Leading Modernist Architect
Wells Wintemute Coates was one of the leading Modernist famous architects in Britain in the 1930s and founder, with E. Maxwell Fry, of the English Modern Architecture Research (MARS) Group (1933). The son of Canadian Christian missionaries serving in Japan, he received his early education in Tokyo. Later, he studied science and engineering at the university in Vancouver.
By all accounts he was destined for a career in science, and he obtained a PhD in engineering from London University (1924); nonetheless, he took up journalism and sought part- time work with the architectural firm of Adams and Thompson, where he met architect Maxwell Fry.
His first design projects were mainly for shops and exhibition stands, although by the early 1930s he was working for the property developer Jack Pritchard on a series of houses of the minimal type. He designed the modern “Isokon” Lawn Road Flats, Hampstead, 1932-4. This scheme, with 10 Palace Gate, Kensington, and the Embassy Court luxury flats at Brighton, are among his best buildings; all are in the Corhusian manner.
He was a member of Herbert Read’s loose-knit “Unit One” and was featured in the publication of the same name. He was also active in CLAM. He worked extensively for the BBC, producing studios in Broadcasting House, London, in the interwar period and an experimental “Telekinema” as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951.
Earlier, after creating the MARS Group in 1933 he designed the Group’s major exhibition in London in 1938. In the 1950s he formed an architectural and planning practice with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and spent his rather unsuccessful last years in Canada.
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