Ivor Smith
Architect who was co-creator in the late 1950s of Park Hill, towering concrete slabs of flats on a hillside near the centre of Sheffield
IVOR SMITH, who has died aged 92, should be numbered among those, such as Patrick Hodgkinson (Brunswick Centre) and Neave Brown (Camden housing), who at an age that today would seem dangerously young, were given responsibility for major projects whose scale went beyond housing to create whole urban environments.
In Smith’s case, the project was Park Hill, Sheffield (1958-61), on which he worked with Jack Lynn (1926-2013), under the City Architect, Lewis Womersley, who was an expert enabler with political skills, but in no way a designer.
Park Hill replaced tightly packed rows of houses on a steep site close to the centre of the city – a city that was still engaged in its historic industries of coal, iron, steel and cutlery. The two young men proposed themselves to work there and came up with their project, adapted from the form of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation at Marseille, with split-level apartments reached, in this case, by the first major example in Britain of a “street deck”, walkways on to which the front doors opened.
To allow maximum light, the blocks were turned at an angle and linked together with bridges, so that each level debouched on to solid ground and allowed the milkman to drive to every door with his electric float. The concrete frame structure was filled in with windows and brick panels, the latter specified to provide work for bricklayers.
Although Smith and Lynn were young and had never built anything before, they had the support of top consultants Ove Arup & Partners as structural engineers, Alan Pullinger of GN Haden & Sons for services and Cyril Sweett as quantity surveyor.
Among the problems were the contractors, Sheffield Council’s own workforce, who had never used concrete before, and the discovery of extensive mine workings below the site that had to be pumped full of a weak mix of concrete to hold the building up.
The project aimed to provide amenities for the community that had previously lived on the site, with pubs, shops and schools. The comfort of the flats and the glorious views were welcomed by residents, and the street decks performed their social function, although Smith regretted not including windows looking out on them. Later on, as with so much public housing, social conditions changed and the buildings were viewed as a problem.
Under threat of demolition, the whole complex was listed in 1998 and Smith was brought in as a consultant for the next first phase of alterations, changing the appearance considerably to appeal to private buyers.
Ivor Smith was born on January 27 1926 at Leigh-on-sea, where his father was a maths teacher. Aged 13, at the outbreak of war, he was evacuated with the family to Belper in Derbyshire, not far from his parents’ roots in Sheffield. He left school at 16 and attended the evacuated Southend School of Art in Mansfield, cycling over every week and staying in digs.
From there he went on a scholarship to study architecture at the UCL Bartlett School, itself evacuated to Cambridge, and was befriended by its assertively classicist head, Sir Albert Richardson, sitting up with him at night, a bottle of port handy, helping to draw lecture slides by hand on squares of smoked glass.
Then, as a pacifist, he chose farming, finishing the war at Pigotts, five miles from High Wycombe, managing the farm of the Catholic arts community set up by Eric Gill. The final stage of Smith’s education was in the diploma section of the Architectural Association in London, where his interest in the form of urban housing was developed with a project for a Unité-inspired block in Rotherhithe, which in turn became a stepping stone for Park Hill.
He left Sheffield in 1962, and combined designing with teaching at Cambridge, and thereafter as head of school at University College, Dublin, where he innovated by inviting many of the rising figures of the time to come and give guest lectures in what became known as his “flying circus”. His time subsequently as head of the Bristol School of Architecture ended amid controversy when the school was abolished by its parent body, the University of Bristol, in 1984.
His teaching then took him to Singapore and Edinburgh as Visiting Professor, and at the invitation of the Commonwealth Institute to establish the first school of architecture in Kingston, Jamaica, which has flourished ever since.
Several of Smith’s later buildings, in partnership with Cailey Hutton, continued the theme of aggregated dwelling units, although on a smaller scale than Park Hill. They included Dibley’s, an old people’s housing scheme at Blewbury in Oxfordshire, 1970-72, and the north side of King Street in Cambridge (in two phases between 1966 and 1978), in some respects a scaled-down version of the futuristic Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, and the Daubeny Building at Magdalen College, Oxford, 1974.
Ivor Smith had a warm personality and an inclusive approach to architecture, admiring the old and finding ways to incorporate its lessons in new buildings. His book, Architecture an Inspiration, published in 2014, gives a good indication of what he liked and why.
In 1948, he married Audrey Lawrence, whom he had met while first in Cambridge. She survives him with four children.
Ivor Smith, born January 27 1926, died February 18 2018