And while all this was going on, they were quietly designing and building a slew of other buildings: the modernist Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, the Darwin College study centre in Cambridge, the Tower Houses in Aberdeen, the science building for Portsmouth University and the Sainsbury’s supermarket outside Bath.
They had come from nowhere, and they had suddenly entered, through one of the most carnivorously competitive and demanding projects, the heart of the English architectural world.
Dixon and Jones were both born in 1939 to middle-class artistic families, Dixon in Bishop’s Stortford and Jones in St Albans. Both left public school and went straight to the Architectural Association. “My parents met at art college,” says Jones. “My father studied under Henry Moore and then later designed motor cars. My mother was a portrait painter, so my sister and I were very much brought up in an artistic milieu.”
Dixon was brought up near Jordans, the Quaker village, which supported large numbers of artists. “We weren’t Quakers but we certainly were aware of the artistic community there. My mother was an artist and my father was always tinkering away in his workshop making things. At the age of 6 or 7, I was already using lathes and making things with him in the workshop. I’m dyslexic so I found academic work very difficult. I was hopeless at exams, but I arrived at the AA clutching a load of stuff I’d made, and got in on the strength of that. I don’t think that would happen now.”
Dixon met his future wife, Fenella, there, and Jones joined them living in the same house in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. “We hung out at the ICA, there were endless parties…” You can see a hangover of the Swinging Sixties in a photograph of the three of them taken in 1973: the long straggly hair, the pop art shirts and the bra-lessness and long trailing scarf of Fenella.
By then they were part of the so-called Grunt Group (they did lots of drawing and didn’t talk much), and were engaged in local authority housing. It was the classic dichotomy: young, slightly arrogant, middle-class, public-school-educated architects designing homes for poor people about whom they knew virtually nothing. They worked briefly for McManus & Partners and then moved in 1971 as a team to work on a huge housing scheme in Milton Keynes. “We tried to apply modernist and rational principles to this treacherous field of work,” recalls Jones, “but you have to deal with the tastes of residents as well as your own architectural ambitions.”
When the competition came up in 1973 to build a new county hall in Northampton, Dixon and Fenella entered, joined at stage two by Jones and three others. They won with their design for a modernist glass pyramid, but a combination of the oil crisis and political changes meant the pyramid was never built. With the recession, both subsided into teaching and working on a small scale from their respective bedrooms. Jones went to Canada. Dixon designed housing schemes like the St Mark’s Road development in North Kensington – a series of pitch-roofed brick houses built on the traditional street line which represented a break with the modernist orthodoxy of the time. And it was in this context that Dixon submitted his entry for the Royal Opera House with a scheme that worked to repair the urban fabric and paid due respect to the building’s setting.
“If the pyramid had happened, it would I think have been a real marker on the English architectural landscape. It was extremely cutting edge. Maybe not as influential as Crystal Palace, but it would have been a major player.”
If the pyramid had happened, Dixon Jones might have been a very different practice, churning out high-tech glass and steel boxes, earning pots of money from commercial architecture, and the two of them would probably be very rich and famous by now. As it is, they still deliberately run a relatively small practice. Between them, Jones on his second marriage and Dixon separated from Fenella and now living with the former TV newsreader, Julia Somerville, they are responsible for a total of 11 children aged from 17 to 40. They celebrated their sixtieth birthdays jointly in 2000 with a giant cake designed in the shape of an escalator.
“We didn’t consciously avoid the glass and steel commercial route, but it’s not in one’s nature to do that,” says Jones. “I don’t think people sit down and decide to be a commercial or an arts architect. It’s just in your DNA somehow. We like eating well and having as cultivated a life as possible, and not talking to horrible project managers too much. I find that just a waste of my life.”
Dixon and Jones have remained resolutely un-famous, partly because they have no signature house style. Their work is not instantly recognisable because they are not ideological purists. Instead they design in response to the situation and the climate of the times. This has in some ways counted against them, because in a world which likes signature buildings, consistency is a better marketing tool. You can see it in the work of Foster and Rogers, where you can be quite sure what you will get, and this has underpinned their commercial success.
But you get the impression that Dixon and Jones don’t particularly want to be famous or rich. They do this for the love of it, for the intellectual challenge. They still have that obsessional quality that haunts zealous beginners in the industry. They still stay up all night working on new ideas that excite them. “It’s more intimate than a marriage,” says Dixon. “Our ability to put up with each other’s irritations and enjoy each other’s inspirations is infinite. We’re not the same, but our differences are productive in a frictional way as well as a harmonious way.”
“When I worked in Canada,” adds Jones, “I used to come home in tears thinking it was all too much, the huge responsibilities and carrying it on my own. Now we can go away on holiday and not worry. We can share the burdens as well as the ideas.”
It seems a most civilised arrangement, and judging from reports among the young Dixon Jones team, the office is a civilised and gentlemanly place, lacking in the brutality and bullying that pervades the working culture of many big architectural practices. And that is because Dixon and Jones are civilised and gentlemanly people, archetypally English, modest and understated, and still slightly surprised at their success.
