Lawn Road Flats (The Isokon) – A New Vision of Urban Living

Abstract

So much of modern architecture’s early history depended on a handful of courageous pioneers. One of the first Modern Movement buildings in England was the achievement of an unlikely trio — a plywood salesman and his psychotherapist wife, and a Canadian part-time journalist turned architect. This article and the accompanying text by Magnus Englund tell the extraordinary story of the Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London – their origins and heyday, the linked program of furniture design, their declining postwar fortunes and ruination, and then their recent and remarkable rescue and restoration to become a beacon of modern heritage and the epitome of progressive 21st century urban living.