Wells Coates

Wells Coates (1895 - 1958) was, for most of his life, an ex-patriate Canadian architect who is best known for his work in England

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1895 - 1958

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Coates' most notably the Isokon building in Hampstead, London. The oldest of six children, he was born in Tokyo to Methodist missionaries Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates (1864-1945) and Harper Havelock Coates (1865-1934).

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Isokon building - 1865 - 1934

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Coates desire to be an architect was inspired by his mother, who had studied architecture under Louis Sullivan and planned one of the first missionary schools in Japan .

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Coates spent his youth in the Far East, and voyaged around the world with his father in 1913. He served in World War I, first as a gunner and later as a pilot with the Royal Air Force. From 1921 to 1924, he attended the University of British Columbia where he obtained his BA and BSc degrees, and in 1924, he moved to London where he studied engineering (obtaining a PhD) . Among his first jobs in England was with the design firm of Adams and Thompson in 1924.

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1913 - 1921 - 1924 - University of British Columbia

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His childhood experiences in Japan would play an important role in his aesthetic sensibility that he brought to his architectural work, and this sensibility found a fitting outlet in the Modernist Movement, then current in Europe. He attended the 1933 Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CAIM), which produced the famous Athens Charter, and was one of the founders, with Maxwell Fry, of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), the British wing of CAIN.

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Modernist - Maxwell Fry

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Wells embraced Le Corbusier's architectural mantra that buildings should be 'machines for living' (machine á habiter). The machine á habiter ideal was best-reflected in his Isokon Building (also known as Lawn Road Flats), completed in 1934. Indeed, the architectural critic J. M. Richards suggested that he improved on Corbusier, coming "nearer to the machine á habiter than anything Corbusier ever designed". The building was compared the exterior to an ocean liner by the novelist Agatha Christie, who lived there for a time, so clean and striking was the design . The apartment building was the brainchild of Jack and Molly Pritchard, who in 1931 established a design firm featuring Modernist architecture and furniture. With simple living spaces strongly influenced by his Japanese experience, and including built-in Isokon furniture, Isokon was "an experiment in collective housing designed for left-wing intellectuals" . It became a haven for Germans escaping Nazi persecution and hosted many famous personages including Christie, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. The building was ahead of its time: it won second place in Horizon Magazine's ?Ugliest Building Competition? in 1946, and would not be recognized as one of England's most important Modernest buildings for another decade. Regrettably, the building fell into disrepair by the 1990's but it changed ownership in 2001 and was fully restored by 2004.

Related Topics:
Le Corbusier - 1934 - Agatha Christie - Molly Pritchard - 1931 - Walter Gropius - Marcel Breuer - 1946 - 2001 - 2004

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An inventive genius, Coates revelled in introducing new ideas in his work. Among his innovations was the '3-2' architectural plan, where two living rooms on one side of the building are equivalent in height to three rooms on the other side, making two units vertically on three floors. He also designed the "D-handle", a simple door handle design commonly employed, for example, in Scandanavian furniture

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The thirties were his most prolific era. The Isokon was immediately followed by Embassy Court, (1935) and Palace Gate, Kensington (1939). These were the only apartment buildings he would design . He also had several private houme commissions. During World War II, he again served with the RAF, this time working on fighter aircraft development, for which he was later awarded an OBE .

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Embassy Court - Palace Gate

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Following World War II, he, like some other well known architects including Walter Gropius, contributed to the post-War housing effort by introducing an early scheme for modular housing he called Room Unit Production. He also designed a remarkable sail, called the Wingsail. It was a rigid design mounted on a catamaran hull. Though he formed a company to market the design, it was not a success, as both the sail and the catamaran were ahead of their time.

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He is less well known for his planning work. In 1937, he undertook planning for a slum clearance in Britain (not implemented) . In Canada (1952-54) he prepared plans for Iroquois New Town on the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario which were also not implemented (the design was awarded to others) . He also prepared plans for a Toronto Island Redevelopment Project , and was a participant in the Project 58 urban redevelopment scheme for Vancouver.

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Coates began coming back to Canada in the early 1950's, about the time of the Iriquois project, finally settling there in 1957. In 1955 and '56, he taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard with Walter Gropius but he was not happy there. He returned to Vancouver where he worked on Project 58. His last assignment was to design a monorail rapid transit system for Vancouver, dubbed the Monospan Twin-Ride System (MTRS). Once again, he was ahead of his time. The project was abandoned, but would be rejuvenated years later in another form known as SkyTrain. Wells Coates died of a heart attack in Vancouver in 1958.

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The University of East Anglia Library in Norwich has materials relating to his life and work. A list of the holdings is available on the WWW http://www.lib.uea.ac.uk/lib/libinf/find/archives/pritchard/pp23.htm.

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