Artist 29: Berthold Lubetkin

Berthold Lubetkin was a Russian architect born in 1901.  He is attributed with pioneering modernist design in Britain in the 1930s.  While studying in Moscow and Leningrad, Lubetkin witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917.  During this time he was taking in the elements of Constructivism.  In the 1920s he practiced in Paris, where he helped to design an apartment building located in the Avenue de Versailles.  While in Paris he designed a trade pavilion in the USSR.  Then in 1931 he moved to London and set up an architectural practice called Tecton.  The company’s first projects included buildings for the London Zoo.  They later designed the Dudley Zoo, which consisted of twelve animal enclosures and showed a great example of modernism in the United Kingdom.  Tecton also designed private homes, including one of the few modernist terraces in the U.K.  Due to the onset of war in 1939 Lubetkin’s practice was stopped from reworking the Finsbury slums to modern flats.  Even though the war stopped one of their largest projects, war made Lubetkin’s work mainstream.  Modernist architecture was what England showed to their people as the goal when peacetime came.  Many of his later designs put to use precast concrete panels and complicated abstract facades.  He later moved to Bristol with his wife, until his death in 1990.