Hugh Casson: The Biography

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2000 by Alastair Best

By Jose Manser. London: Penguin. 2000. [pound]25

Hugh Casson's life spanned most of the last century, but in many ways he was a child of the century before that. His heroes were Ruskin and Lutyens. He once admitted that modern architecture was not much fun to draw, and in all his writing and broadcasting, it's hard to find a single critique of a contemporary building. In fact, I've succeeded in unearthing only one, a piece in The Observer about Owen Williams' hangar complex at Heathrow in which the author, having quickly exhausted his stock of laudatory adjectives, finds himself yearning for a flying field 'flat, windswept, cross-garnered with the infinite perspectives of runways and rimmed by the horizon itself -- a kingdom over which the aircraft can rule unchallenged ... and where the buildings, low and lightly built can be moved, extended and altered as the changing needs demand'.

This is an exhibition designer's view of the world (the piece was written two years after the Festival of Britain) and it betrays Casson's romantic preference for the light and ephemeral over the permanent that influenced the conduct of his entire working life, too. He managed to dispense with offices and all the cumbersome paraphernalia of telephones and paperclips, preferring to perch on his secretary's desk (at the Royal Academy) or lean over someone else's drawing board (at Casson Conder & Partners). The equivalent to a true office, perhaps, was his yellow Mini, where he could draw and write unmolested -- except by parking wardens.

So although he was an important creative force in his own practice, as well as an important procurer of clients, Casson was never really suited temperamentally to the hard slog of architecture. Architecture meant long and protracted battles with town halls and surveyors; it meant gumbooted site visits in the Midlands. Given the choice between that and whizzing down to Glyndebourne in the Mini to knock off a set for Haydn's La Fidelta Premiala or popping over to Windsor to sort out the Queen's curtains, he knew where his preferences lay.

He was sometimes dismissed as a lightweight, not least by himself, but I doubt whether anyone of his generation was his equal as a communicator. He could have made an excellent living as a travel writer or descriptive journalist; on television, he was in the Kenneth Clarke class; he was an inspiring teacher whose students adored him ('Hugh never did much actual teaching' was one, very revealing, comment from a colleague at the Royal College of Art); and he managed to convert the thankless task of committee work into an art form in its own right.

Ah, those committees. Why did he succumb so easily? Partly, perhaps because as a warmhearted and public-spirited man, he had difficulty saying no. But mainly, I believe, because he was one of nature's chairmen. The tact, diplomacy and brisk concision which he had brought to hear on the South Bank exhibition was ideally suited to the deliberations of the Royal Fine Art Commission, the National Trust and the Royal Academy.

He spread himself so thin that it is a miracle that there was enough of him to go round. I regret that he did not find time to write his memoirs. Instead we must make do with this thorough, if rather awestruck, biography. Apart from the distressing number of literals and homophones which infest my proof copy, my main criticism is that Jose Manser never quite succeeds in bringing her quicksilver subject into full view. We seek him here, we seek him there among these well-researched pages, but he remains damned elusive.