Former school of Architecture

Keynote address at conference on High Rise Housing, other speakers were Erno Goldfinger (architect), the editor of Building Design (London), various tenants' leaders and a Local Authority housing committee chair. 
It was covered in the press but never published.

Early in 2010, the Journal of Design History commissioned a review of three new books, but when they saw the unruly copy submitted in July 2010, they took the unusual step of sending a review our for peer review itself.  The conclusion was that this text was utterly unsuitable for publication in the Journal of Design History. No comments or suggestions were made.  Here is that review.

This essay interrogates domesticity in a rare example of a dwelling designed by Giancarlo De Carlo. What makes a Modernist home? Le Corbusier was horrified at how the dwellings of his idealised alpha males contradicted their active lives, being stuffed (as he saw it) with sham and bric-a-brac. So how does De Carlo represent domesticity for his academic philosopher client? Is Schindler's paradigm 'Shelter or playground' a useful caption for this De Carlo house outside Urbino? If philosophy is seen as mental gymnastics (the trope of Stoppard's play 'Jumpers'), is this realised in the literal gymnastic 'climbing frame' of Casa Sichirollo? De Carlo scorns an interior design which 'completes' or forms a role for the client. Here, designing with a humanist, phenomenological focus more on events than objects, his client becomes active subject rather than the passive object of his dwelling. Philosophical ideas from the sessantotto times which produced...

for our 21st-century population with the equally vast and audacious, if less democratic, abbeys or palace complexes of old. Back in the 1970s we had all (except for Reyner Banham) lost our nerve over megastructures. And this seemed to imply an equivalent lost nerve in system building generally. Earlier ideas of great crumbly megastructures had grown from Team X pseudo-organic notions of cluster: from the Smithsons' urban restructuring and Aldo van Eyck's experiments with clustered forms, from Giancarlo De Carlo's (unbuilt) carpets of clustered dwellings, 1 and Jørn Utzon's (built), each with identical units intricately spilled over a landscape. One architect designing a new English university in the early 1960s told me he had poured Lego pieces over the valley of his site model-his attempt to generate a crumbly megastructure. Ideas, mainly from the 'habitat' notions at the centre of Team X, perhaps reached their final megastructural formation in the form literally called 'Habitat', by Moshe Safdie in Montreal, which was completed in 1967. I remember it well, as I tried designing a highly articulated agglomeration of romantically stacked volumetric modules, linked by penthouses cribbed from the Cumbernauld centre, for a highdensity housing project as a fourth-year student in 1966. Megastructural from repetitive volumetric units, perhaps. But not rational systems. In fact, it was the 'system builders' of wall-frame housing, of course, who actually 'renewed' our towns. And so, by the 1970s, architects who mentioned the word 'system' were very defensive indeed. There were, though, even then, brave attempts at systematising the process of architectural procurement, but these were towards the tail end of a stronger tradition-that of the postwar school, whose story Andrew Saint has told so well. 2 Here was system building that did not have to be megastructural and, by the 1970s-in the days when architects 56 Prefabricating Memory Lane: Whatever Happened to Systems? Three decades after his first involvement with an issue of 4 on systems buildings, John McKean, Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton, revisits the subject. He concludes that, despite the ensuing years, architects still have much to learn about the mass production of buildings.

Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a ‘world history of architecture’ today? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into ‘The Historical Styles’ and ‘The Non-historical Styles’.
(This essay began as a paper to a conference on 'Globalisation & Representation' in 2005)

In reviewing two recent publications on alternative housing, JOHN MAULE McKEAN argues that self-build will not solve a 'housing problem', rather its importance lies in the creative act of self-fulfilment. Housing: an anarchist approach, Colin Ward, Freedom Press. 182 pp. £1.25. Alternatives in housing? a report on self-build in Britain, Unit 11 The Architectural Association (AA bookshop, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1) 40 pp. 60p.

This book is a huge pleasure because it reveals the man and revels in his energy and wit. It is also a delight because it is so authoritative, written by the two people who know Walter Segal's life, personality, and work better than anyone. These are authors who celebrate Segal's idiosyncrasy and his noble architectural road less travelled."