Wells Coates

Wells Wintemute Coates OBE (December 17, 1895 – June 17, 1958) was an architect, designer and writer. He was, for most of his life, an expatriate Canadian who is best known for his work in England, the most notable of which is the Modernist block of flats known as the Isokon building in Hampstead, London.

Early years

The oldest of six children, Wells Coates was born in Tokyo, Japan on December 17, 1895 to Methodist missionaries Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates (1864–1945) and Harper Havelock Coates (1865–1934).

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

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. He attended the University of British Columbia where he obtained a BA degree in May 1920 and a BSc degree in May 1922, and in October 1922 he registered at East London College where he studied engineering (obtaining a PhD in 1924). Among his first jobs in England was as a journalist and then with the design firm of Adams and Thompson in 1924. He established his own firm in 1928.

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 Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 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 CIAM.

Between 1932 and 1936 Coates was in partnership with an English architect David Pleydell-Bouverie and designed together the Sunspan House for the 1934 ''Daily Mail'' Ideal Home Exhibition held at Olympia, London.

Role as a Modernist

Wells embraced Le Corbusier's architectural mantra that buildings should be 'machines for living' (''machine à habiter''). This 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 à habiter'' than anything Corbusier ever designed". The building was compared to the exterior of 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 Coates' 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 and Hungarians escaping Nazi persecution and hosted many famous personages including Agatha Christie, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer.

Isokon 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 Modernist buildings for another decade. The building fell into disrepair by the 1990s but it changed ownership in 2001 and was fully restored by 2004.

Later achievements

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 Scandinavian furniture. In 1930 he designed a studio for the British Broadcasting Corporation
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