ERNÖ GOLDFINGER: Architect (1902-1987), Designing Modern Britain - Design Museum, Until 26 November 2006
An influential figure in the British modern movement, ERNÖ GOLDFINGER (1902-1987) was born in Budapest and studied architecture in Paris. After moving to London in 1934, he won praise for austere, yet sensitive projects, notably his Hampstead home, and drew controversy for ambitious schemes at Elephant and Castle and Poplar.

When the tenants moved into Balfron Tower, the first of three blocks of council flats on Rowlett Street in Poplar, one of the neediest areas of east London, in 1965, they discovered that Flat 130 on the 26th floor was occupied by the architect of the building, Ernö Goldfinger, and his artist wife Ursula. The Goldfingers had decamped from their home in leafy Hampstead to spend two months there finding out what the flats were like to live in.

Balfron’s tenants were summoned to Flat 130 for a glass or two of Champagne, a great extravagance in the east London of the 1960s. As the Champagne flowed, the Goldfingers discovered exactly what their neighbours did – and did not – like about their new homes. Tokenistic though a two month stay in a tower block may seem, when Goldfinger started work two years later on the design of a larger block of council flats, Trellick Tower in west London, he incorporated many of the observations made by the Balfron tenants to the new project.

Goldfinger’s tower blocks have since confounded his critics by proving to be robustly built and imaginatively planned. The Champagne parties at which he listened to – and learnt from – the complaints of the residents of Balfron Tower illustrate the underlying humanism in his architecture. Today the flats in Trellick, many of which passed into private ownership during the 1990s, are greatly sought after. Yet ambitious though he was for these monumental public schemes, even Goldfinger’s admirers concur that his best buildings were his smaller, beautifully proportioned and impeccably detailed projects at Albermarle Street and Willow Road where, the modern houses which once outraged Hampstead’s conservationists now belong to the National Trust.