Fifty years after his death, Wells Coates is seen as a seminal figure in the modern movement in architecture in Britain. Born in Japan in December 1895, he studied engineering in Canada and in England and began practising as an architect in London in 1928. His blocks of flats, his shop and office designs, houses, interiors, radios, boats, and other industrial designs are evidence of his commitment to a functional aesthetic and of his refusal to compromise his own high standards.
He was above all an idealist and believed it was necessary to formulate codes of behaviour, what was to be done and how it could be done. This led him to a deep and sustained involvement in group activities of many kinds and to search for architectural principles appropriate to the modern world.
One of Coates’s most satisfying preoccupations was devising new solutions to design problems.
He used his considerable analytical powers to this end. Engineering skill and a thoroughgoing understanding of structure also contributed to his success as a designer, as did his restlessness and his dissatisfaction
with conventional solutions. His life and character moved between the light and the dark. Against the disasters – in personal relationships as well as in his work – there was his driving idealism and ever–reviving optimism.
