Geoff Gradwell influences

Ahead of the game... again

Geoff Gradwell identifies two of the biggest influences on his own design practice and professional approach...

Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Gropius was born in Berlin, Germany in 1883. He studied architecture in Munich and worked in the office of

Peter Behrens in Berlin. In 1910 he formed a partnership with Adolf Meyer. The following year he designed the spectacular Fagus factory in Alfeld-an-der-Leine. Gropius followed this with the Werkbund Exhibition Building in Cologne (1914).

Influenced by the ideas of William Morris, Gropius established the Arts and Crafts School in Weimar, which became the

world-famous Bauhaus. His revolutionary methods and bold use of unusual building materials was condemned as "architectural

socialism". The Bauhaus was forced to move to Dessau where it was housed in a building designed by Gropius.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Gropius moved to England before emigrating to the United States in 1937. He was

professor of architecture at Harvard University (1938–52) and designed the Harvard Graduate Center (1949), the American Embassy in Athens (1960), the University of Baghdad (1961) and the Pan Am Building (1963). Walter Adolph Gropius died in 1969.

Professor Sir George Grenfell-Baines from an Obituary in the Daily Telegraph

Sir George Grenfell-Baines, who died aged 95, drew on socialist principles to found one of Britain's earliest, and largest, "multi-disciplinary" architectural practices. (Geoff Gradwell worked with Sir George [both ‘GG’] for over fourteen years and for BDP for over ten years before the firm closed their Preston office).

Building Design Partnership (BDP), which he established in 1961, brought together architects, engineers, landscape architects,

interior designers, cost consultants and specialists in everything from energy to electronics, working together in teams.

Grenfell-Baines's concept sprang from an earlier experiment in team working, the Grenfell Baines Group. The Group – later

Grenfell Baines and Hargreaves – had been set up at Preston, but quickly spawned satellite offices throughout northern England and, in 1959, a London office was opened. After BDP was launched, more branches opened in Scotland and Northern Ireland and there were several overseas ventures, particularly in the Middle East, America and Portugal.

The son of a railwayman, George Grenfell-Baines was born at Preston on April 30 1908, and educated at Roebuck Street

Council School. He went on to Harris College in the town, taking evening classes in building trades, then trained as a surveyor's draughtsman and finally – after working for the Bolton firm of Bradshaw, Gass and Hope for some years – gained his architecture qualifications at Manchester University.

He immediately made money out of his thesis project, winning £350 for gaining third place in the competition to build a new

Parliament House in Southern Rhodesia. It was 1936, and he used the money to start his own office. An early project was a

sophisticated, vibrantly-coloured hotel bar in his home town, inspired by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

The war years proved vital to the expansion of the practice, with Grenfell-Baines engaged on the construction of factories and

runways for such companies as English Electric. By 1947, he had five offices across the north. As a result of this experience, he

was the only northern architect invited by Sir Hugh Casson to design a building at the 1951 Festival of Britain: the Power and

Production Pavilion, executed with H J Reifenberg. Baines included a complete glazed-end wall of prototype high-tech construction, said to be the largest sheet of glass in the world.

Industrial buildings were to prove a mainstay of his early work, with some fine buildings from this period including the 1956 offices

of the Shell company at Stanlow in Cheshire, heavily influenced by Le Corbusier.

Grenfell-Baines was politically on the hard-Left in the 1930s, and remained well to the Left of centre all his life. Commercial success led him to set up a profit-sharing scheme with his staff. Health benefits, pension schemes and sabbaticals for long service followed, long before they were the norm in the profession.

Central to his vision was the notion that all professions and trades in the building process were of equal value. He had long admired the attempts of Walter Gropius, first director of the Bauhaus design school in Germany, to fuse all the building design disciplines.

He thus established BDP as a partnership of equals, removing his own name from the firm. Later, Gropius himself was to commend Grenfell-Baines on his success.

The last big competition win for Grenfell Baines and Hargreaves was also its first true multi-discipline commission: Wolfson Hall for Glasgow University, in 1959. The new BDP got under way with another win, for the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, Lincolnshire. Such large public sector projects became the bread and butter of the practice, along with continued industrial work such as the buildings for British Nuclear Fuels at Sellafield in Cumbria.

The 1960s and early 1970s saw Grenfell-Baines at the helm of BDP winning commission after commission in the public sector

building boom for new hospitals and universities such as Manchester, Bradford and Surrey. Always able to attract the cream of

like-minded professionals, he hit a personal peak the year he officially retired – 1974 – with a flurry of significant projects.

These included the first designs for a Channel Tunnel Terminal (later to be successfully revived); the headquarters for the Halifax Building Society and – a very different aesthetic – the picturesque jumbled roofs of the Millburngate Shopping Centre in Durham. However, the key 1970 competition win that could have made BDP an international force much sooner – for a vast United Nations complex in Vienna – got mired in the politics of the UN and was never built.

Grenfell-Baines drew well – he was still entering competitions in his nineties, for the fun of it – and had a natural facility for

mathematics. He was also an able town planner, working on projects as diverse as the new town of Aycliffe in County Durham and another for the city of Chester. Although he became a vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he preferred his beloved north-west to London, which may have cost him the presidency.

Although a sharp-eyed critic, Grenfell-Baines would not pre-judge a design on the basis of style alone: "Handsome buildings that perform poorly are no more good to society than are good-looking unreliable husbands or beautiful wayward wives to home and family. Ask the children," he wrote in 1987.

Following his retirement, Grenfell-Baines pursued his lifelong interest in teaching, becoming Professor of Architecture at Sheffield University. As ever, he went about this in unorthodox fashion, setting up a parallel Design Teaching Practice in the city, based on

the principle of teaching hospitals, to get students used to the idea of working on real projects. He finally ended his teaching role

at Sheffield in 1980 but continued to encourage bright young architects.

"GG" was an early adherent of holistic healthy eating and living, becoming honorary president of the Tyringham Clinic, and

remaining a trim, dapper figure throughout his life. To this he partly attributed his longevity (his mother, however, also lived to 95). Grenfell-Baines was awarded the OBE in 1960 and knighted in 1978.

Grenfell-Baines's first marriage, to Dorothy Hodson, in 1939, produced two daughters and ended in 1952. His second, in 1954,

was to Milena Ruth Fleischmann, a wartime Czech refugee, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He is survived by his wife

and children.

from an Obituary in the Daily Telegraph

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