and so forth
Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, founders of The Dartington Hall Trust, appointed Swiss American architect William Lescaze to design High Cross House for their first headmaster William B Curry.
Satisfied with the finished house they went on to commission Lescaze to design further buildings for the estate and beyond.
One of these was a house for the choreographer Kurt Jooss, his partner Aino Siimola and their daughter Anna.
Built in 1935 as the ‘Jooss House at the Warren’ it later became known as Warren House.
The house was built with an integral dance studio 25 feet long, a self contained nursery, external terraces with the intention of trapping as much sun as possible and a roof top penthouse.
The only comparable architectural precedent is Walter Gropius’s 1925 Haus Schlemmer atelier for the choreographer Oskar Schlemmer at the Dessau Bauhaus.
The Dartington Hall Trust archive preserves all client correspondence, specifications of work and executive drawings.
Initially a music student, Jooss trained in dance from 1920 to 1924 with Rudolf von Laban and then worked as choreographer for the avant-garde Neue Tanzbühne.
Jooss’s most important work, The Green Table won first prize at an international competition for new choreography held by the Archives Internationales de la Danse in Paris in 1932. It was a strong anti-war statement made a year before Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany.
Jooss was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 after refusing to separate from his Jewish colleagues. He avoided being taken into a concentration camp by 18 hours before the local Gestapo arrived at his house.
After touring Europe, America and Scandinavia, Jooss, his collaborator Sigurd Leeder, composer Frederick Cohen, set designer artist Hein Heckroth and entire company were invited to move to Dartington Hall in the summer of 1934.
Through the support and sanctuary provided by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst the Jooss-Leeder School of Dance was established and in September 1935 Ballets Jooss was ‘refounded’ at Dartington as “the home, headquarters and training ground of an international ballet."
William Lescaze was an unusual contributor to this scene, since he was traveling, as it were, in the opposite direction to the current that flowed primarily from East to West and without the impetus of political pressure.
Although his partnership with George Howe lasted until 1935, some of the work that William Lescaze undertook prior to its dissolution lies outside the scope of their collaboration.
Extensive correspondence took place during the construction, including between George Daub, Lescaze’s chief construction supervisor and Estate Architect Robert Hening.
There was much discussion between Hening and Jooss on the design of the house resulting in amendments to not only Lescaze’s plan for the positioning of the house but also the orientation of the rooms.
Although according to the New York architect’s office every effort was being made to ‘wed the house to the site in such a way as to give Mr Jooss everything he had expressed a desire for, and more besides’ it took several revisions of the plans before Jooss was satisfied with the layout.
On the 22nd December 1934, Hening deftly drafted the Trust’s ultimatum to their remote architects and on the 1st January 1935, committed to executive drawings that astutely aligned Jooss’ brief and the site realities with Howe and Lescaze’s design scheme.
In the New Year excavations commenced immediately with Howe and Lescaze providing detailed drawings for staircase, fireplaces, fitted joinery and finishes on the 9th January 1935.
Oak floors were specified for the hall, dining room and first floor landing, linoleum for the kitchen and cork in the two bathrooms.
Deal was used for all other floors with the exception of the dance studio which was specified as Bagac.
The studio was a bare plain room with a piano and a handrail along the north wall and an acoustic ceiling and soundproofed door.
Plywood studio furniture was commissioned from Gerald Summers Makers of Simple Furniture workshop.
The original studio suite included Summers extraordinary and unique Type P chair, folding ply coffee table and black stackable Alvar Aalto 611 chairs purchased from Finmar Ltd.
The Jooss family moved into Warren House with his family on its completion in mid 1935.
Dartington gave Jooss space and time to create new work and in return performances by Ballets Jooss across the USA, Canada and Europe during 1935 to 1939 helped give Dartington an international reputation as a centre for the arts.
The final account from the Staverton Builders Ltd totalled £3,468.
The house was widely published and individually featured in FRS Yorke’s The Modern House House in England in 1937.
At the end of February 1938, Jooss’s mentor Rudolf von Laban arrived in Dartington from Germany as a guest of the Elmhirsts.
Laban who had become godfather to Jooss' daughter Anna in 1931, had a prominent role in German dance before the Nazis seized power.
Laban initially lived as a guest of the Jooss family and used the studio at Warren House for his practical research to document the principles of movement expression with his long term partner and collaborator Lisa Ullmann.
Laban wrote his theoretical opus Choreutics during 1938-39 as he convalesced at Warren House.
His analytical studies addressed the spatial aspects of movement, organisation and order.
In Jooss’ studio, Laban developed his three dimensional polyhedral ‘trace form’ models of the Kinesphere, a representational spatial network which sought to organise bodily movement and structure personal space.
The Kinesphere followed Laban's conception that movement was a “building process” and that “Movement is, so to speak, living architecture”.
The Jooss family did not have many years to enjoy Warren House and like other German Émigrés Jooss was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ in June 1940.
Jooss was eventually set free from Huyton camp in Liverpool following a change in government policy and petitions from John Maynard Keynes.
Ballet Jooss set designer Heckroth was tragically deported on HMT Dunera to the high security Hay Internment Camp in Australia.
Heckroth was finally released and returned to England in 1943 after a vociferous campaign led by art critic Herbert Read.
Following the dissolution of Ballet Jooss, Heckroth's subsequent association with director Michael Powell led to his designs for the Powell and Pressburger film productions ‘Black Narcissus’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.
During the Second World War, Warren House was used by American troops stationed at Dartington Hall in preparation for D Day on 6 June 1944.
Officers were quartered at Warren House where they set up a bar in the Dance Studio and used the clothes cupboards on the first floor as a battery house for hens.
The Americans at Dartington were involved in operations that included erecting ‘Bailey’ bridges on the nearby River Dart and practice landings on the coast at Slapton Sands and Lyme Bay, which in April 1944 went tragically wrong resulting in almost a thousand deaths.
Jooss eventually left England in 1949 to return to Essen, Germany working as a director, choreographer and teacher until his retirement in 1968.
One of Jooss’ students from this period was the choreographer Pina Bausch who entered his Folkwangschule Essen at the age of 14 in 1955.
Bausch subsequently joined Jooss and his new Folkwang Ballett Company in 1962 as a soloist and assisted Jooss on many of his pieces before succeeding him in 1969 as artistic director of the company.
In the late 1940's, Hening sub divided the dance studio into four flats for young people previously associated with Dartington returning from the war, including cinematographer Tom Stobart whose 1953 film ‘Conquest of Everest’ documented the Hillary Tenzing expedition and ascent.
The dormitory hostel bedrooms were separated from the self-contained ground floor staff flat created for Peter Cox the founding principal of the Dartington College of Art in 1951. The Cox family eventually took over the whole house and the majority of the post war partitions and interventions were removed.
Whilst Peter Cox was in residence a range of distinguished people visited the house, including Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Imogen Holst, Igor Stravinsky, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Kurt Jooss himself.
After Peter Cox’s retirement, the house was lived in by other members of Dartington staff until 1993 when it became home to the Dartington Social Research Unit, who became part of the Warren House Group.
From 2007 to 2012, Warren House was home to administrative departments of The Dartington Hall Trust.
When the administrative occupation of the property by the Dartington Hall Trust eventually ended, extensive external repairs, internal refurbishment and full restoration of Kurt Jooss’s dance studio were undertaken.
The works restored the east terrace to the 1935 configuration, Hening's demolished first floor curved wall and Lescaze’s original ‘fenêtre en longueur’ studio window.
The north façade composition was reconstructed to Howe and Lescaze's period details and the house for a choreographer returned to its original purpose and use.
Sources
William Lescaze, Architect - Lorraine Welling Lanmon, Art Alliance Press, Philadelphia 1987
William Lescaze - Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Catalogue 16, Rizzoli International 1982
Howe and Lescaze Archive E.S. Bird Library Collection, 222 Waverly Avenue, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
Robert Hening, Architect - Obituary: Alan Powers, The Independent 26th August 1997
FRS Yorke, The Modern House in England, The Architectural Press 1937
Country Life Magazine - 4th June 1938
Going Modern and Being British: Art, Architecture and Design in Devon Edited by Sam Smiles, Intellect Books 1998
Devon Architectural Guide: Buildings of England, Nikolaus Pevsner, Bridget Cherry, Yale University Press 1989
The Simple Heart of Plywood - Abel Sloane Ruby Woodhouse 1934 2018
Dartington Hall Trust Archive Devon Records Office Exeter
Dartington Hall Properties Ltd
Yvonne Widger
MOMA
BFI
Photography
The Architect and Building News 1935
Dartington Hall Trust Archive: T/PP/JB/1/C/009
George Bennett Photographic Series 1935
Dartington Hall Trust Archive: TPH/02/B/1289
Gert J van Leeuwen
Antoine Vereecken
We Not I
and so forth
Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, founders of The Dartington Hall Trust, appointed Swiss American architect William Lescaze to design High Cross House for their first headmaster William B Curry.
Satisfied with the finished house they went on to commission Lescaze to design further buildings for the estate and beyond.
One of these was a house for the choreographer Kurt Jooss, his partner Aino Siimola and their daughter Anna.
Built in 1935 as the ‘Jooss House at the Warren’ it later became known as Warren House.
The house was built with an integral dance studio 25 feet long, a self contained nursery, external terraces with the intention of trapping as much sun as possible and a roof top penthouse.
The only comparable architectural precedent is Walter Gropius’s 1925 Haus Schlemmer atelier for the choreographer Oskar Schlemmer at the Dessau Bauhaus.
The Dartington Hall Trust archive preserves all client correspondence, specifications of work and executive drawings.
Initially a music student, Jooss trained in dance from 1920 to 1924 with Rudolf von Laban and then worked as choreographer for the avant-garde Neue Tanzbühne.
Jooss’s most important work, The Green Table won first prize at an international competition for new choreography held by the Archives Internationales de la Danse in Paris in 1932. It was a strong anti-war statement made a year before Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany.
Jooss was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 after refusing to separate from his Jewish colleagues. He avoided being taken into a concentration camp by 18 hours before the local Gestapo arrived at his house.
After touring Europe, America and Scandinavia, Jooss, his collaborator Sigurd Leeder, composer Frederick Cohen, set designer artist Hein Heckroth and entire company were invited to move to Dartington Hall in the summer of 1934.
Through the support and sanctuary provided by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst the Jooss-Leeder School of Dance was established and in September 1935 Ballets Jooss was ‘refounded’ at Dartington as “the home, headquarters and training ground of an international ballet."
William Lescaze was an unusual contributor to this scene, since he was traveling, as it were, in the opposite direction to the current that flowed primarily from East to West and without the impetus of political pressure.
Although his partnership with George Howe lasted until 1935, some of the work that William Lescaze undertook prior to its dissolution lies outside the scope of their collaboration.
Extensive correspondence took place during the construction, including between George Daub, Lescaze’s chief construction supervisor and Estate Architect Robert Hening.
There was much discussion between Hening and Jooss on the design of the house resulting in amendments to not only Lescaze’s plan for the positioning of the house but also the orientation of the rooms.
Although according to the New York architect’s office every effort was being made to ‘wed the house to the site in such a way as to give Mr Jooss everything he had expressed a desire for, and more besides’ it took several revisions of the plans before Jooss was satisfied with the layout.
On the 22nd December 1934, Hening deftly drafted the Trust’s ultimatum to their remote architects and on the 1st January 1935, committed to executive drawings that astutely aligned Jooss’ brief and the site realities with Howe and Lescaze’s design scheme.
In the New Year excavations commenced immediately with Howe and Lescaze providing detailed drawings for staircase, fireplaces, fitted joinery and finishes on the 9th January 1935.
Oak floors were specified for the hall, dining room and first floor landing, linoleum for the kitchen and cork in the two bathrooms.
Deal was used for all other floors with the exception of the dance studio which was specified as Bagac.
The studio was a bare plain room with a piano and a handrail along the north wall and an acoustic ceiling and soundproofed door.
Plywood studio furniture was commissioned from Gerald Summers Makers of Simple Furniture workshop.
The original studio suite included Summers extraordinary and unique Type P chair, folding ply coffee table and black stackable Alvar Aalto 611 chairs purchased from Finmar Ltd.
The Jooss family moved into Warren House with his family on its completion in mid 1935.
Dartington gave Jooss space and time to create new work and in return performances by Ballets Jooss across the USA, Canada and Europe during 1935 to 1939 helped give Dartington an international reputation as a centre for the arts.
The final account from the Staverton Builders Ltd totalled £3,468.
The house was widely published and individually featured in FRS Yorke’s The Modern House House in England in 1937.
At the end of February 1938, Jooss’s mentor Rudolf von Laban arrived in Dartington from Germany as a guest of the Elmhirsts.
Laban who had become godfather to Jooss' daughter Anna in 1931, had a prominent role in German dance before the Nazis seized power.
Laban initially lived as a guest of the Jooss family and used the studio at Warren House for his practical research to document the principles of movement expression with his long term partner and collaborator Lisa Ullmann.
Laban wrote his theoretical opus Choreutics during 1938-39 as he convalesced at Warren House.
His analytical studies addressed the spatial aspects of movement, organisation and order.
In Jooss’ studio, Laban developed his three dimensional polyhedral ‘trace form’ models of the Kinesphere, a representational spatial network which sought to organise bodily movement and structure personal space.
The Kinesphere followed Laban's conception that movement was a “building process” and that “Movement is, so to speak, living architecture”.
The Jooss family did not have many years to enjoy Warren House and like other German Émigrés Jooss was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ in June 1940.
Jooss was eventually set free from Huyton camp in Liverpool following a change in government policy and petitions from John Maynard Keynes.
Ballet Jooss set designer Heckroth was tragically deported on HMT Dunera to the high security Hay Internment Camp in Australia.
Heckroth was finally released and returned to England in 1943 after a vociferous campaign led by art critic Herbert Read.
Following the dissolution of Ballet Jooss, Heckroth's subsequent association with director Michael Powell led to his designs for the Powell and Pressburger film productions ‘Black Narcissus’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.
During the Second World War, Warren House was used by American troops stationed at Dartington Hall in preparation for D Day on 6 June 1944.
Officers were quartered at Warren House where they set up a bar in the Dance Studio and used the clothes cupboards on the first floor as a battery house for hens.
The Americans at Dartington were involved in operations that included erecting ‘Bailey’ bridges on the nearby River Dart and practice landings on the coast at Slapton Sands and Lyme Bay, which in April 1944 went tragically wrong resulting in almost a thousand deaths.
Jooss eventually left England in 1949 to return to Essen, Germany working as a director, choreographer and teacher until his retirement in 1968.
One of Jooss’ students from this period was the choreographer Pina Bausch who entered his Folkwangschule Essen at the age of 14 in 1955.
Bausch subsequently joined Jooss and his new Folkwang Ballett Company in 1962 as a soloist and assisted Jooss on many of his pieces before succeeding him in 1969 as artistic director of the company.
In the late 1940's, Hening sub divided the dance studio into four flats for young people previously associated with Dartington returning from the war, including cinematographer Tom Stobart whose 1953 film ‘Conquest of Everest’ documented the Hillary Tenzing expedition and ascent.
The dormitory hostel bedrooms were separated from the self-contained ground floor staff flat created for Peter Cox the founding principal of the Dartington College of Art in 1951. The Cox family eventually took over the whole house and the majority of the post war partitions and interventions were removed.
Whilst Peter Cox was in residence a range of distinguished people visited the house, including Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Imogen Holst, Igor Stravinsky, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Kurt Jooss himself.
After Peter Cox’s retirement, the house was lived in by other members of Dartington staff until 1993 when it became home to the Dartington Social Research Unit, who became part of the Warren House Group.
From 2007 to 2012, Warren House was home to administrative departments of The Dartington Hall Trust.
When the administrative occupation of the property by the Dartington Hall Trust eventually ended, extensive external repairs, internal refurbishment and full restoration of Kurt Jooss’s dance studio were undertaken.
The works restored the east terrace to the 1935 configuration, Hening's demolished first floor curved wall and Lescaze’s original ‘fenêtre en longueur’ studio window.
The north façade composition was reconstructed to Howe and Lescaze's period details and the house for a choreographer returned to its original purpose and use.
Sources
William Lescaze, Architect - Lorraine Welling Lanmon, Art Alliance Press, Philadelphia 1987
William Lescaze - Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Catalogue 16, Rizzoli International 1982
Howe and Lescaze Archive E.S. Bird Library Collection, 222 Waverly Avenue, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
Robert Hening, Architect - Obituary: Alan Powers, The Independent 26th August 1997
FRS Yorke, The Modern House in England, The Architectural Press 1937
Country Life Magazine - 4th June 1938
Going Modern and Being British: Art, Architecture and Design in Devon Edited by Sam Smiles, Intellect Books 1998
Devon Architectural Guide: Buildings of England, Nikolaus Pevsner, Bridget Cherry, Yale University Press 1989
The Simple Heart of Plywood - Abel Sloane Ruby Woodhouse 1934 2018
Dartington Hall Trust Archive Devon Records Office Exeter
Dartington Hall Properties Ltd
Yvonne Widger
MOMA
BFI
Photography
The Architect and Building News 1935
Dartington Hall Trust Archive: T/PP/JB/1/C/009
George Bennett Photographic Series 1935
Dartington Hall Trust Archive: TPH/02/B/1289
Gert J van Leeuwen
Antoine Vereecken
We Not I