Alison and Peter Smithson

Dirk van den Heuvel

The dissertation looks into the work of the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson (1928-1993, 1923-2003). Main questions of the dissertation concern the architecture of the house, housing, and town planning, and how the Smithsons both continued, criticized and transformed modernist concepts of architectural order. The combined notions of form and formlessness, of image and movement, of material and experience, of process, finding processes and the "As Found", are key to the aesthetics and aesthetic procedures as proposed by the Smithsons. The dissertation includes seven chapters : The Smithson-ness of the Smithsons is an almost autonomous piece as an introduction to the various interdependent themes of the research, including the methodological issues of discourse analysis, historiography and writing. The second and third chapter ( “The Simple Life Well Done” and Competing...