Emanuel Vincent Harris (usually E Vincent Harris or simply Vincent Harris) was born on 26 June 1876 at 3 Lambert Street, Devonport, the son of Major Emanuel Harris and his wife Mary Vincent. He was educated at Kingsbridge Grammar School and articled to James Harvey of Plymouth from 1893 until 1897. He then obtained a place with Edward Keynes Purchase in London, there after moving first to Leonard Aloysius Stokes and then to Sir William Emerson. During these early London years he studies at the Royal Academy Schools and passed the qualifying exam. He was admitted ARIBA on 3 December 1900, his proposers being Emerson, Stokes and Phene Spiers.
In 1901 (or 1902 - sources vary) Harris joined the London County Council’s Architects’ Department, working under William Edward Riley on tramway generating stations, some of which he made notably architectural. He won the Royal Academy’s Gold Medal and travelling Scholarship in 1903, set up independent practice in the following year and began entering competitions, coming second in Torquay Town Hall, sixth for the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, fourth for Crofton Park Library and second again for Dartmouth Town Hall. In 1908 he formed a partnership with Thomas Anderson Moodie, a Scottish colleague in the LCC, who had just returned from South Africa on the completion of the Central South African Railway Offices in Johannesburg, won in competition in 1903. They won the competition for Glamorgan County Hall in Cardiff in the same year, 1908, and to help build it they were briefly in partnership with John Stanley Towse, a former colleague of Harris in Stokes’ office who had commenced independent practice in 1903. Harris and Moodie left the LCC shortly after winning the competition.
A four-year run of bad luck in competitions, broken only by the Fire Station at Cardiff in 1910, brought the partnership with Moodie to an end in 1913. In September of that year the competition for the giant Board of trade Office in Whitehall was announced and Harris resolved to enter it entirely on his own. He was declared the winner in February 1915, but the project was shelved because of the war. His design was not perhaps the best as architecture but it was very efficiently planned introducing the concept of double banked offices with central corridors.
Harris married Ethel Maule, the daughter of a doctor, in 1913. He was admitted FRIBA on 12 January 1914, his proposers being Edwin Cooper, a fellow of the Classical Society, Henry Hare and Ernest Newton, but professional practice was interrupted by the First World War in which he served on the Western Front. The Board of Trade remained on the drawing board but in 1920 he was successful in the Sheffield Memorial Hall competition. It inaugurated an impressive run of competition wins for county and municipal projects, notably Nottingham County Hall at West Bridgford, ( 1925, built 1937-46) Braintree Town Hall and Leeds Civic Hall (both 1926) and the Manchester Library and Town Hall extension (1927) where he narrowly defeated Bradshaw Gass & Hope on cost. All of these were won by the most thorough research into the requirements: he had three visits to the USA by 1929 to see best practice there, and the influence of contemporary American classicism was particularly marked at Sheffield and Manchester Library.
In 1929-30 Harris was one of the assessors for the new Council House at Bristol. The competition unexpectedly proved abortive and was abandoned. The commission was then offered to one of the assessors, the eminent Bristol architect George Churchus Lawrence. He declined. It was then offered to Harris who accepted and was censured by the RIBA for doing so. The commission was nevertheless confirmed in 1933. The incident made no difference to his practice. Other county and municipal competition wins and commissions followed, and in 1930-31 he prepared a master plan for Exeter and South-West England University College where generously paid for the building of the chapel. Most of these 1930s buildings were in a brick-and-stone idiom with Lutyens-inspired elements, quite different from his stone-faced buildings of the 1920s.
Harris joined the Art Workers Guild in 1935.
The commission for the unbuilt Board of Trade offices was re-awarded by an Office of Works selection committee in January 1934 and redesigned to accommodate the Air Ministry in 1936, construction beginning in 1939 and halted a second time by the outbreak of war. In general concept it still followed the 1913-15 scheme and remained stone-faced in deference to the Whitehall setting.
Harris was sixty-nine at the end of the Second World War but he continued in practice to complete the Bristol Council House and build the Whitehall offices, revised yet again in a still larger and much bolder form to meet Treasury requirements. New commissions continued to come in, notably Kensington Library built 1955-60 and still in his pre-war classical brick-and-stone idiom.
Harris was appointed OBE in 1950, an honour which bore scant relationship to the scale and quality of his best work. Somewhat controversially he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 1951: by that date the younger architects saw his work as outdated and the half-built Whitehall offices had clouded his reputation. He was aware of it and his terse acceptance acknowledged it: ‘Look, a lot of you people here tonight don’t like what I do and I don’t like a lot of what you do, but I am proud and honoured to receive the Royal Gold Medal’.
On his retirement from practice to Chard in Somerset, Harris gave his house at 10 Fitzroy Park, Highgate, to the Burgh of Camden. He had designed it himself with the assistance of Donald McMorran. Ethel Harris died in 1965. Harris himself died at Cranhill Nursing Home, Bath, on 1 August 1971, and was buried in the churchyard at Chaffcombe where a monument by Arthur Bailey marks his grave. As he had no children his estate of £573,552 was divided between the Royal Academy and Chard School in accordance with his will.
Harris designed only one work in Scotland, an addition to Tullich Lodge, Ballater. But his influence was marked in the works of John Watson II who was in his office 1927-33 and similarly continued to design in a classical idiom after the Second World War, while his brick and stone municipal architecture seems to have influenced the work of James Miller in the mid-1930s. Watson remembered the office regime as strict and austere but not unkind: no smoking, tea or coffee, not out of any meanness but a distaste for any form of untidiness or any hazard to drawings which might upset workflow. The practice was unusual in that it was almost wholly dependent on competition wins for large projects, although he did design a racquet court for Stephen Courtauld in 1924 and Atkinson’s Scent shop in Old Bond Street, London, in 1927.
Harris himself was small in stature and had absolutely no small talk. In Arthur Bailey’s words his practice: ‘required no social attributes or the patronage usually associated with architectural practices…he had no time for letters, meetings or officialdom…having won a competition, it was there to be built’. He designed everything that mattered himself, again in Bailey’s words: ‘The purely classical proportions were printed indelibly on his mind, and he would take a roll of detail paper, pin it to the top of his board and proceed to detail from cornice to skirting rolling the paper from his feet in the process.’
'Biography authored by the Dictionary of Scottish Architects Compilation Team.'