England in the 1960s

The first Modern steel house to be built in Britain after the war was Panshanger (Figure 3.9), designed by Michael Newberry in 1956 and built for himself at Capel, Surrey, in 1957. ¹ The house was a 36 × 36ft. (10.97 × 10.97m) square on plan with four supporting columns located off-centre on the external walls, and similar in appearance to Mies’ Fifty By Fifty House, an unbuilt project of 1950-51 where each side was 50ft. (15.24m). But Panshanger adopted a quite different structural principal: indeed, Newberry has professed no knowledge of Mies’s design at that time. ² Whereas Mies’s building was a static structure with a welded plate roof supported on columns, Panshanger was what is called a grillage (Figure 3.10) or, more appropriately a “reciprocal frame” structure, each part of the pin-wheel formation playing off and relying upon the other. ³ The idea is hardly new: Leonardo da Vinci experimented with it and examples can be found in traditional Japanese architecture. But Panshanger is the first known instance of its application in steel. Although located within an acre of landscaped woodland, recent owners have closed off some of the glazing, not wanting to live within four glass walls. As an experimental house Panshanger demonstrated, at this early date for England, the aesthetic and structural possibilities of exposed steel construction in the same way that the house which Newberry built six years later overlooking the river at Helston, Cornwall, exploited the opportunities of steel construction on a steeply sloping site. ⁴