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Isokon
The London-based Isokon firm was founded in 1929 by the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard and the Canadian architect Wells Coates to design and construct modernist houses and flats, and furniture and fittings for them. Originally called Wells Coates and Partners, the name was changed in 1931 to Isokon, a name derived from Isometric Unit Construction, bearing an allusion to Russian Constructivism. In 1925, Pritchard had become employed as a sales and marketing manager for the British company Venesta, a subsidiary of the large Estonian plywood manufacturer A. M. Luther, based in Tallinn. After having met in Paris, Pritchard hired the designer Charlotte Perriand through the architect firm of Le Corbusier to design a trade fair stand for Venesta at Olympia, London in 1929. Despite his involvement with Lawn Road Flats and the Isokon company, Jack Pritchard continued to work for Venesta until 1936. Pritchard used Venesta to make his Isokon plywood furniture. The Isokon company w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack Pritchard
John Craven Pritchard (8 June 1899 – 27 April 1992) was a British furniture entrepreneur, who was very influential between the First and Second World Wars. His work is exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of London. He was a member of the Design and Industries Association. Life Pritchard was born in Hampstead, London, the son of Clive Fleetwood Pritchard, a successful barrister, and a descendant of Andrew Pritchard, businessman and scientist. He was educated at Oundle School and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. In 1924, Pritchard married Rosemary (Molly) Cooke, a psychiatrist (1900 - 1985); they had two sons, Jonathan and Jeremy, born in 1926 and 1928. Jack also had a daughter, Jennifer, with Beatrix Tudor Hart, a pioneering educator. For many years he and his wife lived in the famous Lawn Road Flats, also known as the Isokon Flats. They later retired to a house also named Isokon on Dunwich Road, Blythburgh, Suffolk, designed by Jennifer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lawn Road Flats
Isokon Flats, also known as Lawn Road Flats and the Isokon building, on Lawn Road in the Belsize Park district of the London Borough of Camden, is a reinforced concrete block of 36 flats (originally 32), designed by Canadian engineer Wells Coates for Molly and Jack Pritchard. Pre-war years The designs for the flats were developed between 1929–1932 and opened on 9 July 1934 as an experiment in minimalist urban living. All of the "Existenzminimum" flats had very small kitchens as there was a communal kitchen for the preparation of meals, connected to the residential floors via a dumb waiter. Services, including laundry and shoe-polishing, were provided on site. The building originally included 24 studio flats, eight one-bedroom flats, staff quarters, a kitchen and a large garage. The Pritchards lived in a one-bedroom penthouse flat at the top with their two sons Jeremy and Jonathan next door in a studio flat. Plywood was used extensively in the fittings of the apartments; Ja ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hampstead
Hampstead () is an area in London, which lies northwest of Charing Cross, and extends from the A5 road (Roman Watling Street) to Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland. The area forms the northwest part of the London Borough of Camden, a borough in Inner London which for the purposes of the London Plan is designated as part of Central London. Hampstead is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical, and literary associations. It has some of the most expensive housing in the London area. Hampstead has more millionaires within its boundaries than any other area of the United Kingdom.Wade, David"Whatever happened to Hampstead Man?" ''The Daily Telegraph'', 8 May 2004 (retrieved 3 March 2016). History Toponymy The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon words ''ham'' and ''stede'', which means, and is a cognate of, the Modern English "homestead". To 1900 Early records of Hampstead can be found in a grant by King Ethelred the Unready to the monastery of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marcel Breuer
Marcel Lajos Breuer ( ; 21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981), was a Hungarian-born modernist architect and furniture designer. At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, which ''The New York Times'' have called some of the most important chairs of the 20th century. Breuer extended the sculpture vocabulary he had developed in the carpentry shop at the Bauhaus into a personal architecture that made him one of the world's most popular architects at the peak of 20th-century design. His work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences. Many are in a Brutalist architecture style, including the former IBM Research and Development facility which was the birthplace of the first personal computer. He is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern furniture design and one of the most-influential exponents of the International Style. Life, work and inventions Commonly known to his friends and associates as Lajkó ( ; the d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnold Deutsch
Arnold Deutsch (1903–1942?), variously described as Austrian, Czech or Hungarian, was an academic who worked in London as a Soviet spy, best known for having recruited Kim Philby. Much of his life remains unknown or disputed. Early life He was a cousin of Oscar Deutsch, the proprietor of the Odeon Cinemas chain. Though he claimed to be an observant Jew to disguise his role as a Communist agent, Deutsch was in fact lapsed in his religious beliefs. At the age of 24, Deutsch received with distinction his PhD in chemistry from the University of Vienna. He was also a follower of Wilhelm Reich and his "sex-pol" movement. Espionage career At the same time, Deutsch embarked on his lifelong involvement with Communism and the Soviet Union. In the 1920s he was working for the OMS, the International Liaison Department of the Comintern. A co-worker of his there was Edith Suschitzky, whom he met at 1926 in Vienna and who would be instrumental in his later espionage career. Soon after ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Harben
Philip Hubert Kendal Jerrold Harben (17 October 1906 – 27 April 1970) was an English cook, recognised as the first TV celebrity chef. Biography Harben was born in Fulham, London, and was educated at Highgate School. His mother, Mary Jerrold, was an actress known for her performance as the murderous Martha Brewster in the first stage production of '' Arsenic and Old Lace'' as well as many screen roles. His father, Hubert Harben, was a stage actor. His sister, Joan Harben, played Miss Mona Lott in the BBC Radio series ''It's That Man Again'' (ITMA). He learned to cook at the side of his parents, and "could scramble eggs and make mayonnaise long before I could read Thucydides or solve a quadratic equation". His first occupation was as a commercial photographer. He was then engaged to run the kitchen of the Isobar restaurant in the Isokon building in Hampstead, London from 1937 to 1940, when he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, but an eye injury put an end to his flying car ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar (1919). Gropius was also a leading architect of the International Style (architecture), International Style. Family and early life Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933), daughter of the Prussian politician Georg Scharnweber (1816–1894). Walter's great-uncle Martin Gropius (1824–1880) was the architect of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin and a follower of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, with whom Walter's great-grandfather Carl Gropius, who fought under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo, had shared a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 2009), , pp. 64–66 The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function. The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was grounded in the idea of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk ("comprehensive artwork") in which all the arts would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture, and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Staff at the Bauhaus included prominent ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olympia, London
Olympia London, sometimes referred to as the Olympia Exhibition Centre, is an exhibition centre, event space and conference centre in West Kensington, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, London, England. A range of international trade and consumer exhibitions, conferences and sporting events are staged at the venue. There is an adjacent railway station at Kensington (Olympia) which is both a London Overground station, and a London Underground station. The direct District Line spur to the station only runs on weekends. Background The complex first opened in 1886. The Grand Hall and Pillar Hall were completed in 1885. The National Hall annexe was completed in 1923, and in 1930 the Empire Hall was added. After World War II, the West London exhibition hall was in single ownership with the larger nearby Earls Court Exhibition Centre. The latter was built in the 1930s as a rival to Olympia. In 2008, ownership of the two venues passed from P&O to Capco Plc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
London Zoo
London Zoo, also known as ZSL London Zoo or London Zoological Gardens is the world's oldest scientific zoo. It was opened in London on 27 April 1828, and was originally intended to be used as a collection for scientific study. In 1831 or 1832, the animals of the Tower of London menagerie were transferred to the zoo's collection. It was opened to the public in 1847. Today, it houses a collection of 673 species of animals, with 19,289 individuals, making it one of the largest collections in the United Kingdom. The zoo is sometimes called Regent's Park Zoo. It is managed under the aegis of the Zoological Society of London (established in 1826), and is situated at the northern edge of Regent's Park, on the boundary line between the City of Westminster and the borough of Camden (the Regent's Canal runs through it). The Society also has a more spacious site at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire to which the larger animals such as elephants and rhinos have been moved. As well as bein ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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