From Atoms to Patterns: Crystal Structure Designs from the 1951 Festival of Britain

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In the 1950s, the booming science of X-ray crystallography inspired designers as well as scientists to ponder the structures of nature. The exhibition From Atoms to Patterns: Crystal Structure Designs from the 1951 Festival of Britain at the Wellcome Collection in London explores how these two groups collaborated to bring molecular patterns into our homes.

Credit: V&A IMAGES/VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

Crystallographer Helen Megaw saw artistic possibilities for using the patterns generated by X-ray crystallography in wallpapers and fabrics. As a wedding gift for biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin in 1937, she embroidered a design based on the structure of aluminium hydroxide onto a cushion. Megaw thought that “the combination of really attractive pattern with the assurance of scientific accuracy would win a lot of attention”.

While planning for the Festival of Britain — a morale-raising national exhibition in London after the Second World War — in the summer of 1951, Mark Hartland Thomas at the Council of Industrial Design welcomed Megaw's idea. He persuaded 28 British manufacturers, including Dunlop, Wedgwood and the chemical company ICI to join the Festival Pattern Group (FPG) that produced 80 new designs for textiles, wallpapers, ceramics, glass, metal and plastic.

As the FPG's adviser on crystal structure diagrams, Megaw played a pivotal role. She persuaded eminent crystallographers to participate, including Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz and John Kendrew as well as Hodgkin. The diagrams on which the designs were based were selected by Megaw, who also advised manufacturers on their interpretation. Atomic structures of minerals (such as afwillite and apophyllite), biological molecules (insulin, haemoglobin) and synthetic polymers were incorporated.

At the Festival of Britain, the science of X-ray crystallography featured in displays at the Dome of Discovery on London's South Bank and the Exhibition of Science at the Science Museum. The museum used FPG furnishings — its cinema foyer walls were covered with insulin wallpaper (pictured) and the benches were upholstered in myoglobin leathercloth.

More FPG furnishings decorated the Regatta Restaurant on the South Bank. Diners walked on carpets patterned with resorcinol, gazed at afwillite curtains and haemoglobin laminates, and were served by waitresses whose uniforms had hydrargillite-patterned lace collars. They stubbed out their cigarettes in pentaerythritol glass ashtrays, and used lavatories fitted with apophyllite glass screens.

Writing of the FPG's success, Hartland Thomas observed that the fresh and original designs “were essentially modern because the technique that constructed them was quite recent, and yet, like all successful decoration of the past, they derived from nature — although it was nature at a sub-microscopic scale not previously revealed.”