Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson

Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson (respectively, born June 22, 1928, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England—died August 16, 1993, London; born September 18, 1923, Stockton-on-Tees, Durham, England—died March 3, 2003, London) were British architects notable for their design for the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Norfolk (1954), which is generally recognized as the first example of New Brutalism, an approach to architecture that often stressed stark presentation of materials and structure.

The Smithsons were married in 1949 and after 1950 practiced architecture together. The Hunstanton School, with its formal severity and clarity reminiscent of the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, exemplifies the principles of New Brutalism in its exposed steel- and brickwork and exposed electrical conduits. The Economist Building Group (1959–64), St. James’s, London, consists of a 16-story office tower, a smaller residential tower, and a bank building. The three are connected by a raised asymmetrical pedestrian plaza. The cluster shows imaginative use of the irregular site and is in scale with its St. James’s Street location. Later works include the Garden Building (1968–70), St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the Robin Hood Gardens (1972), a housing project in London.

Books by the Smithsons include Urban Structuring (1967), The Euston Arch and the Growth of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway (1968), Ordinariness and Light (1970), Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic, 1955–1972 (1973), and The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (1981).