TheIndependent

March7, 1990

 

Plainspeaking from Croydon to Chandigarh

 

JaneDrew, Britain's foremost woman architect, gave a functional style to kitchensand aircraft factories in the Thirties and Forties. She took Modern houses toWest Africa and helped to build a new city in the Punjab. Now, at 80, she hasturned her attention to problems closer to home. She talks to Emily Green

 

 

 

JANEDREW, now in her eightieth year, is not a well-known figure outside thearchitectural profession. Yet she is one of the most important Britisharchitects of this century. She set up the first all-woman practice on completingher training in the early 1930s, and after a spell designing kitchens, tookModern architecture out into the British colonies.

 

Shepersuaded Nehru's Indian government to commission the most radical of allModern architects, Le Corbusier, to design the new capital of Punjab,Chandigarh, for which she designed practical, low-cost housing working with herarchitect husband, Maxwell Fry. Fry was one of Britain's pioneering ModernMovement architects and teamed up with Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhausschool, when he left Nazi Germany as a refugee. He and Jane Drew were marriedin 1942. In West Africa she designed universities, hospitals, housing complexesand dams.

 

Hergreatest legacies in Britain are the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London,and the Open University, Milton Keynes. The ICA had no more committed advocatethan Miss Drew, who lobbied furiously for it and designed its premises.

 

Shenow lives in Cotherstone, County Durham, her attentions divided between localvillage issues and what could only appal an Attlee-era pioneer: homelessness.

 

ArchitecturalAssociation, women and kitchens

 

Q: Asa girl, when did you first start thinking about architecture?

 

A: Ilived in the lowest suburb of Croydon. There was a lot of housing done afterthe First World War. I got terribly intrigued by the building works. And I hadenough sense to realise that the whole place was the dreariest surrounding thatyou could imagine.

 

Q:How did you become an architect?

 

A:When I left the Architectural Association in 1934 , I had difficulty gettinginto an office. Most of them - I think Max's was one - said they didn't takewomen, though they all seemed to have female secretaries. So when I formed myfirst practice, Jane B. Drew, founded in 1939 , I tried to employ all women. Inthe end I had to employ some men. We thought we were terribly important. Wewere doing aircraft factories.

 

Q:What sort of other war-time work did an all-woman firm get?

 

A:Designing kitchens. I was doing research for the gas industry. I think theythought women and kitchens would have an appeal. If you remember, there were alot of pre-fabs being put up at that time. There was also the question of whatthe aircraft industry would turn its factories to when peace came.

 

I washorribly thorough with these kitchens. I got statistics about women's heightsand found that the average height of the British woman had increased, and thatthe standard counter height should be raised. I remember going to PoyntonTaylor, at the Ministry of Housing, and pointing out they could make everythingcomplete, include a washing machine, which nobody had then. He said, ''MissDrew, saving women's labour in the home doesn't help the economy.''

 

LeCorbusier and Chandigarh

 

Q:Did you consider yourself a Modern architect early on?

 

A: Mygreat interest in Modernism came when I knew Max. I joined the Mars Group,which was the English part of the Les Congres Internationaux d'ArchitectureModerne CIAM ; and there of course one met people like Le Corbusier.

 

Q: LeCorbusier, unfashionable now, was hugely influential. How did he affect you?

 

A: Iwas enormously impressed by his logic and his creative approach. And I felt hehad a great understanding of the principles of town planning - even though Ithought his scheme for Paris was absolutely mad, his Ville Radieuse.

 

Hemade mistakes; a lot of them. When he did Marseille the 1948-52 housing blockUnite d'Habitation , he put shops in, and actually there wasn't enough trade.And his idea that the building should be lifted off the ground on pilotis sothe landscape should be seen right through was a beautiful one, but all thedust and dirt accumulated. But if you don't try something out, you don'tdiscover.

 

Q:You and Maxwell Fry worked with Le Corbusier in India. How did the team cometogether?

 

A: TheIndians arrived at our house in Gloucester Place for tea. I hadn't any idea whythey were coming. And they asked whether we would take on this job of doing thearchitecture at Chandigarh. They said that Nehru wanted to do it free of theshackles of the past and to incorporate all the ideas that we had been fightingfor. And it seemed a wonderful opportunity, but we couldn't both goimmediately. To start with, we were still working on the university of IbadanNigeria . I was doing the Festival of Britain.

 

ThenI had the idea of saying couldn't Corbusier be brought in? Corb drew up theplans very quickly, because a lot of work had been done already, and becausehe'd been thinking about town planning all his life. Certain corrections weremade by Max. Corb did a straight line grid to start and Max pointed out that itought to be slightly curved in an east-west direction, because of the sun, andbecause it wasn't leading to any great vistas. And Corb corrected that.

 

Now,the whole thing was ideal in a way, because it was on a very gentle slope,which made drainage possible. The difficulty was water, so we had to do a verybold thing, which was to dam the river, and get the water down to the lake,which would then flow down through all the sectors. I discovered early on inChandigarh that the murders in the cold season were all about women and in thehot season they were all about water. I also had the job of doing the by-laws,which I made visual because a lot of people couldn't read. To get law and ordergoing is very important. There had been murders between the Muslims and theHindus and it was still going on. The high court had to be dramatic andimpressive.

 

Andwe had to give people pride. The secretariat and the assembly - beingmagnificent buildings, which they are, and frightfully expensive - werecompletely justified, because they had lost their capital, Lahore.

 

WhatCorb did was to look ahead. The roads could all be doubled in time once thetraffic justified it. And the fast roads were relatively free of entrances, sothat no fast traffic could injure people. Punch came out with terribly funnycartoons which showed cows walking on our fast roads, which was roughly truebecause motoring in India is rather like motoring in the zoo. Instead of havingall these awful notices we have, like 30 mph, which nobody obeys, the smallroads were curved so that you couldn't speed along them.

 

Q: LeCorbusier did the city centre, the Capitol and the Law Courts. What did you do?

 

A:One of my jobs was to do the lowest cost housing. We incorporated serviceswithin the structure. The electric lighting for the streets came off thehouses. All the pipes went together. It was very much cheaper. This combiningof services and structure is one of the big economies that one could make. Butyou could only make it if those things were under public control.

 

Wherewe had the cheapest housing, we tried to give the most open area, because theywould have very small gardens. And we had managed to give even the very poorestpeople two rooms. We did without a lot of things, of course. We had plain brickinside and we did without doors inside sometimes. We had latches instead ofhandles. Much cheaper.

 

Q:Have you returned to Chandigarh?

 

A: Ithink it was two years ago - I was horrified to see that all we had done by wayof green belt had been destroyed. And our ideas that they were not to build onthe main road from Chandigarh to Delhi was completely gone. There were littleshanty towns all the way along.

 

Politicians,princes and planning

 

Q:You saw Nehru as a great visionary. How did our politicians compare?

 

A:None of our ministers seems to be well- read on planning. The accent now is onthe green business. But it's bad planning which was the cause of most of thepollution. Today town planning and architecture are one. Unfortunately we havetwo separate institutes: one, the Royal Town Planning Institute, and the otherthe Royal Institute of British Architects.

 

Q:What do you think of Prince Charles's criticisms?

 

A: Hetreats architecture as if it were theatrical scenery. I think he'swell-intentioned. A lot of what he said I don't dispute, because there has beenno coherent policy at all about where high buildings should go.

 

Asfar as post-war housing went, there were all sorts of theories. For instance,that you could get more people near town without long journeys by building highand putting the amenities with it. What happened was that they built high, butthey didn't put the amenities with it. A lot of ideas were bastardised bycouncils cutting costs.

 

Q:The reaction to post-war housing failures has been to build in past styles.What do you make of this step backwards?

 

A:The most important ingredient for any architecture - aside from proportion - isthat it has got to give hope for the future. However, moving back intostereotype gives you a feeling of being respectable.

 

Fosteringthe future

 

Q:The ICA was all about the future. How did it happen?.

 

A:The idea of the ICA was to encourage the avant-garde, and to have exhibitionsof important people's work alongside that of the young unknowns. Picasso camein; all sorts of people who were affecting art. There were discussions andmeetings. It wasn't a place where people went to buy things.

 

Q:What do you say to young architects today when Modern is a dirty word?

 

A: Irecently attended a workshop for at the winter school in Liverpool. I set aproject of designing housing for the homeless.

 

Q:What were their solutions?

 

A:All sorts: low-rise, high-rise, cubicle arrangements . . . all entirelydifferent. This gives me an awful lot of hope for the young.

 

 

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