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When Peter Smithson died in March 2003, architecture lost one of its most inspired practitioners, incisive theorists, and charismatic teachers. Along with his late wife and partner, Alison, Smithson emerged in the postwar era as Britain's preeminent advocate of architectural modernism. The Smithson's achieved cult-figure status in the architectural world, particularly among students who admired the power of their ideas and work. But with no built projects in the U.S., they remained something of an enigma there. Now, as part of our Conversations with Students series, Smithson's ideas will be made widely accessible in a handy and inexpensive format for the first time.

Striving to adapt the progressive ideas of the pre-war modern movement to the specific human needs of post-war reconstruction, Alison and Peter Smithson were among the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century. As younger members of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and as founding members of Team 10 they were at the heart of the debate on the future course of Modern Architecture. Their polemics and designs - addressing issues such as the rising consumer society and the orientation of urban planning - laid the foundations for New Brutalism and the Pop Art Movement of the 1960s. An important adaptation made by the Smithsons and their generation was the rejection of modernism's machine aesthetics. The new notions of place and territory were juxtaposed to Le Corbusier's machine à habiter. To the Smithsons a house was a particular place, which should be suited to its location and able to meet the ordinary requirements of everyday life and to accommodate its inhabitants' individual patterns of use. This exhibition examines the evolution of the Smithsons' approach to this everyday "art of inhabitation." It does this by extensively documenting most of their designs for individual dwellings, especially their optimistic House of the Future of 1956 and the series of renovations of and additions to the fairy-tale-like Hexenhaus in Germany from the late 1980s onward

"British architects and urbanists Alison and Peter Smithson first rose to prominence in the 1950s. Many of their ideas, social, architectural, and urban, profoundly influenced generations of practitioners, students, and academics.... The Charged Void: Urbanism is the companion volume to The Charged Void: Architecture; the two comprise the complete works of Alison and Peter Smithson. The Charged Void: Urbanism collects the urban form projects from the Smithsons' extensive and prolific collaboration, as well as building projects with specific implications for urban form. The work is ordered thematically in fourteen chapters: cluster, cohesion, pavilion and route.... More than a collection of work, this book represents a record of a careful and highly focused thought process concerned with the qualities of urban life - a ... collection of observations, decipherings, commentaries, and recommendations for understanding and improving the complex nature of the city."--

"Climate Register" analyzes four Smithson projects in terms of their intention in dealing with the influence of climate and the effect this has had on design and realization. "Imprint of India" lends a narrative style to communicate an architectural preoccupation between climate and buildings.

An extended exploration of the authors' theories and work over the past seventeen years, in which not only their aesthetic but also their political and emotional concerns are made plain.