Charlotte Benton, who has died of a heart attack aged 79, was one of a handful of pioneers who helped shape design history as a discrete discipline in the 1970s and 80s, initially in collaboration with her husband, Tim.
From 1972 the Bentons worked together on the first art history course for the recently founded Open University. The module A305 History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939 was launched in 1975 and ran until 1982, and was described by the journal Design Issues as “the single most important work of design history to have emerged in Britain”.
The emphasis was on primary sources, aided by 24 freely available late-night BBC Two programmes filmed all over Europe and complemented by 32 radio programmes, slide strips and course booklets, many written by Charlotte and Tim, as well as two collections of historical texts, many translated for the first time, and both published in 1975. Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939 was edited by Tim and Charlotte with the architect Dennis Sharp; and Documents: A Collection of Source Material on the Modern Movement was edited by Charlotte alone.
Anyone could watch the TV programmes or tune in to the radio broadcasts, and the influence of A305 was international, with the course featured as a display of images and documents at the 1976 Venice Biennale. The subsequent founding of the Design History Society in 1977 and of the Twentieth Century Society in 1979 (initially the Thirties Society) was no coincidence.
A305, whether consumed by an OU student or unofficially, provided tools to look critically and intelligently at modern architecture and design. Tim fronted many of the broadcasts. Charlotte was less publicly visible, although she contributed radio programmes on futurist and Soviet architecture, on the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne and on 1920s French design. In terms of employment, however, her husband was an Open University lecturer, later professor, while she was a research assistant whose contract was not renewed after 1976.
Although she had taught in colleges of art in the 1960s and 70s, her shyness and perfectionism made teaching a fraught experience, and after completing her work on A305 she largely devoted herself to research, writing and editing. The Bentons’ admired team work continued to be productive, and she and Tim accrued an extensive and impressive home library, firstly in Stockwell, London, and subsequently in Cambridge, readily available to researchers. For Thirties: British Art and Design Before the War, held in 1979 at the Hayward Gallery, Charlotte and Tim offered an inclusive view of the architecture of the period. In 1987 she contributed an essay on Le Corbusier’s furniture and advised on the Le Corbusier exhibition at the Hayward. Gradually, however, Charlotte collaborated less with Tim, although they worked together on the popular 2003 V&A exhibition Art Deco.
Charlotte was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Her mother, Margaret (nee Wade), was a doctor and her father, Michael Jefferson, a neurologist who from 1949 was a consultant at Queen Elizabeth hospital, Birmingham, and senior clinical lecturer and tutor in neurology at the University of Birmingham.
Charlotte boarded at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and took an undergraduate degree at the Courtauld Institute in London where she was taught by Alan Bowness and John Golding. She and Tim met while she was an undergraduate at the Courtauld, and they married in 1968. To her parents’ mild regret, Charlotte, along with her two brothers, broke a family tradition of medical service initiated by her grandfather who had been a surgeon at the Anglo-Russian hospital in St Petersburg. Arguably, however, she brought a scientific acuity to her research and publications.
She produced less for a short period after the birth of her son, Daniel, in 1980, but her contribution overall continued to be immense, often done pro bono. She was on the original editorial board of the Journal of Design History, was a distinguished contributor and served as production editor from the journal’s inception in 1988, retiring in 1998. In this role she set up the journal’s template and its editorial process and persuaded Oxford University Press to act as publisher. She was largely responsible for the high standard of its articles, making it an internationally admired publication.
Among a wealth of writing, in 1995 her book and exhibition held at the RIBA Heinz Gallery, A Different World: Émigré Architects in Britain 1928-1958, became an indispensable work of documentation, going beyond Walter Gropius and Ernő Goldfinger to examine less well-known émigré figures such as Erwin Anton Gutkind, Gunther Hoffstead and Arthur Korn.
Having pioneered research into Charlotte Perriand, Charlotte conducted a series of interviews with the designer, then in her 90s, for a Design Museum exhibition held in 1996. She subsequently wrote a remarkable article on Perriand’s recreation in bamboo of the famous Le Corbusier/Perriand/ Jeanneret chaise longue while the designer was in Japan. From 1999 until 2004 Charlotte worked productively with the art historian Penelope Curtis on the groundbreaking conference Figuration/Abstraction: Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe, 1945-1968 at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which looked at public sculpture in eastern Europe during the cold war. Benton edited the 2004 book of the same name.
Learned, charming and humorous, she was a formidable and generous scholar, naturally cross-disciplinary, who laid the foundations for an inclusive design history. In 2015 she helped organise the conference 40 Years On: The Domain of Design History, at the OU in Milton Keynes, which examined the legacy of A305. Characteristically, she chose not to be a speaker.
Charlotte and Tim divorced in 2003. She is survived by Dan, and by her two brothers, Andrew and Simon.
• Charlotte Anna Benton, design historian, born 17 July 1944; died 22 January 2024
