Theo Crosby

His post-VE day travels around that country introduced him to a world—of urbanity and cultural generosity[2]—which he had never experienced in South Africa, and which opened his eyes to the power of the public realm.

In 1949 he began work at the modernist architectural practice of Fry, Drew and Partners on Gloucester Place in London, combining this with studying sculpture in the evenings at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

[3] Here he came into contact with teachers Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Edward Wright, with whom he would later work on the exhibition This is Tomorrow, and fellow students Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, with whom he would later form a design partnership.

[5] He also "designed beautiful abstract covers, sometimes including the odd word to describe the theme du jour – "houses", "roofs", "Sheffield" – but rarely featuring photography or even buildings".

Crosby also edited the ICA's Living Arts magazine, and persuaded the institute to mount an exhibition—Living Cities—in 1963, to foreground the urban theories of the young Archigram group.

For a short time Crosby headed up the experimental Design Group attached to the building contractors Taylor Woodrow, and he brought members of Archigram in to work under him.

The Fulham Study was requested by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, and envisaged "an improbably massive redevelopment"[19] of the area, which drew on the Smithsons' earlier projects for Sheffield and Berlin.

[23] The decision to have an architect on the team was soon vindicated when Reuters, having asked Crosby to redesign its boardroom, was then persuaded to work with Fletcher on a new corporate identity and logo.

[24] The team "had an ability to combine the formal restraint of Swiss modernism with the wit of the Madison Avenue advertising industry", which "set them apart from other British design firms"[25] In 1972 the three were joined by Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky, to form Pentagram, which was organised as a horizontal cooperative of equals, in which profits were shared, and staff and overheads pooled.

In this exhibition Crosby rehearsed many of the arguments he would deploy until his death against the strident modernism adopted during the 1960s: the need to value history and, in particular, the monument;[29] the necessity of bringing back craftsmanship to the environment;[30] the requirement to understand what grants a place identity;[31] the importance of sensible regulation; and the need to retrieve the city from mere money interests.

[33] This was an argument expanded two years later in a pair of "Lethaby Lectures" jointly entitled "The Pessimist Utopia", which Crosby delivered to the Royal College of Art, and subsequently published as a Pentagram Paper.

[34] The group helped to draft the Prince's influential speech to the 1987 Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's Annual Dinner[35] which kick-started his campaign for Paternoster Square.

A number of the "10 Principles We Can Build Upon", which formed the core of the argument of A Vision of Britain (The Place, Hierarchy, Scale, Harmony, Enclosure, Materials, Decoration, Art, Signs & Lights, and Community) were indebted to Crosby.

This means among many other things, to encourage art and craft of every kind, to make them part of the public realm; to make out of a necessity a kind of utopia where everything is beautiful ... That means more intelligence at every level"During this period, Crosby tried (with Peter Lloyd-Jones) to generate interest in what he termed a "New Domesday Book":[37] a collaborative effort—beginning as an Inventory of Crosby's own neighbourhood of Spitalfields—to record the existing state of British streets, to serve as data for architects working remotely from their sites; and to provide planning officers with a better sense of the importance of the ensembles present in British towns and cities.

Here he was able to put into effect many of his long-held convictions about building, including something he had recommended in his "Pessimist Utopia" lectures: breaking down a large-scale development into smaller, more visually comprehensible, parts.

In addition to the "wooden O"[38] itself, he provided a smaller theatre based on a design by Inigo Jones, and a highly decorated structure housing a restaurant, all set within a piazza placed above an open-plan booking hall.

Some years before the conversion of Bankside Power Station to become Tate Modern, and the opening of the Millennium Bridge link to St. Paul's Cathedral—when the immediate neighbourhood of the Globe was visibly neglected—Crosby had the imagination to visualise his new complex standing at the centre of a new, vibrant, cultural quarter, which he referred to as "Shakespeare Village".