Review of Edward Denison's "McMorran & Whitby" (RIBA Publishing, 2009) (Paperback, £20. ISBN: 978-1859463208)

by David Watkin

Most twentieth-century architecture until after the Second World War was traditional, generally classical, and, especially in America, of high quality. You would never guess this from the hundred of books on the period which ignore this work and give the impression that Modernism was the greatest show on earth and the dominant factor in the period. Gradually, the story of what actually happened is now being written, but the difficulties which still have to be overcome are well illustrated in a review of Edward Denison's admirable book, McMorran & Whitby, in Building Design (4 December 2009) which complained that such 'revisionist' studies of architects are 'framed by complaints that their work has been overlooked or deliberately marginalised', the 'villain' being 'an imagined implacable cosmopolitan “modernist” conspiracy determined to displace an indigenous tradition. This is deficient history and poor polemics.'

Quite the reverse, for this account describes precisely how the Modernist takeover was an essay in propaganda which captured the architectural establishment, the media, and above all the schools of architecture so that no student would be allowed to design traditionally, and still is not. To this day, the only school which teaches the practice, as opposed to merely the history, of the classical and traditional architecture of which McMorran and Whitby were masters, is that of Notre Dame, Indiana. The students at this brilliant school are thus instantly snapped up by any sensible architectural practice in the USA.

Donald McMorran and George Whitby were aged just 61 and 56 at the time of their respective deaths in 1965 and 1973, but had they lived longer they would have doubtless received virtually no more commissions in which they could continue and develop the classical language of twentieth-century architects, notably Lutyens and Vincent Harris, in whose office McMorran had worked from 1927-35. McMorran and Whitby, who joined him in practice in 1958, had already faced opposition from the architectural establishment, including figures who should have known better such as Hugh Casson and Ian Nairn.

To gain commissions, McMorran occasionally compromised with Modernism as with his grim proposal of 1958 for an extension to the National Gallery in the form of a tower block, an early 'carbuncle'. By contrast, his project for St Paul's Choir School of 1959-61 was a delicious design arranged round a circular court. This was recommended by the Royal Fine Art Commission who forwarded it for their approval to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Instead, they initiated a competition in which McMorran was not even invited to compete. It was judged by Sir William Holford, architect of the appalling tower blocks of St Paul's Cathedral precinct, now mercifully demolished. He, typically, rejected the fine classical design by Raymond Erith, close to McMorran and Whitby, in favour of the trendy Modernist blocks by the Architects Co-Partnership. McMorran's finest built work includes Devon County Hall, Exeter (1954-63), and, with Whitby, halls at Nottingham University (1957-9). County Hall is a large complex of enclosed quadrangles and open courtyards with frequent segmental arches and a tower of Lutyens-like geometry. These features recur at Cripps Hall at Nottingham where the Gate of Honour sports tall Ionic columns, austerely lacking in bases and fluting, yet warm through their pink stone. McMorran, as Denison explains, regarded the Ionic order as the only directional order and thus appropriate for a gateway through which traffic flows. The pattern was set by the Ionic interior of the Propylaea, gateway to the Acropolis, which has a Doric exterior. Denison sensitively describes how 'The stone from which these beautifully fashioned columns and capitals were carved possesses an almost magical quality - changing tone with the weather.' Almost unbelievably, these were attacked by the 'Anti-Ugly Brigade', architectural radicals who painted them bright white in absurd deference to Corbusier's pilotis.

In a different mode are McMorran and Whitby's John Player Offices, Nottingham (1962-7), in which they reworked the continuous weather-boarding of many buildings in the functional tradition of c.1800. The building is thus close to Raymond Erith's public house, Jack Straw's Castle, Hampstead Heath (1963-4), yet McMorran and Whitby's weather-boarding is ingeniously of aluminium. The John Player Offices were nonetheless condemned by the City Architect at Nottingham who said that he was 'most concerned that architects should still be designing 18th-century pastiches'.

It must be confessed that McMorran's work could be curiously uneven. His competition design of 1951 for Coventry Cathedral was a bleak and rather menacing cylinder punctured by circular windows and set on a rectangular platform of stone which, in Denison's words is 'dissected by glass volumes cut into its surface'. Most unhappy is his lumpen, featureless facade of 1957-62 for the building at 100, Pall Mall, which replaced the Carlton Club. Incidentally, the Club was not 'destroyed during the war', as Denison says, for its powerful facade of 1923 by Sir Reginald Blomfield survived and should have been retained.

McMorran and Whitby created a beautiful sequence of buildings in 1965 at Bury St Edmunds for the County Council Offices, Council Chamber Library, and Police Station, quiet, understated work, sensitive to the historic setting. McMorran's skill in such commissions had already been demonstrated in his Ede House, Hackney (1950-1), a police section house, an elegant and subtle essay in classical symmetry below a simple pediment. With Whitby, McMorran designed the City Police Station, Wood Street, in the City of London (1959-66), a large building containing four ranges round a courtyard, all in Portland stone. The facade is enlivened with massive rustication on the ground and first floors, inspired by Sanmicheli, yet squared up in a twentieth-century manner.

To McMorran's great regret he was forced to add a six-storey slab block to serve as a residential 'section house' at the rear of the Police Station which is a disaster. The large extension which he and Whitby made in 1966-72 to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, is also less than perfect. It suffers from its juxtaposition with the existing main building, a richly Baroque masterpiece by E.W. Mountford of 1902-7. It was an incredibly challenging commission, involving creating separate access to the courts from the street for four different groups of users: judge and jury, barristers and witnesses, defendants and the general public, all to circulate the building without coming into contact with anyone but members of their own group. The facade of McMorran and Whitby's building is heavy and unclassical, the finest part being the interiors, in particular the staircase by the corridor leading through to Mountford's building.

Denison gives us a tantalising insight into McMorran's inner thoughts. Justifying the reference in the City Police Station to his favourite Italian Renaissance architect, Sanmicheli, he argued, 'It is what you see that matters', thus asking 'why should a nerve centre in the event of a nuclear war not echo a palazzo?' He rejected the notion that there could be no such things as 'truth' and 'honesty' in art and architecture, a judgement close to this reviewer's heart. He was devoted to that great book, Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism (1914), which was rejected by Reyner Banham who claimed grotesquely that it 'lies outside the mainstream of architectural thought'. Need we look further than Banham for the supposedly imaginary 'villain' conjured up in the Building Design review?

© David Watkin 2010

About the author

David Watkin is Emeritus Professor of the History of Architecture at Cambridge University. His most recent book is The Roman Forum (Profile Books, 2009): his next book, The Classical Country House: From the Archives of Country Life, is published by Aurum Press this year. (Photograph of Professor Watkin by Michael Clifford)