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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 wiktionary:isometric, Isometric Unit Construction, bearing an allusion to Russian Constructivism (art), 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, 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 t ... [...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, 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 and her husba ... [...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, Belsize Park in 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 Designs for the flats were developed between 1929–1932 and the complex 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; Jack Prit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wells Coates
Wells Wintemute Coates (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 deg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hampstead
Hampstead () is an area in London, England, which lies northwest of Charing Cross, located mainly in the London Borough of Camden, with a small part in the London Borough of Barnet. It borders Highgate and Golders Green to the north, Belsize Park to the south and is surrounded from the northeast by Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland. Hampstead is known for its intellectual, artistic, liberal, and literary associations. It contains a number of listed buildings, such as Burgh House, Kenwood House, the Spaniard's Inn, and the Everyman cinema. With some of the most expensive housing in London, Hampstead has had many notable residents, both past and present, including King Constantine II of Greece and his wife Queen Anne Marie, Helena Bonham Carter, Agatha Christie, T. S. Eliot, Jon English, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Jim Henson, George Orwell, Harry Styles and Elizabeth Taylor. As of 2004, Hampstead has been home to more Prime Mini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marcel Breuer
Marcel Lajos Breuer ( ; 21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981) was a Hungarian-American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. 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. Lif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English people, English author known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery ''The Mousetrap'', which has been performed in the West End theatre, West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime"—a nickname now trademarked by her estate—or the "Queen of Mystery". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. She is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies. Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edith Tudor-Hart
Edith Tudor-Hart (''née'' Suschitzky; 28 August 1908 – 12 May 1973) was an Austrian-British photographer and spy for the Soviet Union. Brought up in a family of socialists, she trained in photography at Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau, and carried her political ideals through her art. Through her connections with Arnold Deutsch, Tudor-Hart was instrumental in the recruiting of the Cambridge Spy ring which damaged British intelligence from World War II until the security services discovered all their identities by the mid-1960s. She recommended Litzi Friedmann and Kim Philby for recruitment by the KGB and acted as an intermediary for Anthony Blunt and Bob Stewart when the '' rezidentura'' at the Soviet Embassy in London suspended its operations in February 1940. Early life and education Her father, Wilhelm Suschitzky (1877–1934), was a social democrat who was born into the Jewish community in Vienna, but had renounced Judaism and become an atheist. He opened the fi ... [...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 his PhD with distinction 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 ... [...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, known for his radio and television programmes about food and cooking. With no formal training as a cook he ran a restaurant in Hampstead in the 1930s and had charge of a major airline's test kitchens in the 1940s, before being spotted by the BBC and given his own series on radio from 1943 and television from 1946. In 1955 he moved to Independent Television, where he presented his cookery programmes until 1969. He aimed to show viewers the basics of cookery techniques, and published more than twenty books on the subject between 1945 and his death in 1970. Life and career Early years Harben was born in Fulham, London, on 17 October 1906, into a theatrical family. His parents – Hubert Harben and Mary Jerrold – were actors, and his younger sister, Joan, joined the profession, becoming celebrated as Mona Lott in the BBC radio series ''It's That Man Again'' (ITMA).Levy, Paul"Harben, Ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (; 18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-born American architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar and taught there for several years, becoming known as a leading proponent of the International Style (architecture), International Style. Gropius emigrated from Germany to England in 1934 and from England to the United States in 1937, where he spent much of the rest of his life teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the United States he worked on several projects with Marcel Breuer and with the firm The Architects Collaborative, of which he was a founding partner. In 1959, he won the AIA Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in architecture. Early life and family Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933), daughte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the , was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined Decorative arts, 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 form follows function, 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, Modern architecture, modernist architecture, and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence on subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
