. Wallis, Gilbert & Partners also designed a showroom and service station for Henley’s (1937) on the Great West Road, near their art deco factories for Pyrene, Coty and Firestone. The forty metre high, curved clock tower later became famous for advertising Martini when it was converted into a warehouse for the company. The building caught fire in 1989, and an office building was built on the site, retaining the clock tower. Wallis Gilbert and Partners also built car showrooms at Great Portland Street in 1926 and for Packard Ltd on the Great West Road in 1929, as well as service stations for Brew Bros, Old Brompton Road (1933) and Godfrey Davies in Neasden (1939).