Theo Crosby (3 April 1925 – 12 September 1994) was an architect, editor, writer and sculptor, engaged with major developments in design across four decades. He was also an early vocal critic of modern urbanism. He is best remembered as a founding partner of the international design partnership Pentagram, and as architect for the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe in London. However, his role as éminence grise in British architecture and design from 1950 to 1990 helped effect much broader changes. Crosby's archive is located at the University of Brighton Design Archives.University of Brighton Design Archives: Theo Crosby Archive
1940s and 1950s: architecture and sculpture Crosby studied architecture under Rex Martienssen, an acolyte of Le Corbusier, at Witwatersrand University Johannesburg. From 1944 he participated in the Allied invasion of Italy. His post-VE day travels around that country introduced him to a world—of urbanity and cultural generosity"I have come to value that memory, of cafes, of leisured discussions about very little, of closely built, dirty and beautiful buildings, of well made fittings, of marvellous floors and pavings, gifts to the public": from Theo Crosby's Inaugural Address as Professor of Architecture and Design at the RCA, 1990—which he had never experienced in South Africa, and which opened his eyes to the power of the public realm. He settled in England in 1948, following the South African government's official sanctioning of apartheid. In 1949 he began work at the modernist architectural practice of Fry, Drew and Partners on Gloucester Place in London, combining this with studying sculpture in the evenings at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.Theo Crosby, "The Painter as Designer", Edward Wright graphic work and painting, Arts Council, 1985, p.49 Here he came into contact with teachers Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Edward Wright, with whom he would later work on the exhibition This is Tomorrow, and fellow students Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, with whom he would later form a design partnership. The Central, with its emphasis on cross-disciplinary work, would have a lasting effect on Crosby's view of the architect's role.Philip Thompson's obituary of Alan Fletcher in The Guardian, Monday 25 September 2006 He also formed links at this time with the modernist MARS Group, and the Architectural Association.
1950s and 1960s: editing and exhibitions
Between 1953 and 1962, while establishing his own architectural practice, Crosby acted as Technical Editor (under Monica Pidgeon's editorship) of Architectural Design magazine, which was seeking to bring a more youthful, vital and progressive approach to the subject than the previously dominant Architectural Review. At first his main job was laying out the pages, for which he sought guidance from the Central School, but was "rebuffed". It was left to the painter Edward Wright to provide him with some instruction a couple of years later."The Painter as Designer", op cit. Wright had taught an evening class at the Central School before becoming – through Crosby's efforts – the art director of the publishers of AD in 1955 He also "designed beautiful abstract covers, sometimes including the odd word to describe the theme du jour – "houses", "roofs", "Sheffield" – but rarely featuring photography or even buildings".The Sesquipedalist blog (www.sesquipedalist.com), 16 March 2009. This blog has shown a consistent interest in Architectural Design magazine under Crosby's and subsequent tenures During his tenure the early works of James Stirling, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers were published in AD, and it began to champion what came to be known as the "zoom wave".Simon Sadler, Archigram: architecture without architecture, MIT Press, 2005, p.161; Reyner Banham, "Zoom Wave Hits Architecture", New Society, 3 March 1966
Attaching himself to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Crosby attended meetings of the Independent Group there, and was particularly impressed by the group's discussions of the impact of mass communication and information theory on architecture and design. It was Crosby who suggested, and steered to completion, what would be the Independent Group's swansong—the watershed exhibition This Is Tomorrow at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. Characteristically the exhibition was organised around twelve multidisciplinary teams. Crosby collaborated on his installation with graphic designers Germano FacettiFacetti had been a student in Wright's evening class at the Central School and Edward Wright, and the sculptor William Turnbull. The installations which garnered most attention, however, were those of Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker (with its Pop-Art imagery including Robby the Robot), and Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson and Nigel Henderson (which featured a "primitive" pavilion studded with evocative ephemera). In AD Crosby wrote that the exhibition was "evidence of attempts towards a new sort of order, a way towards that integration of the arts that must come if our culture is not merely to survive, but come truly to life". It was, he said later, "my first experience at a loose, horizontal organisation of equals", and claimed it was the inspiration behind the distinctive organisation of Pentagram."The Painter as Designer", op cit, pp. 49–50 In characteristic fashion, Crosby—alert to practicalities—sold the ads that made the memorable exhibition catalogue possible. In 1960 he showed his own sculpture at the ICA, alongside paintings by Peter Blake and interventions by John Latham.
Between 1958 and 1960 five issues of the "little" arts magazine Uppercase were published, with Crosby as editor.The inspiration for it had largely been Edward Wright's. It was published by the Whitefriars Press (who also published AD) in editions of 1,000, half of which were given away to customers, and half to friends of AD
Crosby also edited the ICA's Living Arts magazine, and persuaded the institute to mount an exhibition—Living Cities—in 1963, to foreground the urban theories of the young Archigram group.One of the group, Ron Herron, said the exhibition "became a manifesto of sorts" He also found the money for the show (from the Gulbenkian Foundation), and featured it in a special edition of Living ArtsSadler, op cit, p.33 Crosby has been described as a "hidden hand" during this period, uniting the separate spheres of Archigram, the Architectural Association, and Architectural Design, and thereby "creating a new circuit for progressive and 'international' notions".ibid, p.161
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw Crosby add to his reputation as an architect through a number of temporary exhibitions. With Edward Wright he produced the Architectural Design magazine's stands at the 1955 and 1958 Building Exhibitions, and the congress and exhibition buildings for the 6th International Union of Architects Congress, held in London in 1961, both of which combined architecture and graphics in a striking fashion.The job had come to Crosby due to his colleague Monica Pidgeon's presence on the organising committee of the 1961 Congress. See Diana Rowntree's obituary of Pidgeon in The Guardian, 21 September 2009 Such projects also reinforced his belief in the desirability of cross-disciplinary work in the arts. Later he remembered how, after completing the UIA project "we all felt very pleased with each other and have I suppose often wondered why such occasions, generous and spontaneous are so rare"."The Painter as Designer", op cit, p.51 Three years later he designed a pavilion at the Milan Triennale, for which he was awarded Gran Premio. Fletcher Forbes Gill, the design company that Crosby would subsequently join, produced the graphics for the pavilion.
1960s: Urban studies
For a short time Crosby headed up the experimental Design Group attached to the building contractors Taylor Woodrow, and he brought members of Archigram in to work under him.In his RCA Inaugural Address, op cit, Crosby claimed this came as a direct result of his UIA buildings The Design Group focussed on three main urban projects (none of which were carried out as proposed): for Euston Station;The scheme is illustrated in Sadler, op cit, p.46 for a section of Fulham in West London,A composite image of this scheme is used on the cover of Crosby's 1965 book, Architecture: city sense and for the centre of Hereford in south west England. The Euston project envisaged a city of towers to replace the Victorian station and Arch, demolished in 1961–2. The Fulham Study was requested by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, and envisaged "an improbably massive redevelopment"Sadler, op cit, p.84 of the area, which drew on the Smithsons' earlier projects for Sheffield and Berlin. At the same time a new form of prefabricated dwelling was experimented with, "the only constraint" upon which "was that it should stack up into a tower structure".Peter Cook, Archigram, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p.44 For Fulham, the pod-like units were arranged in terraces (compared by Crosby to Georgian terracesTheo Crosby, Architecture: city sense, Studio Vista/Reinhold, London/NY, 1965, p.60) and towers. This housing system had "originated in discussions for the CIAM Congress 1955",ibid, p.96. In fact CIAM held no Congress in 1955, so Crosby probably had in mind discussions held in 1955 in advance of the 1956 Congress (CIAM X) on Habitat and illustrated ideas shared with the Brutalists and Team X. Indeed, for all his subsequent questioning of modernist urban theory Crosby never lost faith in the Smithsons' call for an architecture "Without Rhetoric."
1960s and 1970s: Design
In 1965, on the departure of Bob Gill from the design partnership Fletcher Forbes Gill, Crosby joined to form Crosby Fletcher Forbes, reportedly after Fletcher and Forbes had considered extending their proposals for the corporate identity of Shell Petroleum to encompass the architecture of Shell gas stations.Emily King, obituary of Alan Fletcher, The Independent, 26 September 2006. In his Inaugural Address as Professor of Architecture and Design at the RCA (1990) Crosby says the reason was that he had "got a piece of the British Pavilion at Montreal's EXPO 67" The decision to have an architect on the team was soon vindicated when Reuters, having asked Crosby to redesign its boardroom, was then persuaded to work with Fletcher on a new corporate identity and logo.ibid. The team "had an ability to combine the formal restraint of Swiss modernism with the wit of the Madison Avenue advertising industry", which "set them apart from other British design firms"ibid.
In 1972 the three were joined by Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky, to form Pentagram, which was organised as a horizontal cooperative of equals, in which profits were shared, and staff and overheads pooled. Pentagram went on to build up a formidable worldwide reputation. Throughout the Pentagram years Crosby's passion for publication was expressed through a provocative series of "Pentagram Papers" (the title most likely a punning reference to the Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971).In 2006 the 36 Pentagram Papers were compiled by Delphine Hirasuna, and published by Chronicle Books. The compilation contains much useful information about the founding and evolution of Pentagram and the genesis of the Papers
1970s and 1980s: Revisionism