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From cockpit to domestic interior: the Great War and the architecture of Wells Coates

This paper considers the effect that military service in the First World War had on the approach to design and practice that the architect Wells Wintemute Coates (1895–1958) developed from c. 1928 onwards. It argues that his experience in the Canadian Field Artillery, and more especially as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, influenced his design praxis and embedded in him a fundamental conception of architecture as a set of tools (framework, space, equipment), centred around the body of the inhabitant, and designed to facilitate their daily life. His early familiarity with aircraft, which were manufactured from the newest of materials such as plywood and aluminium, also left him with an abiding concern to use the most up-to-date materials in his designs and to develop an appropriate form of aesthetic expression for them. The article explores the background to his approach, and how it was enacted in designs at 1, Kensington Palace Gardens, London (1932), Lawn Road Flats, London (1934) and in the studios he designed for the BBC's Broadcasting House, London, in 1932. It concludes by considering how wartime experience also affected Coates's understanding of the persona of the professional architect.