Le Corbusier Design For Venesta Stand At Building Trades Exhibition, London 1930 Venesta Stand At Building Trades Exhibition, 1931 Wells Coates' First Design For House In Lawn Road, London, For Jack & Molly Pritchard Wells Coates' Front & Back Perspectives Of Lawn Road Flats

About this talk

Running time: 28 minutes

Jack Pritchard was all his life involved with furniture design and architecture in Britain. In retirement, he looked back and chatted about the 1930s, and the famous people with whom his life interacted.

It started in the late 1920s, when he got involved with the engineer-architect Wells Coates. Before long they had formed a personal friendship that led to a piece of real estate development. Lawn Road Flats was the name of the building in Hampstead, London, which Pritchard commissioned from Coates and which, the moment it was completed, became a centre for the pioneering architects of the time. Pritchard recounts the anxieties and pleasures he underwent in the process.

He was by now involved with the Modern Architecture Movement in Britain and, with writer Morton Shand and architect Maxwell Fry (see Learning From The Tropics and How Modern Architecture Came To England), contrived to get Walter Gropius (see The Victory Of The Modern Approach Is Sure) out of Nazi Germany, finding work for him and offering accommodation in the Lawn Road Flats. Marcel Breuer too. He also engineered the coming together of Gropius and educationalist Henry Morris, which led to the design of Impington Village College by Gropius with his new partner Maxwell Fry.

Please note that a transcript of this talk is available - please contact us for further details.

Jack Pritchard


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