THE DOOR TO A SECRET ROOM: a Portrait of Wells Coates. - Brief Article - Review - book review

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1999 by Sherban Cantacuzino

By Laura Cohn. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1999. [pounds]25

This portrait of Wells Coates by his daughter, Laura, is truthful without being prying and affectionate without showing the slightest hint of adulation. Based largely on letters and diaries, amply illustrated in black and white, and broken up into 12 short chapters with one-word titles like 'Japan', 'Ideals', 'Money', 'Inventions', it makes easy and enjoyable reading. It also illustrates -- and, this is surely the point -- the work of an important twentieth-century architect and industrial designer. Wells Coates was a difficult and complex character, uncompromising, lonely yet sociable, rational yet intense and passionate.

The author traces Coates' search for truth and idealism to a combination of his upbringing in Japan and his Methodist background. Interestingly he compares his failure at the new town of Iroquois on Lake Ontario with Lubetkin's failure at Peterlee, which occurred at about the same time. But unlike Lubetkin and most of his colleagues, Coates had no formal training as an architect and came to architecture from science and engineering, which he had studied at McGill and which enabled him to grasp complex technical processes. The most substantial chapter is rightly devoted to the most significant of Coates's buildings, the Lawn Road Flats in London, designed for Jack and Mollie Pritchard. Their conception and construction makes a fascinating story. It continues to this day with the problems of their restoration and survival.