Theo Crosby

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.

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 —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.

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.

He also formed links at this time with the modernist MARS Group, and the Architectural Association.

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.

Crosby studied architecture under Rex Martienssen, an acolyte of Le Corbusier, at Witwatersrand University Johannesburg.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw Crosby add to his reputation as an architect through a number of temporary 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.

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".

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".

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

The Design Group focussed on three main urban projects (none of which were carried out as proposed): for Euston Station; for a section of Fulham in West London, and for the centre of Hereford in south west England.

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 Facetti 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.

In characteristic fashion, Crosby—alert to practicalities—sold the ads that made the memorable exhibition catalogue possible.

Between 1958 and 1960 five issues of the "little" arts magazine Uppercase were published, with Crosby as editor.

In 1960 he showed his own sculpture at the ICA, alongside paintings by Peter Blake and interventions by John Latham.

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" of the area, which drew on the Smithsons' earlier projects for Sheffield and Berlin.

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.

He also found the money for the show (from the Gulbenkian Foundation), and featured it in a special edition of Living Arts 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".