John Winter
John Winter’s Swains Lane house
JONATHAN ELLIS-MILLER on John Winter’s architectural legacy
First published Spring 2013
John Winter wrote, 'Goldfinger's office was a place to learn. No one could argue that it was a happy office. Goldfinger was moody and tyrannical and one was never allowed to forget that the art of architecture as understood by Goldfinger was to take precedence over everything else in life'. One could conclude that these formative experiences with Goldfinger informed the rest of John's life, as architecture for John was a serious business.
An equally indelible influence was through John's father, a middle-class director of a shoe manufacturing company, who also knew how to actually make a shoe. John admired, almost obsessed about those who could make things, and it was something he cultivated as a skill for himself. Nick Grimshaw, who John taught at the AA, was impressed by the fact that 'John knew how to weld'.
Norwich born John was by many accounts an unusually focused young man. Mary Reyner Banham remembers being invited, with her husband Peter, over to the Winter's for lunch, and the young 17 year old John invited Peter to his room, to see some things he had collected. Peter was expecting to see the typical boyhood photographs of military aircraft, footballers or movie stars, but instead discovered walls carefully adorned with collage grid work of cuttings from John Entenza's magazine Arts and Architecture.
John was indentured to local Norwich Arts and Crafts architect Theo Scott, and was encouraged by Peter Reyner Banham to study at the Architectural Association. Whilst there, he where he was a contemporary of Denise Scott- Brown and Adrian Gale. Gale recollected that John was 'very serious, intellectual, with an unusual amount of moral certainty about architecture'.
John completed his studies and went to work for Erno Goldfinger, where his practical background swiftly led him to becoming spaces in Percy Street, Charlotte Street and Earlham Street, and he encouraged the idea of having a loose collaboration in order to have an exchange of ideas as well pay the rent. Collaborators included Peter Collymore, Michael Braun and Charlotte Baden-Powell. Collymore observed 'Winter had concocted a innovative form of studio dividers that were very heavy, we were trying to shift them into our offices in Earlham Street, we were saved by stage hands at the Cambridge Theatre who lent us block and tackle, this allowed us to move the furniture without our killing ourselves or other innocent bystanders'.
John built a series of houses, the first for his sister designed in 1956 whilst he was still working in America, a single storey house in Wentworth and a pair of white mosaic-clad houses in Belsize Park. The Winters acquired the cemetery Superintendent's house at Highgate Cemetery, where the garden was big enough to build a new house. The house was practical, stylish and innovative. The steel framed house, arranged over three floors had the family kitchen and living space on the ground floor with access to the garden to the east and the west. The middle floor contained the bedrooms and the upper floor was an elegant Miesan pavilion with views north, east and west across London. The Cor-Ten steel cladding was the first domestic use of this material in Britain. Other innovations were that all windows were double glazed. Winter got the largest panels available and this drove the design, with opening ventilation panels to the sides, an arrangement that is used in so many contemporary buildings today. Completed in 1969, Jeremy Dixon commented 'it was that house, it was a game changer', it surely put John on the architectural map. John was asked by Barry Till to take part in an architectural competition for Morley College and he won it, beating others including the partnership of Norman Foster and ABK.
John, always a prolific and effective writer, had decided to write a book about a no-frills subject, entitled Industrial Architecture – a survey of Factory Building and it was published in 1970. In this he puts forward a thesis that British 17th and 18th century industrial architecture informed German architects such as Beuth and Schinkel and thus Mies. In the same volume John cites the Sheerness Boathouse (1860) as being the first truly modern building, as its use of wrought iron I sections, corrugated metal cladding and strip windows were revolutionary. John's interest in dockyard and industrial architecture led to commissions in the Medway towns, firstly at the Chatham Dockyard and then at Rochester Castle Forebuilding where he erected a high tech fabric roof in a medieval structure. This was one of the first applications in the UK of fabric structures.
Other works followed, a housing scheme for Woughton Village and various commissions for his long-standing client Sir Sacheverell Sitwell on the Renishaw estate where he developed a language of modern contextual architecture. This was a time of change; Venturi had published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, the modernist vision was now being re-visited; the National Gallery extension had been taken away from ABK to be replaced with the post-modern architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown; James Stirling had teamed up with Leon Krier; Terry Farrell and Nick Grimshaw had split, Farrell going the same way as Stirling.
John was awarded the contract for Portsmouth Historic Naval Base (1989) on the basis of his expertise in Dockyard/Industrial architecture and historic buildings. The project consisted of a masterplan, a new building and works to the historic storehouses. After the initial contract was awarded, John was asked by Dr Margaret Rule to design a new museum for the Mary Rose, the Tudor warship. This commission represented the opportunity of a lifetime, however given the circumstances it was also one that would require a subtle political and stylistic touch. John's design was an uncompromising Miesan pavilion, a simple all- encompassing structure that would cover the building and the dry dock, the approach similar to the one taken by Mies in the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin. This approach was not to everyone's taste, crucially not the Prince of Wales. John was unceremoniously dumped from the Mary Rose project to be replaced by the Prince of Wales' chosen architect Christopher Alexander.
The final major new building that John Winter's studio completed was 83-85 Mansell Street (1991), a project for a new speculative office building. Planning permission had been granted (Elana Keats and Associates) for a rather crude post-modern building and as a young architect I was given the responsibility of doing a set of tender drawings. Every element of the building was re-visited
and a truly modern building emerged. John Young (Richard Rogers' Partner) wrote to Winter personally to congratulate him on the building. On the citation for the RIBA award John Winter very generously allowed me to be personally credited.
In 1991 John designed a notable and delightful new summer residence for his family in Happisburgh, Norfolk. It was a low- slung steel framed construction with corrugated metal cladding and roofing. He was always amused that the steel frame was made by North Walsham Tractors, the project exemplifies John’s skill in detailing humble materials in a simple and straight forward manner to produce a stunning outcome.
With the demise of the Portsmouth project John had embarked on the conservation and re-use of inter-war modernist buildings,
the first being the Headmaster's House by William Lescaze (1932) at Dartington Hall school and a further 29 similar projects including High and Over by Amyas Connell (1930) and Highpoint One (1935) by Tecton. John increasingly grew to admire the work of the inter-war architects, concluding that the buildings they made were 'really rather good'.