The Legacy of Wells Coates

The filmmaker explore the famous modernist buildings The Isokon and Embassy Court by Wells Coates, portraying its architecture as well as the inhabitants.

Wells Coates (1895 – 1958) was a designer and architect who had never received a formal training in Architecture, his background as an engineer and designer gave him enough basis to state: ‘I am a trained engineer, and I believe that house-building is today the business of the engineer plus the painter’.

Wells was heavily influenced by his Japanese up-bringing, Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus school and the Swiss-French architect, designer and urban planner Le Corbusier. Coates took it upon himself to create dwellings that would allow his clients to shake off the values and traditions which still lingered in post war British society. He envisioned minimal living spaces for modern individuals, a place that would provide the setting for the taking place of the ‘theatre of ordinary life’.