Charlie: If you had big ambitions in architecture in the early 1960s, Yale University’s department of architecture was a good place to be. The faculty was chaired at the time by Paul Rudolph, a leading American modernist who had been taught by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius at Harvard. On the Yale campus were buildings by Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, the latter having joined the faculty in 1947 – a time in which his colleagues would’ve included Josef Albers and Philip Johnson, still making appearances at Yale in the 1960s. A new library by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was about to start construction. Serge Chermayeff and Vincent Scully were professors. The best architects in the world were teaching in buildings that represented the most experimental architecture of the time. In 1962, a group of Brits were just about to graduate. Their names were Norman Foster and Su and Richard Rogers.

They had arrived in 1961 from an austere postwar Britain that hadn’t embraced modernism in the way the United States, fuelled by economic prosperity, was doing with unfretted fervour. Richard had arrived in the US by sea, on the Queen Elizabeth. “It had towered over Southampton,” he later recalled. “In New York, it was dwarfed by the buildings.” America was big, bold and modern – a glamorous, energised contrast to war-scarred Europe.
The trio were in their element, inspired and invigorated by the US architectural scene.

Penniless but eager, they relentlessly toured works by Frank Lloyd Wright, blagging or sneaking their way into buildings such as Fallingwater. They went to see Kahn talk in Philadelphia, forged close relationships with Chermayeff and Johnson, and drank martinis with James Stirling at Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York. It was the experience of being immersed in architecture, as much as their education, that was formative for the ambitious trio.

Upon their return to the UK in 1963, Norman, Su and Richard joined up with Wendy Cheesman – soon to become Wendy Foster – to form Team 4, a name picked for its implications of collaboration and collectivism. Their first pitch for work was to Su’s father, Marcus Brumwell, an ad man who wanted a retirement home on a piece of land he owned on a creek in Feock, Cornwall, for him and his wife, Rene. Original plans for a house by Ernst Freud, son of Sigmund, had been sent to Richard while he was at Yale – he called them “appalling” and thought the couple should have a home worthy of displaying the art they had spent years collecting from then early-career artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Needless to say, Team 4 came to the rescue.

The resulting house, Creek Vean, is comprised of two flat-roofed volumes. One is a two-storey structure containing a living room suspended over an open-plan kitchen, both with arresting views to the south of the Fal Estuary via expanses of frameless glass.The other is a more stealthy single-storey block with bedrooms overlooking the creek and a valley-facing guest suite, all accessed off a long, top-lit, gallery-like hallway for displaying the Brumwell’s art. Entrance to the house from the road is a via a bridge that leads to the front door, then beyond to a series of steep steps that descends the sloping site to garden level, and which divides the two wings of the house.

“It was Norman and Richard’s first building and it had to be a good one,” Su has said. “They knew that it had to be right.” Standing in Creek Vean today, 55 years after it was completed, there is a sense of it being a sort of ground zero for the careers of architects who have made some of the most recognisable additions to city skylines around the world over the past six decades. Encased in the design are fragments from their time in the US, and the work of old guard modernists. There’s the influence of Wright, specifically the way the design makes use of the site’s position on a steep slope above water. Look at the stairs at Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall and you’ll be in no doubt where the idea for the ones at Creek Vean came from. Rudolph, their tutor at Yale, would have approved of the way they chose to sink the building into the site.

As with later high-tech projects, the conventional model for what a building should look like was abandoned and cutting-edge technology was embraced – it was the first residential project in the country to use fibreglass. But while it looks nothing like a house found anywhere else, never mind in architecturally conservative Cornwall, Pillwood sits easy within the forest, due in part to the painted green of the steel frame, but also because there is a lightness and transparency to its design. Like a greenhouse, it gives the impression of opening itself up to the light, rather than closing off. Su’s son, Ab Rogers, described the house as “naked” when he chose it as one of his top three favourite living spaces on The Modern House podcast, adding, “Its magic is about how few elements it consists of.”

Visiting Creek Vean first, as I did, where current owners Dick and Gill Dickinson were at home – wonderful custodians who have worked tirelessly to restore the house – and Pillwood afterwards, where Ab and his family were in residence on their annual summer holiday, there is a feeling of the two houses being successive chapters of the same book; as though the creek’s gentle valley were an open spread about the life and work of Team 4. Where Creek Vean tells a triumphant story of the ambitions of four young architects, who, fuelled by the energising spirit of mid-century American modernism, designed one of the best houses of its generation, Pillwood, despite being the work of only one Team 4 member, tells of how their greater ambitions would be realised – how they used the lessons of 20th- century architecture they learned in America and applied them with new materials and building technology, ultimately leaving their mark on the annals of architectural history. All that, in a sleepy, bucolic Cornish creek.