From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In English modern architecture, Wells Coates’ Isokon building on Lawn Road in Belsize Park, north London, is the Old-Time Religion. Now 90 years old, this extraordinary work is the pure, uncut definite article, in comparison with which much else since can be found lacking. Architects, critics and historians have tried repeatedly to rediscover a milder, more conservative and folksy kind of modernism, from the Anglo-Scandi picturesque of the Festival of Britain to, more recently, Alexandra Harris’s study of England’s ‘Romantic Moderns’. The Isokon’s modernism is cosmopolitan, collectivist, aesthetically revolutionary, politically dangerous. If it were to be built today it would still alarm any town-hall planning meeting or conservation group.
Advertisement from the 1930s for Lawn Road Flats, as the Isokon building was also known
While much of what makes the Isokon building so formidable comes from its design – as we’ll come to presently – a great deal comes from how it was tied up, somewhat inadvertently, in the fraught politics of the 1930s and ’40s. After it opened in 1934, its diminutive flats were taken in large part by émigrés from fascism in central Europe. The most famous and least controversial names were architects and artists of the Bauhaus, who acquired their apartments via connections with the building’s sponsors, Jack and Molly Pritchard, whose modernist furniture company, Isokon, gave the building its name. The Pritchards helped bring to Belsize Park an astounding list of the great and the good of high modernism: Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Egon Riss, Arthur Korn. The polyglot milieu of the building also attracted émigrés from fascism who were working for the Soviet secret police, including the psychologist Arnold Deutsch, recruiter of Kim Philby and the ‘Cambridge Spies’, and German brother and sister Ursula and Jürgen Kuczynski – journalists, Communists, and also spies. (In a particularly surreal touch, one of their co-residents was Agatha Christie, who loved the building for its sleek, ocean-liner glamour.)
Isokon inhabitants modelling Marcel Breuer’s ‘Long Chair’, designed for the building in 1936, photographed by Philip Harben
These two strands of modernism and espionage are brought together in the figure of Edith Tudor-Hart, the Bauhaus-trained Viennese photographer and Soviet spy whose limpid, utopian photographs of the building, many of them recently rediscovered, are on show in the Isokon’s small gallery (opened in 2014 in what had once been the building’s bar-restaurant) to mark its 90th anniversary; these are also published in an impressive accompanying book, Through a Bauhaus Lens, by Leyla Daybelge and Stefanie Pirker. Tudor-Hart never lived in the Isokon, though her sister-in-law, the educationalist Beatrix Tudor-Hart, did; Edith was merely commissioned by Pritchard to document the building’s completion and opening. This in turn forms the basis for another new book, Maryam Diener’s Parallel Lives, a peculiar, elegantly designed and melancholic short historical novel about Edith Tudor-Hart and Ursula Kuczynski. In Diener’s novel the Isokon building’s opening stands as a moment of happiness and hope to which the pair try to cling as their lives are thrown into turmoil by the Second World War and the moral doubts elicited by their work for Stalin (Tudor-Hart destroyed her photographic archive for fear that MI5 would confiscate it, so much of the recent rediscovery of her work has come from photos submitted for commissions but unused).
Worker with washbasin at the Isokon, 1934, photographed by Edith Tudor-Hart; courtesy of Fotohof Archiv
It is still easy to see why this building might have seemed like a beacon. There was nothing even remotely like this in Britain in 1934 – a country which had up to that point sat out the modern movement almost entirely, bar a handful of secluded private houses. While other architects adapted modernism, with red bricks, attractive woodwork, decorative tiles or other backward-looking gestures, Coates and the Pritchards wanted a building which would shout modernism from the rooftops. From the street, the eye is drawn to the way the long concrete access decks culminate in a series of sculptural stairways. The effect is deliberately machinic, aggressive, massive. There had been many concrete-framed buildings in Britain before it, with the material then covered with stone cladding, but the Isokon was made purely of concrete and could be seen to be so, with nothing added as a facade except a pinkish render, applied lightly across the bare concrete surface. At the same time, there is a pleasure in the building’s curves and streamlines, a cool glamour, which proposed that a new kind of society might simply be more enjoyable than the old.
The apartments in the Isokon building are tiny. Their main precursor was, appropriately, in the Soviet Union, in collective housing blocks such as the Narkomfin in Moscow. In these, it was expected that much of life would take place not within the flats, but in the public facilities. In Narkomfin, there was a library, a laundry, a restaurant and a roof terrace; the Isokon had all these except a library, with its restaurant claiming to have served up the first kebab in London. The Isokon did not go quite as far as the Narkomfin – many of its flats did not even have kitchens, for instance – but it resembles the Soviet forerunner much more than it does the more luxurious modernist blocks like Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint in Highgate (1935) or Coates’s 10 Palace Gate in Kensington (completed 1939), not to mention the spacious council flats built to Parker-Morris standards after the war.
Isokon opening day, July 1934, photographed by Edith Tudor-Hart; courtesy of Fotohof Archiv
So the Isokon imagined a new way of living, not just a new aesthetic; it only made sense when connected to its communal facilities, and for people who had chosen to live in a certain way. This made it unpopular as council housing when Camden Council took it over in 1972 – a working-class family could barely fit in one of its flats. Its restoration as outré heritage building with a mix of private and key-worker housing in the 2000s was relatively uncontroversial. The new society it imagined didn’t come into being – not for want of trying by the socialists, Stalinists and anarchists who lived in its microcosm here in the 1930s; but the building still stands as a statement of expanded possibility. What if our lives were reordered around an idea of communal, rather than private, luxury? The Isokon’s central question remains unanswered.
‘Through a Bauhaus Lens’ is at the Isokon Gallery until 26 October 2025.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.