‘The design of buildings is a social act…Design and building of necessity involves co-operation.’
Edward Cullinan Architects, 1965
On long car journeys with his uncle Mervyn as a boy, Edward Cullinan (forever known as Ted) was encouraged to study architecture, rather than become a doctor like his father and grandfather. These active observation sessions along the Kingston bypass clearly took root.
Having obtained an Anderson and Webb scholarship to attend the Cambridge School of Architecture where he was introduced to Modernism, Cullinan decided to migrate to the Architectural Association for his final two years of study. The AA marked a great shift from Cambridge; Modernism was not taught by rote, but rather was being actively advanced by a host of young, practising tutors. Taught principally by Denys Lasdun, with whom he would go on to work, and Peter Smithson, Cullinan was given room to develop his own expressive response to modernist pedagogy.
In 2010, reflecting on a pilgrimage made by bicycle to Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp in 1955, Cullinan stated that he had ‘no idea that architectural form could reach this level of sophistication and profundity and feeling’. It was the ‘feeling’, however, that would resonate most significantly throughout his life and career. Tempered by the experiments of Modernism that were, he believed, ‘always done on those who can’t protest’, his political inclinations towards libertarian socialism and anarchism permeated his deeply human architecture and catalysed the establishment of his office, Edward Cullinan Architects, as a co-operative in 1965.
Departing from the machinic precision of his tutors, Cullinan developed an architecture that was driven by social and ecological imperatives. Westminster Lodge, at Hooke Park in Dorset, with its green timber frame and collective system of inhabitation, succinctly embodies the principles that have remained so critical to the design work of the office. Though originally designed for the Parnham Trust in 1995, the AA purchased Hooke Park in 2002 and as such the building has inadvertently become an intrinsic part of the fabric of the school, continuously occupied to this day.
Cullinan was amicably derided by Smithson as being ‘a bit hand-knitted’ for his woody, un-polished architectural sensibilities. Such qualities, however, were the result of careful design, driven by a desire for beauty, social equality and ecological sustainability. His meticulous eye, not just for architectural form but also for human sensitivity, his fluency in translating ideas through drawing and his desire to develop knowledge in others saw his inspirational and highly influential work recognised with a RIBA Gold Medal in 2008. It is for these reasons that his office was for many years ranked as the most respected practice in the country, and for which Ted Cullinan himself, as a manifestly generous and modest individual, will forever be remembered.
