Bauhaus and Bauhaus people were through British, rather than the more dominant American circumstances. Around the middle of the 1930s, several Bauhaus people moved to London, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy. They landed at the "Isokon Building" (Lawn Road Flats), one of the first International Style apartment buildings in Great Britain, designed by the Canadian architect Wells Coates. Another Canadian, Hazen Edward Sise, was active in this circle as well. Wells Coates (1895-1958) was an architect and designer born of Canadian Methodist missionary parents in Tokyo, while Hazen Edward Size (1906-1974) was born to an English-Canadian family in Montreal. Coates studied engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and after a stint in Paris working with Le Corbusier, in London, England. He set up a design practice with the entrepreneur Jack Pritchard in London in 1930, where he engaged in both product design and architecture. In 1931 this firm was renamed “Isokon Ltd.” (Isometric Unit Construction). In March 1932 Pritchard, Coates and the architect Serge Chermayeff went to the Dessau Bauhaus (Sise was the only Canadian to have done so prior to its closure in 1933), but the School had already moved with Mies to Berlin. Still the empty building made a deep impression on them. Coates was co-founder with Chermayeff amd others in 1933 of the Modern Architecture Research Group (MARS), the British section of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

Sise started architectural studies at McGill, completing them at MIT in 1929. After post-graduate work in London, he worked briefly for Le Corbusier in Paris before returning to Montreal in 1931 to help found the Atelier School, a centre of modern art. He was the Canadian delegate to the Fourth CIAM, held on board the SS Patris, a boat that sailed during the summer of 1933 from Marseilles to Athens, and which produced the famous Athens Charter of modern architecture and planning. Sise took a series of portrait photographs of Moholy-Nagy while the Hungarian was working on his documentary film Architects’ Congress, Athens, commissioned by for the CIAM by its Secretary General Sigfried Giedion. Sise and Coates—also on the voyage as a MARS delegate from Britain—would have been the first Canadians that Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Breuer and Giedion ever met, and they all became friends. After the boat trip Sise returned to London and joined Coates’ MARS group

Coates is perhaps best known for his design of the Isokon Building (aka the “Lawn Road Flats,” 1933-34), which for a time in the mid 1930s served as a home for Bauhaus refugees such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Edith Tudor-Hart along with Agatha Christie and, according to intelligence historian Andrew Burke, some seven British spies for the Soviets. Like Gropius before him, it was Jack Pritchard who invited Moholy-Nagy to London with an offer of work. Moholy-Nagy arrived in May 1935 and stayed at Lawn Road Flats before finding larger accommodations soon after Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and their daughter Hattula arrived three months later. This building, the first domestic structure in Britain to use reinforced concrete construction, was financed by Pritchard, for whose Isokon wood contracting firm Marcel Breuer designed a line of furniture and Moholy-Nagy designed the logo and brochures. It was considered to be the most radically Modernist structure in Britain at the time, and continues to be seen as an icon of British Modernism. It became the epicentre of what is now sometimes referred to as the “British Bauhaus,” which term encompasses the design work and publishing carried out by Gropius, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, and their associates from 1934 to 1937. The textile artists Otti Berger, Margarete Heymann, and Margaret Leischner, as well as photographer Lucia Moholy, carried this activity on after the departure of the men in 1937. While the publication in English translation of Moholy-Nagy’s book The New Vision in 1932 and Herbert Read’s 1934 book Art and Industry set the stage for the arrival of the Bauhausler in London, it was Gropius’ 1935 book The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (with a cover design by Moholy-Nagy) that, according to Alan Powers, was the “first account of the Bauhaus to be published in English.”

As part of these “British Bauhaus” activities, in 1935-36 Sise collaborated with Moholy-Nagy and Cyril Jenkins on the film The New Architecture and the London Zoo, commissioned by architecture curator Ernestine Fantl for the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the exhibition Modern Architecture in England (1937) and featuring the Tecton architects’ designs for the London Zoo. The Swiss University of Toronto graduate Fred Lasserre worked with Tecton after the London Zoo project was complete. He later established the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia. At this time, John Bland was studying at the Architectural Association in London, which by 1935 was a strongly Gropius-influenced centre of Bauhaus-based collaborative, research-based pedagogy. Bland would go on to be appointed Director of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal in 1941.

In 1938 Sise, Lasserre, Coates and the Victoria BC-born Christopher Tunnard all worked on the MARS exhibition “New Architecture” at the Burlington Galleries in London – a remarkable Canadian contribution to a key event of British Modernism. That same year Coates lectured at the Architectural Association on “The Conditions for an Architecture Today.”

At home Sise helped establish the CIAM-affiliated Architectural Research Group in Montreal and Ottawa (1939-49), he worked for the National Film Board with, among others, James Donahue, and befriended Norman Bethune’s close associate and fellow Leftist Fritz Brandtner, who had moved to Montreal from Winnipeg in 1934. After the War Bland hired Sise to teach the history of architecture at McGill and they co-founded the architectural cooperative ARCOP in 1955. Sise was principal designer of the Beaver Lake Pavilion on Mount Royal in Montreal (1955-58), one of the first International Style structures in the city. He also designed the Post Office Building for the Town of Mount Royal, for which he commissioned the Moholy-Nagy student Gordon Webber to design a mural, and for which he was awarded a Massey Medal, Canada's highest award for architecture. His final major work was the “Man the Producer” and “Man the Explorer” theme pavilions at Expo 67 in Montreal.

Coates began engaging in urban planning work in Ontario and British Columbia in the early 1950s (including master plans for Kitimat, BC, for Toronto Island and for Iroquois New Town, the latter two with John C. Parkin), and left Britain in 1955 for a job teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design before returning to Vancouver, where published several articles on international Modernism in the RAIC journal and worked on a number of ambitious planning and public transportation projects, including the Monospan Twin-Ride System (MTRS), none of which were realized before his untimely death in 1958. It should be said, however, that Vancouver’s Skytrain system was in effect the realization of the MTRS, and can thus be considered to be Coates’ most enduring legacy in Canada.
 
On the wall within the display cabinet: The Lawn Road Flats (Isokon Building), Hampstead, London, 1938. Wells Coates, architect, 1936. Digital exhibition print (Canadian Centre for Architecture); advertisement for Lawn Road Flats, 1938. Designer: Edith Tudor-Hart. Digital exhibition print (Pritchard Archives, University of East Anglia); Sydney W. Newbery, View of the Isokon Flats from Lawn Road, London, Wells Coates architect, 1934. Digital exhibition print (Pritchard Archives, University of East Anglia); László Moholy-Nagy, design for the brochure for the Isokon Long Chair, designed by Marcel Breuer for Walter Pritchard’s Isokon Company. Both the brochure and chair were designed in 1937. Digital exhibition print (Pritchard Archives, University of East Anglia); László Moholy-Nagy, logo design for the Isokon Company, 1936. Digital exhibition print (Pritchard Archives, University of East Anglia). On the display case surface: The Architectural Review (July 1936). Special issue: “Leisure At the Seaside,” open to showing English seaside architecture, including Wells Coates, Embassy Court, Brighton, 1934-35 (nos. 6, 7). László Moholy-Nagy Designer and Photographer; two postcards: Edith Tudor-Hart, Isokon-Lawn Road Flats, Opening Day, 9 July 1934 and Philip Harben, Isokon Long Chair, n.d., produced by the Isokon Gallery, London, 2018; Francis Bruguiere, designer (?). Herbert Read: Art and Industry. London: Faber & Faber, 1934; László Moholy-Nagy, designer. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Translated by Morton Shand. London: Faber & Faber, 1935; László Moholy-Nagy, designer. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Translated by Morton Shand. Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., 1935; Ceramic Memorial Plaque for the Isokon Building (Lawn Road Flats), London. Designed and manufactured for English Heritage, 2018; László Moholy-Nagy, design, cover of “Bill of Fare” (menu) for Walter Gropius’ farewell dinner, London, 9 March 1937, organized by Jack Pritchard at the Trocadero Restaurant, London (Salgo Trust). (Unless otherwise indicated, items are from a private collection)