The Concept and Its Origins
When the Isokon Building was completed in 1934 on Lawn Road in Belsize Park, it represented something genuinely new in British architecture — not merely a stylistic novelty but a fundamental reimagining of what a dwelling could and should be. Designed by the Canadian-born architect Wells Coates and commissioned by Jack and Molly Pritchard, the building translated into built form a set of ideas about modern living that had been developing in Continental Europe, particularly in Germany, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. It was the first fully realised work of the International Style in Britain, and it remains one of the most intellectually charged buildings in London.
The name Isokon derived from Isometric Unit Construction — a term that the Pritchards and Coates used to describe their ambitions for a system of modular, flexible housing that could be industrially produced and adapted to various purposes. The name was more programmatic than descriptive; the Lawn Road Flats were not, in the end, modularly constructed or easily adaptable, but the term captured the aspirations toward rationality, efficiency, and modernity that animated the project. The Isokon company also produced furniture — Marcel Breuer's celebrated bent plywood chair was designed for Isokon — and the building and the furniture company were conceived as parts of a single design project aimed at revolutionising the way modern people lived.
The intellectual context for the Isokon project was the European debate about minimum dwelling that had been energising architects and housing reformers since the 1920s. The Frankfurt Kitchen, developed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for Ernst May's social housing programme in Frankfurt in 1926, represented one pole of this debate: the scientific organisation of domestic space to maximise efficiency and minimise the labour of housework. The Bauhaus in Dessau, under Walter Gropius, represented another: the integration of craft, design, and manufacture in the service of a new material culture appropriate to industrial society.
Wells Coates and the Design
Wells Coates was among the most distinctive architectural personalities of interwar Britain. Born in Tokyo to Canadian missionary parents, educated in engineering and then in architecture, he brought to his work a combination of technical rigour and aesthetic sensibility unusual among his contemporaries. His friendship with the Pritchards, who shared his modernist convictions and were willing to back their convictions with their own money, gave him the opportunity to realise a project that would otherwise have been impossible in the conservative climate of British architecture in the early 1930s.
The building that Coates designed for Lawn Road was organised around the concept of the minimum flat — a small, efficiently planned unit in which every cubic metre of space was rationally organised to serve the needs of modern urban life. The individual flats were, by any conventional measure, extremely small: the smallest studio units contained a living area, a sleeping gallery, a minimal bathroom, and a kitchenette, all compressed into a space that would have been considered barely adequate for a single room in a conventional dwelling. The ingenuity of the planning made the smallness liveable; every surface was organised, every fitting multipurpose, every space contributing to the efficient functioning of the whole.
The exterior of the building expressed its planning logic with uncompromising clarity. The long, slightly curved concrete facade, painted white, presented to Lawn Road a face of studied austerity: projecting balconies on an external walkway gave access to the upper floors, replacing the conventional internal corridor with an open gallery that Coates likened to the deck of a ship — an analogy that reflected the interwar modernist fascination with ocean liners as the supreme expression of functional design. The ground floor housed a communal bar and restaurant — the Isobar — along with services and facilities intended to make private cooking unnecessary. The building was conceived as a total environment, not merely a container for individual domestic units.
The Isobar and Communal Life
The communal facilities at the base of the Isokon Building were as important to its conception as the individual flats above. Jack Pritchard's vision was of a building that would liberate its residents from the drudgery of domestic labour — particularly the domestic labour that fell, in the 1930s, almost entirely on women — by providing collective alternatives to individual cooking, cleaning, and home maintenance. The Isobar restaurant, designed initially by László Moholy-Nagy and later redesigned by Marcel Breuer, was to be the social heart of the community: a place where residents ate together, talked together, and formed the intellectual community that the Pritchards envisaged as the building's real contribution to modern life.
In practice, the communal ambitions of the Isokon proved difficult to sustain commercially. The Isobar went through several phases of management, briefly achieving genuine success as a social venue in the late 1930s when the building's remarkable concentration of émigré artists and intellectuals made it a centre of London's modernist cultural life. But the economics of running a restaurant as a service to a small number of residents proved challenging, and the communal vision was never fully realised in the way the Pritchards had imagined.
The idea of living without a private kitchen — or with the most minimal of kitchenettes — proved similarly resistant to full realisation. Residents found ways to cook in their flats despite the minimal facilities, and the relationship between private domestic life and communal provision that the building's design had assumed remained perpetually in tension with the actual habits and preferences of the people who lived there. But the social life of the Isokon, if not quite what its founders had envisaged, was genuinely remarkable: the concentration of creative and intellectual talent in a single building of thirty-six flats was extraordinary by any measure.
The Building's Physical Form
The Isokon Building stands on the eastern side of Lawn Road, a short, quiet residential street that climbs the hill between Haverstock Hill and the Hampstead ridge. Its position — set slightly back from the road, raised above street level, approached by a flight of steps — gives it a commanding presence that its relatively modest size would not otherwise achieve. The building is five storeys high, arranged in a long, slightly curved block whose external walkways on the upper three floors give it a distinctly Mediterranean or Scandinavian character, quite unlike anything else in the surrounding Victorian streets.
The construction employed reinforced concrete throughout — at the time, a material associated with industrial and commercial buildings rather than housing, and its use for a residential purpose was itself a statement of modernist intent. Concrete allowed the structural freedom that the design required: the open walkways, the cantilevered balconies, the continuous floor plates unbroken by load-bearing internal walls. The resulting interior spaces were flexible in a way that conventionally constructed buildings could not be, though the flexibility remained largely theoretical in the actual use of the building.
The original white paint finish of the exterior has been replaced and refreshed over the building's life, and the building as it appears today — restored in 2004 after decades of neglect — is somewhat crisper and more assertive than the original, which would have acquired through use the textures and variations that concrete develops with age. The restoration was controversial among architectural conservationists who questioned whether a building of such importance should be returned to an approximated original state rather than conserved in its evolved condition, but the restored building is broadly faithful to Coates's design intentions.
A Grade I Listed Masterpiece
The Isokon Building was awarded Grade I listed building status by Historic England, the highest level of protection available to historic buildings in England, recognising it as a structure of exceptional interest. This designation reflects a broad consensus among architectural historians that the building represents a pivotal moment in British architectural history — the point at which the International Style made its first mature statement on British soil, in a form that has proved remarkably durable and influential.
The building's influence on subsequent British architecture was less direct than might have been expected from so radical a statement. The Isokon's ideas about communal living, minimum space standards, and the rational organisation of the dwelling never achieved wide acceptance in British housing practice, which remained dominated by conservative tastes for much longer than the Continent or America. But the building's ideas entered the architectural discourse, and its example — the possibility of genuinely modern housing in a British context — was available to subsequent generations of architects and housing reformers who wished to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies.
The Isokon Gallery, established in the building's ground floor, now tells the story of the building and its remarkable community to visitors from around the world. It is a pilgrimage site for architectural historians and modernism enthusiasts, who come to see the building itself, to learn about its remarkable residents, and to understand the particular historical moment that made it possible. The building that Jack and Molly Pritchard built with their own money and their own convictions has outlasted most of the architectural ambitions of its era, and it continues to generate the kind of attention and debate that its creators would have found entirely appropriate.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*