Wells Coates

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wells Wintemute Coates , OBE , (born December 17, 1895 in Tokyo , † June 17, 1958 in Vancouver ) was a Canadian architect , urban planner and designer who worked primarily in Great Britain. Coates is a founding member of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS Group).

Life

Early years

Wells Wintemute Coates was born as the eldest of six children of the Methodist missionary Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates (1864-1945) and Harper Havelock Coates (1865-1934) in Tokyo. His mother, who studied with Louis Sullivan , sparked his passion for architecture . Coates spent most of his childhood in the Far East and traveled around the world with his father until 1913. During the First World War , he initially served as an artilleryman and later as a pilot in the Royal Air Force .

Wells Coates studied in Vancouver, Canada at the University of British Columbia and received his bachelor's degree in May 1920 and his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1922. In the same year, he enrolled at East London College for engineering in October ; In 1924 he obtained a Ph.D. -Degree. After studying in England, he first worked as a journalist and later in the Adams and Thompson design office . In August 1927 he married Marion Grove. In 1928 he set up his own office. His experiences from Japan played an important role in his aesthetic sense for the architectural work. Modernism emerging in Europe met his ideas. In 1933 he attended the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne in Athens and in the same year founded the Modern Architectural Research Group with Philip Morton Shand , Maxwell Fry and FRS Yorke .

Later successes

10 Palace Gate
Isokon Building

Coates developed a so-called 3-2 architectural plan in which he designed the height of two living rooms on one side of a building to be just as high as three rooms on the other side, thus dividing two residential units over three floors. He also designed a simple door handle that is widely used in Scandinavian furniture. In the 1930s he designed a studio for the BBC . Including a specially balanced microphone stand, with which you could move the microphone in almost every part of the studio. This even became the standard equipment of the BBC. Wells Coates also designed the distinctive, rounded Bakelite housings into which the English radio and television manufacturer EKCO built its radios in the 1930s. The thirties were one of Coates' most productive times. The Isokon building from 1929 was followed by the Embassy Court residential building in Brighton in 1936 and the 10 Palace Gate apartment block in Kensington in 1939 . The two structures remained the only apartment buildings that Coates designed. However, he also designed numerous private single-family homes.

During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force and developed fighter aircraft during this time. For this mission he later received the Officer's Cross of the Order of the British Empire . After the war, like Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer , he influenced the British post-war architecture of residential buildings through the use of modular prefabricated parts. He himself referred to this construction method as "Room Unit Production". Coats designed a new type of sailboat, which he called wingsail . A prototype of the 4.88 meter high catamaran was built and tested in Norfolk Broads . However, this boat could not establish itself commercially.

In 1949/1950 he designed the Telekinema cinema building for the Festival of Britain exhibition . The then ultra-modern building offered 400 spectators and was designed for several types of film, including even 3D films . This made it one of the most spectacular attractions during the exhibition in the summer of 1951. The British Film Institute operated the telekinema and reopened the cinema in October 1952 as the National Film Theater . The structure was marked out in 1957.

Worked as a city planner and returned to Canada

Wells Coates has also been involved in urban planning projects. In 1937 he planned redevelopment of slums in Great Britain, which, however, was not implemented. He returned to Canada in the early 1950s . In the years 1952 to 1954 he prepared plans for the town of Iroquois (now part of South Dundas ) on the St. Lawrence River ; however, these plans were not implemented either. From 1955 to 1956 he taught together with Walter Gropius at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University . He prepared the redesign of the Toronto Islands and was a participant in the urban development project Project 58 in Vancouver . One of his last projects is the design of the Monospan Twin-Ride System monorail . The design that had not been implemented was later taken up and implemented as SkyTrain Vancouver in the 1980s during Expo 86 .

Wells Coates died on June 17, 1958 at the age of 63 as a result of a heart attack in Vancouver.

literature

Web links

Commons : Buildings of Wells Coates  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ embassycourt.org: Personal Life ( Memento from August 29, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Wells Coates, 'ECKO model AD-65' radio
  3. ^ Wells Coates: inventions
  4. ^ Elspeth Cowell: Wells Coates' Toronto Island Redevelopment Project. , Jun. 1995 (20: 2), p. 41-50. ( Memento from August 10, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Coates, Wells
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coates, Wells Wintemute (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian architect
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Tokyo
DATE OF DEATH June 17, 1958
Place of death Vancouver