Architects and Architecture of London

Kenneth Allinson

doi:10.4324/9780080942018

Architects and Architecture of London

Petria Radu-Cristian

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780080942018

visibility

…

description

448 pages

link

1 file

descriptionSee full PDF

Sign up for access to the world's latest research

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact

Abstract
AI

The book explores the relationship between architects and the city of London, emphasizing the city's historical and dynamic nature. It reflects on the contributions of significant architects who have shaped London's landscape while also attributing a life and intelligence to the city itself. The text illustrates how London's evolution is tied to its historical context, specifically its Roman foundations and the influence of the River Thames, which has been a central aspect throughout its development.

Figures (498)

Opposite: Wren’s St Magnus the Martyr, 1671-76. This is one of the few Wren churches that is not heavily restored and demonstrates layers of historical usage. it is surely peculiar that so many formerly significant

Above: Herbert Baker's Bank of England, standing above John Soane’s defensive walling. (See page 246.)

Above: Siaple’s Inn, Chancery Lane: restoration of a medieval London building.

Above: the White Tower Centre: nearby fragments of the City medieval wall built upon Roman foundations, near Tower Hill underground station. Below: the Tower as it was in the early Middle Ages

a. Lion’s Tower. b. Bell Tower. c. Beauchamp Tower. d.The Chapel. e. White Tower. f. Jewel House. g. Queen's lodgings. h. Queen’s gallery. i. Lieutenant's lodgings. k. Bloody Tower. I. St Thomas’ Tower & Traitor’s Gate. m. Place of executions.

Above: Westminster Abbey — the West frontage and an overall plan. Below: Westminster Hall.

his building dates from 1610, was restored in 1748 and then again in 1905 (when it was actually moved back in order to widen Fleet Street) and it is an entrance way into the Inner Temple, one of four Inns of Court that have, since the Middle Ages, served as home to England's barristers. (Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, Middle Temple and Inner Temple are Inns within the area of the City but, strangely, not under its jurisdiction.)

hat area inhabited by lawyers that sits between the historic cores of the City and Westminster comprises a web of fascinating courts: three (Inner, Outer and Middle Temples) of them to the south of Fleet Street and one (Lincoln's Inn) to the north. The old buildings here include the Temple church at Inner Temple (entrance, photo right). This was constructed by the powerful Knights Templar in the late C12th as part of a new monastic complex. The church comprises two parts: the Round Church and the Chancel (the latter built some fifty years later). Wren made internal changes, added to by Smirke and Burton in 1841. War damage resulted in some rebuilding and replacement of Wren features removed by the Victorians. The church now features as the church of Inner and Middle Temple — two former colleges of lawyers who acquired the buildings after the dissolution of the Knights in 1307.

Above: Staple’s Inn, indicative of the general aesthetic of Middle Age buildings in London during the life of Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones 1573-1652

Sometime before 1605, the year in which there is evidence of Jones producing masques at the court of James |, together with Ben Jonson, he was to be found accompanying (it is believed) the fifth Earl of Rutland on the first of two trips to Italy — then an arduous journey. Summerson suggests that much of his six-year sojourn was spent in Venice, where, coincidentally, Henry Wotton (1568-1639) - an aspirant diplomant, then a political refugee in Italy and the man who was later to publish the first English translation of Vitruvius - may also have been present. Of Jones’ forty-five recorded works, only seven survive. Four are in London - examples that, even as restored over the centuries, still bear the mark of his character and genius. Of these, the east facade of St Paul's at Covent Garden, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, and the Banqueting House in Whitehall best illustrate what Jones achieved.

basic Vitruvian principle: to the roots of architecture in the form of the primitive hut: an architectural exercise emphasising the ‘archi’ part of a tectonic undertaking. Universal Law — which meant order, and harmonic ratio — was to be manifest within a base configuration of sheltering construction. Law and what was merely creaturely and accommodative were to be married within the forms of Bedford’s exercise in commercial speculation.

In essence, the building is remarkably simple: a two- square plan with internal galleries, but it has been significantly altered within the terms of the original conception. The sides were originally rendered, but the Victorians replaced this with brick; the ground level of the market has been raised, obliterating the steps that originally led up to the (false) east frontage (ditto at the west end); and the arches to the side of the east porch were added by the Victorians. Nevertheless, Jones’ vital conception remains embodied — as if some imprisoned voice mutely crying out for one’s attention. Jones’ witty conception of the church was an exercise in the vernacular and, as a Tuscan architecture, of the kind Vitruvius, Serlio and Palladio had all recommended as suited to country buildings. But he was returning to

e Alobe Theatre: a coutextural hote 1599-1613

nightclub out of hours, an empty theatre still awaiting its evening audience. It is a magnificent, symbolic framing that neo-Platonically references the order of the heavens and yet grounds the substance of the architectonic order in a fashionable and creaturely realm. We now take it all for granted and it is an effort to penetrate the formalities of Whitehall and open ourselves to the sheer showiness of this building strutting its authoritatively tasteful stuff midst an utterly disparate urban fabric in the courtly and marshy village of Westminster. It is no longer novel, just as it is no longer used as originally intended and now exists for more contemplative entertainment, denuded of that very vitality with which it was once imbued. Jones’ design had promised a glorious architectural future and has ended its life as a conserved peculiarity enjoyed more for its ceiling art than the substance of its architectonic pretensions. But this is not bad for a work that is now nearly four hundred years old and arguably — despite attempts to emasculate it — sets itself as a landmark representative of the beginning of British architecture as we now know it.

e@ Watergate (below) that sits in Embankment Gardens, adjacent to Embankment station and Terry Farrell’s Charing Cross office building, is contentiously attributed to Jones but was, in any case, executed by Nicholas Stone (1586-1647), a mason who (among other things) also worked on the Banqueting House. He was born near Exeter, spent time in Holland and returned to Southwark, where he set up a large practice, becoming the King’s Mason to James | in 1619 and to Charles | in 1626. The gate sat on the water’s edge before the Embankment was constructed and bears reference to the Fontaine de Medicis at the Luxemburg, in Paris. If he is the true author of the work, then it again underscores change going on in the tradition of masons and their adoption of a more cerebral posture.

Initial work on the house was stopped when Queen Anne took ill in 1618 (she died a year later). The house was then thatched over at first floor level and work was not resumed (now for the queen of Charles I, Henriette Maria) until 1630 - about the time that Jones was

France was a sequence of antechambre/chambre/anc cabinet off the hall as grand salon). The southern wing at the level of the piano nobile, is dominated by the loggia (beneath which is the so-called Orangery). One presumes the room forming the bridge link over the road was a crucial common place whose view was originally east-west (along the road), and not into inner courts (now light wells). The additional wings were added fo! Charles II, by John Webb and the new form of house was used as Henrietta’s official residence until her death in 1669 (she became, during the Restoration, the Queen Mother). After that, in 1690, the house became the residence of the Ranger of Greenwich Park and, in 1697-99, the road to Dover was moved to its presen position (further north).

designing the Covent Garden ‘piazza’ and church. In fact, like Le Corbusier’s white villa, the pristine Queen’s House had a rather short life. Completed in 1635 there was a mere seven years before its courtly joys were rudely disrupted by the Civil War, just as the bourgeois life of Le Corbusier's villa, completed in 1931, was disrupted by World War Il.

Above: The dome of Wren’s Saint Paul's Cathedral: still London’s most significani building, even after three hundred years. It's remarkable survival of World War Ii bombing, when all around was flattened, made the building even more famous ano gave it an aura it still possesses.

De Wren’s lifetime London was a small boom town. Between 1540-1650 its population grew five to sixfold and these inhabitants were increasingly reliant upon distant markets and nascent industrial enterprises. By 1700 the population had grown by another 50% and was approximately 600,000. That rate of growth was not sustained during the eighteenth century, despite London’s expansion into the West End in the form of the architectural novelties of regular streets and squares of brick buildings. It is against this background Wren set about creating St Paul's Cathedral and the programme of parish churches. Above: St Martin’s, Ludgate Hill, a somewhat neglected but nevertheless interesting example of Wren’s City churches, illustrating the architectural ingenuity with which liturgical demands were accommodated to difficult sites. See page 57. One sees this tradition masterfully continued in Butterfiela’s All Saints, Margaret Street (see page 167). Above: St Martin’s, Ludgate Hill, a somewhat neglected but nevertheless interesting example of Wren’s City churches, illustrating the architectural ingenuity with which liturgical demands were accommodated to difficult sites. See page 57. One sees this tradition masterfully continued in Butterfiela’s All Saints, Margaret Street (see page 167).

St Paul's is also important in another sense: its dome is central to a planning concept that has engendered a set of ‘viewing corridors’ from London's high points to the dome itself. Current intentions are that tall buildings should not intrude into these invisible corridors — a policy indicative of the significance given to St Paul's: the building is as important now (if for more mundane reasons) as it was in its Gothic form some four hundred years ago.

other hand, perhaps architecture can now only be that; perhaps we now find reassuring significances in other ways. Perhaps St Paul’s was simultaneously the acme and swan-song of architectural endeavour? Three hundred years later we're still not quite sure.

Above: the exemplary steeple of St Mary- le-Bow, Cheapside lMproviZation, WH, iwvehtivehesse ahd gamezmancship: the gurvivihg Wreh parish ahd guild churches largely Victorian interiors. The concept of ‘a Wren church’ has changed profoundly since his time, but the remaining examples are among the best-known and most popular of his works.”

Overall, this is amasterful exercise which recentliturgica changes have enhanced as a rather ‘Scandinavian blonde’ approach replacing the old arrangement o pews and employing a central stone altar designed by Henry Moore. Site circumstance, customary issues anc idealism have been brought together as a resolved three-dimensional architectonic that manifests that al too rare and misunderstood capacity of inventiveness wit, consideration and aspiration constituting the wonder of situated architectural gamesmanship.

Top: view across the Thames from the Isle of Dogs. Right: the Hall viewed from the entrance, beneath the dome. James Thornhill’s paintings were completed between 1708-27. Above: the similar dining room at Chelsea hospital. The first pensioners arrived in 1705; by 1815 there were 2,710 of them.

Above: St Anne. Limehouse Below: Westminster Abbey's west towers

restless and robust, dramatic and assertive — until, that is, one penetrates to its heart. It is combinatory, allowing the parts considerable independent latitude before their conformance to an overall schema holds them in place. We appear to have a concern of moving from parts to the whole, rather than from the whole to parts. But the counterpoint is a still centre symbolised and effected by the cube.

Above: St George, south front. Top right: The ‘beasts’ at the feet of George Ist were removed in 1871 by G.E. Street and only recently restored (2007).

Above: the site plan of St Mary Woolnoth, indicating the original street alignments, before King William Street was constructed. This is now difficult to appreciate; the thunderous traffic along King William Street must be utterly different to the comparatively quiet side street off Lombard, in 1727, when the church was completed. One should attempt to look at the west facade in these terms.

Above: the new church within the old shell of St George-in-the-East. Opposite page: three views of Hawksmoor’s St George-in-the-East here is something quite wonderful in finding that, within the dramatic shell of St George, there nestles a 1964 church. It is not just the exhibition of different circumstances and religious concerns (or lack of them), but the shallow romance associated with the inhabitation of ‘as-found’ ruins (one thinks of how the Roman Colosseum once was). Hawksmoor is here nearer to those Roman references he enjoyed than he could ever have imagined. That intruding inhabitant is rather lacklustre: a simple, utilitarian post-war affair, but not one without its own ordinary charms which await the financing of a degree of harmonisation with Hawksmoor’s work. It even manages to incorporate the Hawksmoor apse. And yet, of course, it is the ‘mannerist’ outside shell that impresses and is so essentially Hawksmoor. One has to imagine it as a populous suburban edifice welcoming its parishioners into the various openings that allowed them to crowd in to the nave and the galleries. The current difficulty is a disjunction between the contemporary lives of those parishioners and the cultural import lent to what remains of the building by the intelligentsia (what T.S. Eliot differentiated as culture and Culture, a concept paralleling Wren’s belief in Positive and Arbitrary causes of beauty). The church was originally passed down from above by the Rulers of Taste to the unbelieving masses and this remains the essence of the predominating cultural equation. However, everyone now indulges in nostalgia, even the inhabitants of the local estates (the gentry of Wapping, across the road, surely go no where near the place) and St George as a shell possibly has, strangely enough, as much relevance as ever.

Above: the interior of Thomas Archer's St Paul's, Deptford.

Below: John James’ St George, Hanover Square - an interesting frontage that grabs the pavement into the portico.

Above: St Mary-le-Strand, now islanded in the Strand, but still a well proportioned church with a fine interior (also a living church, where there are regular services). The two-storey schema of the west facade of St Mary- le-Strand. The interior of the church is a simple, single volume with an ornate, elliptical ceiling worth comparing with St Martins-in-the-Fields. In fact, St Martins, St Mary, and St Clements Danes make a fine trio to visit, especially in the context of seeking out the mediation of Gibbs’ work between the baroque of Wren et al and the neo-Palladianism of Burlington's circle (and even of William Chambers, whose Somerset House stands opposite St Mary-le-Strand). See overleaf.

Above: Piranesi’s drawing of the Temple of Claudius, Rome, in 1757, drawn at a time when the voice of Vitruvius was the principal authority in all architectural matters.

Above: Hogarth’s satire on taste in The Rake’s Progress (1735). The prodigal young man spends his inherited wealth on a variety of matters that he hopes will exhibit good taste and adopted civility.

James Gibbs provided Burlington House with a pair of sweeping wings — creating a forecourt that, in essence, still exists (those wings have since been replaced by the rectilinear, Late Victorian exercise of Barry & Banks). But Gibb’s work was not to the taste of Campbell or, later, of William Kent - a man Boyle met with in Rome as someone enjoying a long stay in Italy and training to be a painter. Richard Boyle, third Earl Burlington, 1694-1753 oyle, the third Earl Burlington, was born at Burlington House, in 1694, and succeeded his father in 1704. He enjoyed all kinds of privileges and high-status positions and spent his time between three houses and estates: in London, at Burlington House; at Chiswick; and at Londesborough, in Yorkshire. Two of these became the sites of notable works of London architecture.

Above: Burlington House as it is now and as remodelled, in the neo-Palladian manner, by Boyle. Below: plan of Burlington House as illustrated in Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus. The curved wings forming the courtyard are by Gibbs. These were later replaced by the current arrangement by Barry and Banks, now forming the courtyard entrance area to the Royal Academy.

Camere was born as son of a Scottish laird and possibly attended Edinburgh University, training as a lawyer before reinventing himself as an architect (possibly under James Smith, 1645-1731, one of Scotland's principal architects). He was already building by 1712 - the same year he designed a house outside London (Wanstead, now demolished). It was also in 1712 that Campbell designed a house in Essex called Wanstead, setting a new standard in classical design without the extravagances of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh (since demolished). And it was around now that he was approached by a publisher to put his name to a work called Vitruvius Britannicus — a work on current British architecture, providing an introduction extolling Palladio and Jones, contributing to the selections and adding his own works (1715). The book was immediately successful and became quite influential (there was a second volume in 1717 and a third in 1725). In 1719 he was appointed as Architect to the Prince of Wales and met Lord Burlington, whom he encouraged to make another visit to Italy and for whom he undertook some remodelling at Burlington House. Upon Wren’s death (in 1726), and midst some intrigue, Campbell became the surveyor at Greenwich, under the man who briefly replaced Wren, William Benson (1682-1754; later dismissed for ineptitude; Campbell had illustrated one of his designs in the Britannicus). Between 1720-25 Campbell designed and built Mereworth in Kent - a work referencing the Villa Rotonda and preceding Burlington’s similar work at Chiswick. His reputation soon faded after his death in 1729, but he was buried at Westminster Abbey. Outside London Campbell worked with Burlington on Holkham Hall, a design exhibiting some of that very ‘damn’d gusto’ Burlington et al had criticised (compare with Kent’s work at Horse Guards). Ker was born in Bridlington, Yorkshire, son of a joiner. As a young man, he was able to find local patrons who recommended him to London people. Then, aged twenty five, he set out to Italy with John Talman (son of the architect William Talman) and Daniel Lock (probably on the basis of purchasing paintings for his patrons). They went to Florence and then walked to Rome via Sienna, where Kent started to learn to paint and socially establish himself with the English noblemen there. (The historian Joseph Rykwert describes Kent as

Extant London works include: - 44 Berkley Square 1742-44. - 22 Arlington Street, 1741-50 « Horse Guards, 1751-3 (Kent's design, 1748, completed by John Vardy 1750-59; see photo below), including the Old Treasury building, 1733-37). * Miscellaneous: the Royal Barge (at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 1732); Gothic gateway in the Clock Court at Hampton Court, rn

ingratiating, self-indulgent and unprincipled.) In 1713 his painting managed to win him the prize of a silver medal at the Accademia si San Luca (awarded by the Pope — something that was trumpeted in England). It was around now that he met with Burlington and also began to acquaint himself with architecture. The two set upon a strong friendship: the impulsive Kent and the austere, scholarly Burlington. Kent recollected a stay with Burlington in Genoa and how “his lordship ‘lik'd my designs so well both painting & Archetecture that he would make me promis at least to begin to paint for him the fierst when | come over.”

Above: Dance the Younger. Below: the Mansion House portico, at Bank. George Dance, the Younger 1741-1825 Extant London work of Dance the elder includes: - Mansion House, 1739-52. George Dance, the Elder 1694-1768 Kent (1754-5); St Luke’s Hospital, Old Street (1750-51); and the corn market, Mark Lane (1747-50). He appears to have done well and his son, Dance the Younger, was nominated to succeed his father in 1768. The Elder's most important commission was the Mansion House that now sits at Bank. Dance’s other works were mainly in the City, and included: St Botolph’s, Aldgate (1741-4); St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green (1743-6); the nave of St Mary’s, Faversham,

Above: Dance the Younger’s frontage to the Guildhall forecourt (a unique, hard-paved London space that has the Roman amphitheatre outlined in its paving): all exotic ‘Hindoo’ rather than neo-Gothic. Below: Dance the Elder’s more orthodox exercise of St Botolph, on the eastern edge of the City (now rather isolated by highway engineers). Above: Dance the Younger’s frontage to the Guildhall forecourt (a unique, hard-paved London space that has the Roman amphitheatre outlined in its paving): all exotic ‘Hindoo’ rather than neo-Gothic. Below: Dance the Elder's more orthodox exercise of St Botolph, on the eastern edge of the City (now rather isolated by highway engineers).

Above: the figure of Palladio at Lord Burlington’s Chiswick Villa.

Respective ceiling treatments of Chambers (top), at Somerset House, and (bottom) Adam, at Osterley Park. To Adam, his rival's work was distinctly old-fashioned.

Such pragmatism had another aspect: an awareness that the ambitious architect of the day needed to promote himself through publications. In addition to That opinion and its orientation toward all that is customary might well have been applauded by the Parisian architect Claude Perrault, some one hundred years earlier, but it was rather ironic in the context of rivalry with the Adam brothers. However, Chambers was also to wrap these reflections in a nascent professionalism that was then beginning to emerge. He not only called upon architects to be “well versed in the customs, ceremonies, and modes of life of all men his contemporaries” (so that he might effectively provide for their requirements), [but also to be] as well as skilled in accountancy, estimating, politics and the like.”

Above: one of the doorways around the central court at Somerset House, each intended to lead to a separate department.

Above: view through the entry from the Strand Below: inside the court since the building's conversion and the installation of a fountain. The latter has become a regular attraction for London families looking for somewhere to entertain their children in summer weeks. During the mid-winter weeks it frequently becomes an ice-skating rink. Note the separate front doors and chimneys to the bliaxck La oe Ee! ee eS Mr a Rn Le Sa ee See ee

Note the “separate front doors and chimneys to the block - it is treated as a set of London terrace houses.

Top: Adelphi view, showing one of the few remaining Adam frontages: strikingly refined and quite unlike Chamber's work (e.g. the nearby Somerset House).

demolition. In the 1920s it was given over to the nation and is now a museum and art gallery complete, of course, with tea rooms and shop. A labouring staff and the bourgeoisie have taken over, turned the place into a comforting spectacle, and it is the Judge who is now on display. The very stuff of his former home now mutely suffers the indecorous poking and prodding of curious tourists in search of entertainment, reassurance and a harmoniousness that contemporary architects often feel too embarrassed to provide.

Above: the Library at Kenwood, Hampstead Heath. Below: Kenwood House, south facade, overlooking the Heath. Although the Adam brothers were crucial to giving the house its current character, in 1793-6 George Saunders (1762-1839) added two prominent brick wings, the offices and kitchen buildings and brewery to the east side. This was a continuation of work started by Robert Nasmith (d.1793), who died at his home in Marylebone during the work he was doing at Kenwood.

Above: the Soane family vault at St Pancras old Church. Above: the Soane family vault at St Pancras old Church.

Above: rooms in the Soane Museum (reception room; double picture wall; first floor drawing room). Opposite page: beneath the rear dome, looking east, with a bust of Soane in the centre.

Below: Dover House, the Whitehall screen.

Below: the Regent's Park, 1830 (until 1811 Marylebone Park). Ah ambitious viZiohary John Nash 1752-1835

Below: Nasns scheme overiaia upon an 1852 map of central London (by when New Oxford Street had been created by James Pennethorne, Nash’s former assistant). Note the proposed route from Trafalgar Square to the British Museum, a proposition notionally resurrected and elaborated by Foster when working on the Great Court (see page 437). he Regent Street scheme stretching itself between the Mall and the Regent’s Park not only betrays almost many aspects of English society, but is also a fine example of the English playing at grand projets: it invariably goes wrong, but gets there in the end. Nash’s ‘Royal Mile’ (to which, it must be said, there is a long history that involves two other architects, John White and James Wyatt, who drew up preceding schemes that were clearly influential upon Nash) was intended to create a linkage between the Prince Regent's opulent Carlton House in the Mall (sited where Waterloo Place now is) and the royal park to the north (which, then,

The interior of All Souls, Langham Place (1822-5) is less than special (and has been altered), but the manner in which Nash has dealt with a simply readable architectonic as an urban set-piece serving a role within the greater architecture of the Regent Street scheme is quite remarkable and has withstood the assaults of the buildings around it to maintain its dignified stature on a north-south axis terminating here before swinging around into Portland Place and up to Park Crescent (now offices) and the Regent's Park. His use of a Gothic spire on a classical motif of a tempietto is quite unusual.

Arthur Blomfield was a pupil of Hardwick.

Above: the British Museum frontage and principal entrance.

In 1860 he was awarded the RIBA’s Gold Medal. His final work was the range of galleries at the Royal Academy that sit behind Burlington’s house (1866-70).

Below: the British Museum Reading Room in the mids of reconstruction work and the formation of the Great Court by Norman Foster. (Note the portico in the background, one of four in the Court.) Bottom: the Reading Room as itis, after the formation of the Great Court surrounding the building. On the upper floor, behind the windows, is a restaurant. Below: the British Museum Reading Room in the mids of reconstruction work and the formation of the Grea Court by Norman Foster. (Note the portico in the background, one of four in the Court.) Bottom: the Reading Room as itis, after the formation of the Great Court surrounding the building. On the upper floor, behind the windows, is a restaurant.

Below: The National Gallery frontage, now directly linked to Trafalgar Square, work designed and executed by Norman Foster as a modification to former work by Charles Barry and Edwin Lutyens.

William and Henry also collaborated on other churches, including All Saints, Camden Town, and Henry experimented with neo-Gothic (receiving the barbed criticisms of Pugin). The elder Inwood also worked with another of his sons, Charles Frederick (1799-1840). A third son (born 1802) was also an architect but next to nothing is known of him. illiam, the elder Inwood, was the son of a bailiff to Lord Mansfield, who owned Kenwood, in Highgate (built by the Adam brothers). He designed numerous houses, but his better known works were all carried out with the assistance of his son, who joined his father’s practice around 1809. Together they entered a competition for the St Pancras New Church in 1818. The younger Inwood was immediately sent out to Greece to research detail and character (resulting in an 1827 publication on the Erechtheion, in contrast to his father’s much respected work on purchasing estates and renewing leases). Henry returned via Rome and began the detailing on what ended up as the most expensive church of its day and a Greek version of Gibbs’ St Martin's. The famous caryatids stand as guardians over the entrance to the vaults beneath the church. But it criticised as hastening the onslaught of the neo-Gothic. In a diary entry in July 1821, C.R. Cockerell, dismissed it as “simple Greek — radiates bad taste thro’ the whole’.

By the age of twenty-three the younger Burton was a successful architect. His work was almost always neo-Classical rather than Gothic; after the work with Nash at Regent's Park, he had a strong leaning toward the picturesque. In later life he travelled extensively in Europe and North America.

worrying to the committee. His flat-roofed glass house shocked everyone and Barry threatened to resign if its nave was not covered by a vault — rationalised as a way of saving trees already in the park. Seven weeks later the detail drawings were complete. That toward the end of July; by late September the first columns were going up. When completed the so-called Crystal Palace — 1848 ft x 408 ft - had consumed 3,800 tons of casi iron, 700 tons of wrought iron, 900,000 sq. ft. of glass and 600,000 sq. ft. of wood. In accord with the latesi chromatic theory, the whole structure was dramatically painted to a scheme by Owen Jones in bright colours (which the High-Tech school of the 1970s onwara continued to reinvent). The structure was rebuilt ai Sydenham in south London and burned down in 1936.

fulfilment of function in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man.” When we have the presence of both an associative and penetrative imagination, then we perhaps have life and fire. The authoring poet's tastefully thematic nobility was now a perspicacious intelligence whose moral content grasped at what was ‘vital’ and fundamental to mankind’s flourishing — exactly what an architect is meant to do when formulating a marriage of tectonic expertise with all that refers to what is, at any given moment in time or place, fundamental, original and thoroughly disambiguated (the ‘arche’ of the term).

Above and opposite: George Street's All Saints, Margaret Street - a radical urban church seeking to simultaneously root itself in modernity and a religiosity that located its heart in the lost rituals of the Middle Ages. To a good member of the Church of England in the 1830s any suggestion of symbolism was suggestive of popery. Picinae and sediliae were regarded as superstitious features; altars were hardly used; chancels fell into disuse; pews were sold to the rich while the poor were banished to galleries. Reason and not emotion was dominant. The Tractarian movement and the so-called Ecclesiologists sought to change all this, promoting a ‘pointed architecture’ (as Pugin referred to it) that embodied, in its arches, all-pervading verticality and similar features (symbol of the resurrection), old forms of worship.

Above and opposite: Barry's Reform Club of 1841, and the adjacent Traveller's of 1832, exhibit a novel form of an Italianate style: no portico; no columns, or pilasters; an implicit rather than explicit presence of an Order; the strong cornice that tops the building - no balustrade and no attic storey (the roof accommodation is cleverly lit from the atrium). It is not neo-Palladian, neither is it Greek Revival. The underlying issue was, in part, that being true to ancient Greek precedent implied columns, portico, no pilasters, a single storey, no basement and no attic — being archaeologically correct placed architects in a corner. This stand-alone palazzo demonstrated a new set of possibilities.

Above: a page from Owen Jones’ book on ornament, The Grammar of Ornament.

and the Peers linked to a royal suite and the royal entry point on the south side, at the Victoria Tower). One long corridor runs along the river side (with a terrace, unifying the whole both internally and externally, and a series of internal courts punctuate the whole. But what is So difficult to communicate in drawings, diagrams and photographs is Barry’s success in creating a setting for a layered and interwoven set of rituals and conventions which together constitute the life of the Commons and the Peers, their relations to the monarch and to service staff, etc. This is a complex culture of privilege and power that Barry attuned himself to in terms of a club — which is rather how the place functions. Opposite page: The Clock Tower (Big Ben, 1) is or the far left of the diagram and the Victoria Tower (the sovereign’s entry point, 2) is on the right, leading intc a royal suite (3) to one side of the Peer’s chamber (4) The House of Commons (5) is on the other side of ¢ central hall (6). The river frontage is a principal ordering feature that unites the disparate parts behind the facade. Towers punctuate the manner in which Barry establishes an occupation of the site as a court-yardec private world and, overall, the plan is punctuated by courts (the green areas). The old Westminster Hall (7, is on the Parliament Square side, opposite Westminste! Abbey.

Antwerp and was built in 1566 as a place of commercial exchange by Sir Thomas Gresham. Its typology was relatively simple: a central courtyard surrounded by an arcade, and shops on the first floor. It burned down in the Great Fire of 1666 and was rebuilt looking somewhat different but having the same typology, having a plan labelled ‘Clothiers, Jews, Jewellers, Hamburg, Italian, Scots, etc. This must have been very similar to the first building, which is described as being arcaded and having a stair to the north and to the south up to about one hundred shops (a bazaar). Above the southern gate was a tower. However, like the first building, it appears not to have been very substantial and was repaired and then much rebuilt in 1820, only to be burned down in 1838. It was now that Tite’s building was constructed: a more substantial work, now oriented east-west, but otherwise with the same typology. It was only now that a roof was provided (by the younger Barry, in 1888).

Trading ceased at the Royal Exchange during World

War Il and afterward, it became office space with, rather appropriately, the Mermaid Theatre group starting up in the courtyard. Significant change came in 1988 when Fitzroy Robinson designed an entire new attic storey (hardly visible externally) together with new classical features on the interior matching those designed by Tite. And it all works rather well, the new height satisfying the neoclassical advice to add to the height of rooms something like one and a half times their width.

Above: visitors enjoying the staircase in Scott's Midland Hotel (before refurbishment).

Above: Scott's Foreign & Commonwealth Office (St James’ Park side).

Below: the staircase at the Midland Hotel, St Pancras (George Gilbert Scott) prior to restoration and the hotel's conversion.

church is designed as the kind of cube that Hawksmoor employed as a still centre in his Baroque church designs. In fact, there is an underlying note of similarity between Hawksmoor’s work and Butterfield’s robust and picturesque massing of interplayed parts, despite the utterly different styles.

n 1867 Street and a number of other distinguished architects entered a competition for new law courts in the Strand — one of a series (as for the Palace of Westminster, the Foreign Office, Royal Exchange, Kensington museums, etc.) that defined a new status for the profession. It was a mismanaged project and the judges could not pick a winner satisfying their criteria (a design by Burgess stands out). Edward M. Barry and Street were appointed to come up with a joint design: Street on elevations and Barry on the plan); Scott called in lawyers; in 1868 Street was appointed to complete the design on his own and, when it was published in 1871 there was more controversy over a new design that was much altered and clearly owed something to Burgess Street’s original design had all the hallmarks of Barry’s court-yarded classical body (in plan) and Gothic dress. But the planning was distinctly flawed and such issues of convenience and picturesqueness were to dog the history of the project (dubbed ‘an Acropolis of the law’).

Below: despite its picturesque street frontage, the Royal Courts are planned simply and boldly. ‘H’ is the central entry hall: ‘C’ are runs of court rooms to either side.

Above: three parts of a late C18th Georgian facade, the central part showing Regency modifications and, especially a rendered ground floor and the addition of a portico with Doric columns (all in Eaton Place). Centre: a house from the 1830s, showing a similar typology, but now more thoroughly Italianate — and completely rendered. Right: the final stage in this evolution; the implicit order of base, giant order and attic has now been replaced by the formula Barry favoured: a cornice that replaces the attic storey and Italianate rather than Grecian features. the changing Victorian towhhouze

At that time many ‘architects’ were what we would now call surveyors. The proper way to enter the profession was as an articled pupil, perhaps after studying at an art college or attending occasional classes such as those of the Royal Academy schools and the Architectural Association. One worked and learned at the same time. The idea that one’s principal mode of education was in the full-time isolation of a school and then an examined entry to a codified profession — now the most common way to enter the profession — was anathema to those who declared architecture to be an art (and, incidentally, would remain anathema to architects such as Donald McMorran, well into the post World War II period). Freedom4, aweethese abd light ..

Above: the graphic art of Kate Greenaway (1846- 1901), Walter Crane (1845-1915), and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939 ) characterise a sentiment in British tastes up to the 1914-18 war and lingered beyond that until the next war in 1939, when Rackham died. Greenaway had a long friendship with Ruskin and Shaw designed a house for her in Hampstead. (Thackham, whose period of success was really after Greenaway’s death and up to about 1920, lived in a Hampstead house designed by Voysey.) Crane was a friend of Morris and, in the 1880s, joined him in socialist causes, in fact becoming the illustrator for the movement. In 1884 he was a founder member of the Art Workers Guild and, from 1888-93, was president of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society. The work of these artists on childrens’ fairy stories and the like was a perfect complement to the raw social realities surrounding a privileged middle class of artistically and progressively minded ‘nice’ people.

Above: expansive Queen Anne terraced townhouses, in Cadogan Square, Chelsea, from the 1880s. These were family houses complete with ample servant quarters in basement and attic storeys. Note both the similarities and differences to the typical Georgian terraced townhouse.

In the Queen Anne we have what Goodhart-Rendel referred to as “a Gothic game played with neo-Classical counters.” Actually, with New Zealand House, the game was perhaps the opposite (the scheme is fundamentally regular, like the Jones building in Lincoin’s Inn (below)) although most residential examples carefully interplay compositional elements in exactly the manner Goodhart-Rendel suggests: mildly irregular and with a careful choice of details that proved hugely attractive to artistically-minded elements of the middle-classes, both its ‘aesthetes’ and ‘progressives’.

Above: Swan House, Chelsea Embankment (1876), about which Pevsner remarked: “The oversailing upper floors ... are in the tradition of timber-framed building. The oriel windows on the ground floor are a favourite English motif of about 1675, the excessively slender windows above are Queen Anne — but the delicate, even piquant ensemble is Shaw and no one else and had a great deal of influence in England and America.”

Above: Shaw's Alliance Assurance building of 1901-5, which Goodhart-Rendel describes as a design “that seemed to set all the traditions of its neighbourhood at defiance.” And it certainly is a superbly assured composition, one that shows just how different Shaw's later work was to the style that had established his reputation as a young man. Far more Baroque than Lutyens would probably have approved of at that time, the design nevertheless shows Lutyens how an old man can play the classical game the younger architect was just beginning to enjoy. Ernest Newton was Shaw's chief assistant on the design. Below: the south and west elevations. Right: the earlier, Queen Anne style, Alliance Assurance

Above: Holy Trinity, 1888-90. Note the ‘New Scotland Yard’ stripes. In form, the building somewhat turns away from Pugin and Ruskin and back toward a barn-like, preaching house’ style now dressed in Perpendicular garb.

edding was articled to G.E. Street from 1858- 65, then joined his brother in practice (d.1868). Sedding then moved from Cornwall to London to practise architecture and design furniture, ornaments, etc. His London work includes the Church of the Holy Redeemer, 1887-8, Clerkenwell; Holy Trinity, 1888- 90, Sloane Square; and St Peter, 1892, Ealing; with Henry Wilson, his assistant). Sedding is celebrated by Pevsner as a man who embraced machinery, who in 1892 declared that, “Let us not suppose that machinery will be discontinued. Manufacture cannot be organised upon any other basis. We had better clearly recognise this ... rather than rebel against the actual and the inevitable” — a sentiment of belief that was still radical at that time but, as Pevsner noted, did not fit with the history of the arts in Britain and with its educational values, class structure and social contrasts.

Above: 44 Tite Street, 1878. Opposite page: 46 Tite Street (1883), a stack of four studio flats.

[)sserbec as a charming dandy, Edward Godwin appears to have been a remarkable character. Born in Bristol, son of a prosperous currier and leather cutter, he was educated in London but returned to Bristol where he became articled to a William Armstrong, City Surveyor, Architect and Civil Engineer (1848-53). By 1854 he had set up on his own and built up a successful practice with Henry Crisp (1825-1896). This culminated in winning the competition for Northampton Town Hall (in 1861). He moved to London in 1862; however his wife died in 1865. Success continued with work outside London until Godwin ‘ran off’ with the actress Ellen Terry in 1868. They lived in the country and there began a new phase of Godwin’s creative life: costume and theatre design, furniture, carpets, tiles, textiles, interiors (e.g. for Oscar Wilde, in Tite Street), and studios, including the first two house types at Bedford Park. There were also articles in architectural magazines, theatre criticism, scenery and production. In particular, he championed modular furniture and mass production at affordable rates.

Meanwhile, in 1861, after leaving Street in 1859, Web became a founder member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. - Morris’ design firm. As an architect, worked flowed in, including three London studio-houses for painter friends, including V.C. Prinsep (1 Holland Park Road, 1865), G.P. Boyce (West House, Glebe Place, 1869), and George Howard (1 Palace Green, 1868- 74). Through his membership of the Hogarth Club from January 1859 until its dissolution in December 1861 Webb received several commissions from non-painter members, including a terrace of combined dwellings,

ebb was born in Oxford, son of a physician with drawing skills and a mother equally talented. Both taught him to draw. He intended to be a painter but changed his mind when, at seventeen, his father died. In 1849 he was articled to John Billing in Reading, worked as his assistant until 1854, then moved to Bidlake and Lovatt in Wolverhampton — an experience that appears to have exposed him to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Two months later he had moved to Oxford to work for G.E. Street at half the salary. Here, as Street’s chief assistant, he met William Morris. In 1856 the office moved to London and Webb, together with Morris became members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1858 Morris, about to marry, asked Webb to design him a house in south-east London: what was to become the famous Red House (named after its red bricks and tiles).

Below: the Red House — a famous house for a famous client who actually only lived there five years. The house is quite remarkable but self-evidently a young architect's first major work, with odd internal arrangements and details, and less-than-satisfying interiors (perhaps because they are now mostly without the original decorative schema). Right: a painted window on the first floor.

Red House plans. Top: ground; Bottom: first floor. The external picturesqueness engenders some internal awkwardness obviated by the decorative schema, but the overall planning is less impressive than the house’s picturesque qualities would suggest..

It was now that Morris became committed to that belief in the inseparability of mind, hands and heart, using natural artistic and craft abilities to experiment with stone carving, clay modelling, wood carving, and the first of his illuminated manuscripts. To ‘know’ how to work with the hands and to employ a handcraft technique was to be fundamental to the rest of his life and to his Ruskinian ideas of the dignity of work.

But it was now, during his success in catering for ‘the swinish rich’, as he called them, and in despair at class divisions and his failure to influence anything at the working class level that Morris turned to action, forming

Above and below: Harrington Gardens has an almost aggressive street frontage — except that it isn’t the front: that is around the corner, where the houses are accessed from a private garden. Similarly, the adjacent Collingwood Gardens scheme shows the same kind of striving after individuality. Below right: Audley Street, Mayfair. Mount Street is around the corner.

Opposite page: 52 Cadogan Square, by Ernest George and Peto, 1885. The area was first developed from about 1770, with a second phase from the late 1870s. (No. 50 is also by George.)

Ashbee took up residence at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, a newly established institution graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, set up in response to a shocked public outcry following reports of poverty, disease, overcrowding, and crime in east London, and particularly in Whitechapel. The graduates were meant

term sums up the architectural struggles of the late nineteenth century more than ‘freestyle’: meaning to be free of the conventions applying to this or that style, particularly the neo-Gothic or neo-Classical, in all their varieties of imposition and constraint. Yet nothing could be more fraught and paradoxical. Architecture has to be addressed in terms of intentions and their expression, and ‘freestyle’ actually refers to a form of choice that, nevertheless, demands an orientation and commitment bearing rules within itself.

Above: Brwer & Smith’s Mary Ward House. Previous to that, between 1890-3, Brewer had been articled to F. T. Baggallay. While there, he studied at the Architectural Association and at the Royal Academy schools. In 1894 he joined the office of Robert Weir Schultz in Gray's Inn and entered a circle of people associated with Lethaby — a lasting influence on his work. The practice was successful (mostly with domestic work) but, by about 1910, when another major competition (the National Museum of Wales) was won, the flavour of their larger work was distinctly Baroque rather than Freestyle. Brewer now had health problems and retired from the practice. After his death, Smith continued, notably designing the first phase of the Heals building (extended by Sir Edward Maufe in 1937). His practice then continued until 1933, but without other notable work in London.

Below: Voysey’s Britten Studio, Kensington: a model artists home, some two-thirds of the plan being given over to a readily accessible studio. The Britten Studio is an interesting attempt at the typology of an artist's residence: mostly studio, including discrete living accommodation, with the bedroom on the first floor, in the roof space.

Waterhouse was known for the practicality of his designs which included the National Provincial Bank in Piccadilly, a set of chambers as a commercial venture with his brothers in Carey Street (1872 and 1879-95), and the Prudential Assurance Company, for whom he designed some twenty-seven buildings in the years between 1877 and 1904, establishing what is probably the first

Below: Westminster Cathedral front. Opposite page: view down the nave. The upper parts remain mostly in brick, although Bentley saw these surfaces in mosaic.

Below: view to the 86.5 m high Cathedral campanile, from the 2006 EPR office and retail development opposite, and across the EPR-designed piazza in front of the Cathedral (1975).

Above: a block at the Boundary Estate, 1897-1900: the redevelopment of a slum area called ‘The Nichol’. (Architect of the southern blocks: Charles Winmill.) Below: the Euston Road Fire Station (1901-2, from the Fire Section of the LCC, then ‘under Charles Winmill). Opposite page: the admirable Millbank Estate, 1897- 1902, on the site of the demolished Millbank Prison. The style of many estates — the taller, five to six storey blocks criticised in 1907 as ‘skyscrapers’ and ‘vertical slums’ - was Philip Webb mixed with the influences of visits by Fleming and his colleagues to housing estates in Vienna and elsewhere.

Above: Leadenhall Market - on the site of a medieval poultry market — was rebuilt under Jones in 1881 and nc serves as a backlands lunch-time resort — bars, restaurants, and shops and a fine example of a mode of provisi sadly lacking in the City which, in the 1950s sought to leave the streets to cars and get pedestrians up on a ‘pedwe network (still evident all over the City). Apart from such issues Leadenhall is also a fine piece of architectul gamesmanship — also a neglected aspect of City architecture. The geometry of the complex subtly and deceptive intrudes itself into the backlands employing the dominance of its central crossing. But the gamesmanship is al evident in the way Jones extends the reach of the Market to perimeter streets, stretching the facades to locatio they don’t belong. For example (top right), the upper windows have progressively smaller spaces behind as th run into a neighbouring property — to the point where there is nothing behind and Jones simply carries on a scre wall with windows now filled with metal grille-work. Architects would now execute such a thing with acute se consciousness; Jones is totally matter-of-fact about the gesture.

Below: the Embankment at Waterloo bridge, looking east to the City and Canary Wharf. The Thames River, Prevention of Floods Act of 1879 also imposed the duty of implementing requirements for 40 miles of river frontage, an undertaking Bazalgette described as “one of the most difficult and intricate things the Board have had to do.” |In addition, an act of 1877 empowered the MBW to purchase twelve Thames bridges from the private companies owning them and free them from tolls. One outcome was that Bazalgette replaced three of the bridges with new structures to his own design: Putney (1886); the steel-link suspension bridge at Hammersmith (1887); and the iron arch structure at Battersea (1890). The removal of tolls led to demands for new river crossings below London Bridge and Bazalgette was involved in three major design schemes: Tower Bridge (designed under Horace Jones); Blackwall Tunnel; and Woolwich free ferry. In addition to these river concerns, Bazalgette was attempted to ease horse-drawn traffic congestion in the capital by initiating a programme of new thoroughfares, principally: Southwark Street (1864); Queen Victoria Street (1871); Northumberland Avenue (1876); Shaftesbury Avenue (1886); and Charing Cross Road (1887). He was made a companion of the Bath in 1871, and knighted in 1874.

Below: the figure of Justice on the corner of John Belcher’s Chartered Accountant's Hall, City.

Above: the figures of an architect and a rather sceptical workman on the frieze of the Chartered Accountant's Hall, City.

Above: sign at the Blackfriar pub, Queen Victoria Street, City, exhibiting those Arts & Crafts kinds of sweeps and curves that, on the Continent especially, were to flourish as Art Nouveau. Above: sign at the Blackfriar pub, Queen Victoria Street, City, exhibiting those Arts & Crafts kinds of sweeps and curves that, on the Continent especially, were to flourish as Art Nouveau. Opposite page: the same pub. It was built in 1875 but the art work was begun in 1904-6, by the sculptors Nathaniel Hitch, Frederick T. Callcott, with Henry Poole and the architect H. Fuller Clark making contributions. Poole attended the Royal Academy schools from 1892. His father had been an architectural carver, and much of Poole’s work was architectural sculpture, particularly for Lanchester and Rickards. Among his works for them include sculpture for Deptford Town Hall, the porcelain work for 144-146 New Bond Street, and the high relief spandrel figures of angels for Methodist Central Hall, Westminster. Fuller Clark also did an idiosyncratic building in Riding House Street, W1 (1908).

Above: students of the Architectural Association, 1920. The presence of a woman is interesting.

Below: 36 Smith Square, typical of Lutyens’ ‘Wrennaisance’ work around 1911.

Above: The rear of the British Medial Association building, 1911-24. Opposite: the Country Life building (1906), in Kingsway.

Above: sculpture (a fat boy with a goose) on a corner of the building (by Sir William Reid Dick). Opposite page: the former Midland Bank HQ, in Poultry (Stirling and Wilford’s No1 Poultry appropriately sits opposite). The building is steel-framed.

likes of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who, in 1912, came to lecture and shock the radicalist lady members of the recently formed Lyceum Club with his misogynist Futurism, talk of fast cars, the sanitising effects of war, political protest, and the glories of the machine. It was to take some fifty years before one could begin to talk of any significant influence of Futurism upon British architectural thinking. In the meantime, the reputation of Lutyens’ work ironically seemed to rest as much upon the man’s character as his architectural talents. With regard to the latter, it is his early domestic work and his work in France and India that sustains his reputation. Arguably, only one (very simple) London work — among many — touches upon his originality within a Neo- Platonic architectural framework of belief that Lutyens employed to sustain his revivalist gaming: the Whitehall Cenotaph.

(now mostly Jewish, so that the potential congregation is severely restricted), much in the spirit of Jones’ exercise in Covent Garden. The Pevsner Buildings of England guide calls it eclectic, but it is Lutyens at his most masterful and in full control (he referred to the design as ‘Romantic-Byzantine-cum-Nedi’). Here, he has no need of the language of the ‘high game’ of classicism. He knows it and can apparently go beyond it. To refer to this as eclecticism is perhaps to miss the point. The architect seems to have been seeking a power of simple form and texture: of brickwork, the occasional stone detail, large and low sheltering roof ampstead Garden Suburb is a place you either love or find curiously disturbed by its subscription to an abstracted urbanistic idealism far removed from the realities of Inner London, whether it be the latter’s ubiquitous terraced housing or its West End mansions or mansion blocks (and especially from the mass of disorderly, often deprived and decrepit London). But in the Suburb — midst its mix of neo-Georgian and Arts & Crafts influences — is one of London’s most impressive churches: St Jude’s, by Edwin ‘Ned’ Lutyens (1909-11). Externally, the churchis memorable forits restraintand an elemental, abstracted classicism. The detail is relatively minimal. The overall forms are mildly picturesque, but in accord with a demanding classical symmetry. This is, in fact, a grand barn at the heart of the community

massings of whitewashed walls and random-laid stone, generous verandas, broad tiled roofs, high gables and chimneys, and wood-beam interior ceilings. Lutyens visited in 1908 and they informally discussed forming a partnership and, in 1912. Lutyens invited Baker to collaborate with him in New Delhi. Instead, of a partnership with Lutyens, Baker established a London partnership with Alexander T. Scott (1887-1962), and designed a number of buildings that included the Bank of England. He also served as one of the architects for the Imperial War Graves Commission, 1917-28, and designed some 100 cemeteries. At the Bank of England, Baker designed a steel-framed, stone-clad office building, seven storeys at its highest, with a ring of vaulted, top-lit, Soanian bank halls along the lower perimeter base. Attentive to symbolism, he attempted to embody what he claimed was the Bank of England’s “tradition of the private house” and “that invisible thing, Among his many honours, Baker was elected RA in 1932, knighted in 1926, and created KCIE in 1930. He was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal for architecture in 1927.The Baker family home was Owlett, in Kent, built in 1683 and residence of the Bakers since 1796. He always returned here when in England and donated the house to the National Trust in 1937.

Webb and Bell’s breakthrough was winning the 1891 competition for what became the Victoria & Albert Museum, a work consolidated by others for the government. H. Buckley Creswell (articled to Webb in

Above: 13-15 Moorgate, 1890-3. Above right: the French Protestant Church in Soho Square, 1893 - Webb’s own favourite work. (A building by C. H. Worley’s is adjacent, on the west side of the square.) Opposite: Admiralty Arch.

And then after the event, everything returns to normal. Webb's design (1905-7; constructed 1908-11) suffered Webb's Admiralty Arch is not only an isolated set-piece on its own, or even in relation to the Mall (in Edwardiar times known as ‘processional Way’ by the LCC and the Press) but is part of aceremonial route submerged within the urban fabric of London until those state occasions arise (such as the wedding of Charles and Diana) wher Westminster and the City — or rather, the minster in the west and the minster in the east — are linked together Then, a route emerges: from Buckingham Palace, through the Admiralty Arch and Trafalgar Square (beneath Nelson), along the Strand and Fleet Stree (past the Royal Courts of Justice and the Griffin marking the boundary of the City), up Ludgate Hill to St Paul's. And then after the event, everything returns to normal. Pe ee eee ee ee ee eee ee See eee ee a! severe criticism when completed simply because it mixed the typology of the triumphal arch with that of offices to either side and residential accommodation above, turning the whole into a screen. The origins of the scheme lay in a competition he won that proposed a ‘rond point’and colonnade in front of Buckingham Palace, all as part of a scheme celebrating the life of Queen Victoria (who died in 1901). The rond was constructed (with Sir Thomas Brock’s sculpture at its centre), but not the colonnade. Meanwhile, the Mall was widened into a boulevard and Webb given the opportunity to design a termination to the processional way before it reached Trafalgar Square. (The central gates, incidentally, were the largest in the country at the time.) It was after this, in 1912, that Webb replaced (and transformed) Edward Blore’s rather dreary frontage to Buckingham Palace.

On a similar river and sea-oriented note Cooper won the commission to design a new building for Lloyds of London (their first custom-designed headquarters and one important to the story of the Rogers building of 1986), completed in 1928 and demolished in 1976; only the Leadenhall portico remains, now as a feature of the Rogers scheme. Cooper's assistant, Terence Heysham, continued the practice and completed the ’56

Professor Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield 1856-1942

Above: Air Street, between Piccadilly and Regent Street, with Shaw’s transitional arch and superstructure. Below: Ernest Newton’s County Fire Office. The lion and Britannia on top are sculpted by Herman Cawthra.

Above: the east side of the Quadrant. Below: the west side of the Quadrant.

North of the Quadrant, the best Regent Street buildings are possibly those by Burnet and Tait (the New Gallery range, on the west side), 1920-5. Most of the buildings elsewhere in Regent Street (including around Oxfora Circus, 1911-23, and Dickens & Jones, 1919-21) are by Henry Tanner Jnr (1876-1947), assisted by his brother E.J. Tanner (1887-1939), his father, Sir Henry Tanner Snr (after 1913) and another brother, W.H. Tanner, a surveyor (from 1920). Liberty's is by E.T and E.S. Hall (1914), (who also did the half-timbered section ot Liberty). At the time, the loss of Nash’s buildings was (for some obscure reason concerning nostalgia for al things Georgian, then very fashionable) a prominent and popular source of outrage (after the event; in 1905 the Times had voiced prevailing sentiment in referring to Regent Street as ‘beneath contempt).

Below: the side street elevation, extended by Joass, looking east, with Joass’ work in the centre (where the doorway is). The end bays to the east are by Whitfield (changes are detectable, and the character of the sculpted frieze is distinctly more coarse). So characteristic was Belcher’s style that one Edwardian advertisement once offered ‘instruction in the Gothic, Renaissance, Classic and Belcher styles’.

Above: the principal frontage of the Chartered Accountants’ Hall, City (actually on a side street). Below: Whitfield turning the corner in the manner of Belcher and Joass, thus completing the block as a natural uni before becoming a thoroughly 1960s stylist.

Above: former Mappin House, 1906 - another Mannerist exercise from Joass. Below: 31 Weymouth, 1910 - Joass producing work that almost had a 1930s feel. Opposite page, top: : 37 Harley Street. Opposite page bottom: Burlington Arcade; south end by Pite, 1911, north end by Bates & Sinning, 1937. Above: former Mappin House, 1906 - another Mannerist exercise from Joass. Below: 31 Weymouth, 1910 - Joass producing work that almost had a 1930s feel. Opposite page, top: : 37 Harley Street. Opposite page bottom: Burlington Arcade; south end by Pite, 1911, north end by Bates & Sinning, 1937.

His biographer notes that Joass was elected to the RIBA Council where he failed to utter a single word; however, when Joass retired, it was to indulge his passion for sailing his cruiser and occasional racer Macnab, which he partly designed and which was anchored at Poole Harbour, in Dorset. Only a year before his death Joass won first prize in a Cowes to Dinard race. Despite this enthusiasm, during his final illness he appears still to have been finishing drawings for his office. The mannered nature of his architecture bears comparison with that of early Holden (see page 309).

Above: the Wigmore Hall frontage was extended (to the west) in 1909 by Walter Cave (to provide additional showroom spaces). The hall itself has always been notable for its comforts, convenience, and, of course, acoustics. It is basically a ‘shoe box’ design, but Collcutt modified the conventional design to provide a curved rather than flat ceiling, and removed most decorative finishes (which had an acoustic function). The decorative pieces are by Gerald Moira.

Above: the Lloyds Register building. Below: the Savoy Hotel. Savoy Court (on the east) was first offices, then residential suites and later a part of the hotel; to the west we have the West Block offices. Between them and the original Embankment block of 1888 (probably by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo; no one is quite sure) were the entrance hall, lounge and foyer. (The stainless steel cladding to what was a terracotta arch was added in the 1930s, but still supports a gilded figure by Lynn-Jenkins of Count Peter Savoy.)

and perhaps only comparable with the gaiety of the gabled houses of Amsterdam built around 1650’). Martin attended Lambeth School of Art. After Treadwell died in 1910 he continued alone until 1929, undertaking suburban housing and buildings in Africa. He then went into partnership with E.C. Davies. Further work included Nos 7-9 Buckingham Palace Road; two-storey neo- Georgian work at Ilchester Place, Kensington, 1929; and flats in Palace Gate. A busy little office of arguably more importance than many more famous architects as contributors to London’s character.

Left: No. 7 Dering Street, Mayfair, 1906. (The Buildings of England gives T & M's No. 5 this as No.4 and totally ignores No. 7 — which is by far the most exciting building.) This work is typical of such much during this period that worked within the framework of the Georgian town house site parameters, but strove to establish a commercial reality without the aid of flashing neon and similar devices (which, no doubt, these architects would have used if it had been available). The contemporary parallel is Tokyo sites: narrow and desperate for attention. Below: 74 New Bond Street, 1906. Note the residual Art

Above: two of the many interesting plot rebuildings of the type designed by Treadwell & Martin et al are in Maddox Street, off New Bond Street. Here, No. 47 enjoys a Flemish flavour to its detailing in a rich, dark-coloured tiling (by Walter Williams, 1892, for a firm of tailors). The adjacent No.4 5 is from 1907 (architect unknown). No. 49 on the other (west) side is the sole remaining survivor from the eighteenth century, although the other buildings retain its fundamental typology. This area has a wealth of interesting buildings from this period.

Below: the villa at 8 Addison Road. The street porch leads through a covered passage to the house.

Above: picturesque Waterlow Court, 1909. The street entrance leads through a covered way to the arcade that runs around the inner court.

Above: neo-Georgian house by Lutyens, Erskine Hill, . Below: flats by Parker & Unwin, Heath Close, 1911-12. Bottom: houses in South Square, opp. St Jude’s

traditional means of getting about London: by foot, by horse, carriage and water-boat. Dramatic change came with the mid and later-nineteenth century linkages between London and other rapidly expanding cities facilitated by the steam trains that came charging into the urban fabric to new termini at places such as Kings Cross, Waterloo, London Bridge, Victoria, Paddington, etc. These rail lines also established the framework of an outer suburban development (Service tells us that, by 1880, there were 350 railway stations in central and suburban London), but a different grain of transport change within the core of the urban fabric itself came with the horse-drawn omnibus (first used in 1829) and its railed equivalent — the former becoming the motorbus and the latter the electric tram. And, of course, horse- drawn cabs. By 1900 there were some 3,000 horse- drawn buses and trams, carrying an estimated 500 million passengers a year. borough politics and class values). By 1903 these were providing an estimated 394 million journeys whilst the horse-drawn buses provided for 287 million journeys; but, by 1910, the electric trams were providing 764 million journeys against 287 million on the horse-buses. And then, from 1905, both means of transport were faced with competition from the petrol-driven omnibus — which, during the 1950s — eventually won the battle. Ae part of the dynamics of London’s historical evelopment — as fundamental as the Westminster/ City split and the political divide between Inner and Outer boroughs — has been the systems and patterns of transport that supplemented and then replaced those Below: Covent Garden tube station, as modernised and with some period features (such as signage) removed. Many of the railway station architects took up Halsey Ricardo’s ideas on building within London in glazed tiles and bricks (of which Debenham House, in Holland park, 1905-7, is a fine example) and their ox-blood red forms still populate London’s streets. Typically, they have a classical body and vaguely Arts 2 Crofte datailing

Below: Russell Square station — a fine example of an original station, with relatively few alterations and additions.

Above and below: Green's Scottish Widows building in Cornhill (1935) includes a masterful and indicative, if minor, touch: an arched entrance to an alley that demonstrates an easy accommodation between the symmetry of the facade and the alignment of the alley. There is a comfortable ease with which this is accomplished that is now a lost art.

Above: Mewés & Davis's Morning Post building of 1906-7, now a hotel conversion by Jestico &Whiles (1998). The two top stories (which surely add to the building aesthetically) are 1928. Below: Australia House, A.M. & A.G.R. Mackenzie, 1913-18.

Ironically, in the meantime, British architects first dropped any aspect of their profession with a numerate basis, and then any tectonic aspect which did not serve pure formalism. The net outcome is an art bias in schools of architecture that returns the profession to the ‘art or profession’ arguments of more than one hundred years ago even while the profession as a whole poses as ever more professionally expert and competent.

Ds was born in Leinster Gardens but educated privately in Brussels before entering into an architectural education at sixteen. He was trained by a famous tutor, Jean-Louis Pascal, and then entered the practice of Charles Mewés (1858-1914) in 1898. He was soon back in London, having worked with Mewés on the Carlton Hotel (1901) and then the Ritz design — a building of Beaux Arts character (designed down to the cutlery by the architects), but with an innovative steel frame made in Germany to a design by a Swedish engineer who had worked in Chicago. The building then had the largest steel frame in Europe (although the building regulations prevented its expression by thin walling) and was also innovative in its use of piles. With its mansard roof and crusty details, elaborate Louis XVI interiors and street arcade the Ritz, with its 112 rooms and 24 suites, brought Parisian fashions in architecture back into the heart of London and played a significant role in countering anti-French prejudices. Cesar Ritz Life was good for this short but dapper, good looking young man who apparently enjoyed the company of elegant women and resisted marriage until he was forty-five and could enjoy meals in his own-designed restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel. Friends included other architects such as Edwin Lutyens, A. E. Richardson, Charles Reilly, Oliver Hill, and Herbert Austen Hall. But it appears that he was a (manic depressive).

doing hospital service, but had a nervous breakdown in 1917. He later entered practice again under the Mewés and Davis umbrella in partnership with Charles H. Gage and post-war work included the Armenian church of St Sarkis, lverna Gardens, Kensington (1928). Davis was now heaped with various honours (for example, he became Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur and was awarded the Belgian Ordre de la Couronne) before a further collapse in 1933 and further troubles.

looking like scenes from the trans-Atlantic liners for which Davis designed interiors. Photos courtesy of The Ritz and the RAC. Opposite page: the Ritz arcade on Piccadilly and the pool at the RAC (photo courtesy of the RAC) Above: the dining rooms of the RAC and the Ritz, L Above: the dining rooms of the RAC and the Ritz, looking like scenes from the trans-Atlantic liners for which Davis designed interiors. Photos courtesy of The Ritz and the RAC. Opposite page: the Ritz arcade on Piccadilly and the pool at the RAC (photo courtesy of the RAC)

he definitive history that lends a satisfying narrative and rationale to those changes in British architecture marking the period between the Late Victorian, the Edwardian, and the inter-war years up to the 1951 Festival of Britain has yet to be written. The usual emphasis is upon cultural fractures rather than insidious continuities and, with the hindsight we now enjoy, it is perhaps those continuities that mock the constant references to Modernistic change. Certainly there was remarkable and radical change, but the Post-Modern movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, for example, manifest an indignant outburst of residual sentiment that mixed a contemporary dynamic with what many saw as some unpleasant body prompted to emerge from a submarine condition. And that sentiment continues to occasionally re-emerge. A building built in Piccadilly, adjacent to Emberton’s Simpson building of 1935 and opposite Shaw’s strident hotel frontage of 1905, was erected in 2007 as strangulated witness to the fact that PoMo and the body of sentiment informing it lives on, but with little semblance of the wit and inventiveness of Shaw, Joass, Belcher, Lutyens, Burnet, Green et al. The Hoover sits up a main road west out of London, typical of strip roadside developments at that time. The architects were Wallis, Gilbert and Partners who first produced plans dated 20th May 1931. With incredible speed, the drawings were developed and signed off in September 1931. Hoover moved into their new building in January 1932 although the inauguration luncheon was delayed until May 1933. The building is now - some might say appropriately - a Tesco supermarket, but listed and celebrated by academics, conservationists and the middle classes generally. Note the ‘frame’ in relation to Osbert Lancaster's satirical drawing of the ‘Modernistic’ style, page 301.

Above: the Odeon, Leicester Square: mutilated in 1967, somewhat recently restored, but still robustly suggesting something of what it was in 1937, when completed by Andrew Mather & Harry Weedon. The founder of the Odeon chain was Oscar Deutsch (1893-1941), a scrap merchant who opened his first cinema in 1928. By 1933 he had 26; by 1937 he had 250. Weedon, an architect from Birmingham and a former WWI pilot, designed some 300 cinemas.

Above: stamp issued in 1930 commemorating the transatlantic flights of the Graf Zeppelin — the Machine Age in action.

Above: Wren, on the facade of the RIBA headquarters building designed by Grey Wornum. (See page 314.)

Above: the building that was exciting many young English architects and disturbing many others - Le Corbusier's Villa Savoy, of 1928.

Opposite page: one of Lutyens better late-career, ‘grand manner’ facades (120 Pall Mall, SW1 for Messrs Crane Bennett Ltd (1929, now Banco Sabadell), sitting quietly in Cockspur Street, opposite New Zealand House (1957-63, by Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall & Partners).

Ashbee’s , whose wife Janet visited Holden and his partner in 1906, at their home in Hertfordshire, and found “bananas and brown bread on the table; no hot water; plain living and high thinking and strenuous activity for the betterment of the world.” Ashbee later said of him: “/ know most of the men in my profession in one way or another, and | know that the real architects can be numbered on the fingers of one’s two hands. Old Bodley is one, and Philip Webb, and Lethaby, and Harry Wilson, and unknown by his own name, ‘ghosting’ in the offices of another man, Charles Holden of whom perhaps | may have something to say some day.”

Above: the Law Society Library extension, 1914. Holden's approach is primarily concerned with massinc of a kind that was to become his trademark. The interior is less interesting. Left: detail of the facade — which has parallels with Joass’ Mannerism (see Joass’ Royal Insurance building, 1908, on page 261).

Above: Senate House, 1932, for the University of London — all that was constructed of a massive scheme. Bottom: the entry lobby of Senate House.

In 1942 Holden wrote a reply of protest to a friend’s remarks about industrialisation: “It comes simply to this: that | was born in an industrial age; that | was urged by a passion for building and for service; and that | have an invincible belief in the power of the human soul, the God in man, to rise above and master ugliness and desolating conditions. | had to exercise this passion even in the industrial age into which | was born.”

An American assistant in Scott's 1920s office commented that, ‘it was a small office, not more than 8 to 10 altogether, very informal and apparently unbusinesslike, but it was our pride never to have delayed a job from lack of drawings. Sir Giles designed everything himself, down to the smallest detail, but did not do a lot of visiting” (surely a novel attitude to project management). Scott was elected RA in 1922, and knighted in 1924, awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 1925 and the even more prestigious Order of Merit in 1944. From 1933-35 he was President of the RIBA.

Above: figure above the main door, by B. Copnall. Below: the two upper floors were added in 1957-8 by Wornum. Bottom: the bronze doors (by James Woodford; the

Bottom: the bronze doors (by James Woodford; the two side pillars are also by Woodford).

Whilst the structure and the Vitrolite cladding of the Daily Express (above and opposite page) is by Owens, the interior of the lobby was designed by Robert Atkinson, with plater reliefs by Eric Aumonier.

He was born in Tottenham, was educated locally and, in 1907, he took an apprenticeship with the Metropolitan Electric Tramways Company whilst simultaneously attending evening classes at the Northern Polytechnic Institute, from which, in 1911, he graduated with first- class honours in engineering. Now, at about the time Country Life was publishing Lutyens’ works, Williams started work in the field of prefabricated concrete engineering. He then worked briefly for the Indented Bar and Concrete Engineering Company and, in 1912- 16 for the American-owned, Trussed Concrete Steel Company, first as senior designer and afterwards as chief estimator. In the former capacity he designed his first building, a six-storey cabinet factory for the Gramophone Company (later EMI) at Hayes, Middlesex. But most of his responsibilities concerned bridges, docks, reservoirs, and industrial plant. In 1916-17 he worked for the Wells Aviation Company, designing a flying boat; then in 1917-18 he was chief engineer at the Admiralty shipyard at Poole, where he built reinforced concrete lighters and tugs.

‘Gate and Ward worked their way from New Zealand in 1924, studying at the Bartlett (1924-6) and later establishing a partnership with Lucas (1933), who had studied at Cambridge and married Connell’s sister. Their key work is High & Over, Amersham, Berkshire (1929). The partnership was dissolved in 1939.

Lubetkin made several exploratory trips and, in 1931, was even offered the commission for a private house in Hampstead (which proved abortive). However, in 1932 — together with six harvested graduates of the Architectural Association — he formed the Tecton partnership. He was, of course, the dominant partner. John Allan, Lubetkin’s principal biographer, tells us: “His belief in building design as an instrument of social progress was underlaid by a profound appreciation of architecture’s rational disciplines and emotive power. His Marxist convictions and his experience of the Russian Revolution implanted high expectations of architecture's role in transforming society, both through the provision of new and relevant building types — ‘social condensers’ [a distinctly Cedric Price concept] - and through its aesthetic capacity to project the image of an oncoming better world. Lubetkin’s buildings were characterised by clear geometric figures, technical ingenuity, and intensive functional resolution. He dissociated himself, however, from the contemporary doctrine of functionalism, and

This page: The Bevin Court building in Islington (130 dwellings), near to Kings Cross, is far less strident than the later Skinner, Bailey & Lubetkin buildings. The central stair is especially impressive and the facade is indicative of Lubetkin’s compositional concerns. The four-storey Holford House is a part of the same scheme; the two-storey Amwell House was added by the same practice 1956-8.

Below: Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, a remarkable expression of a complex section a la Le Corbusier.

It was also at this time that Gwynne won a competition to design a large restaurant for the Festival of Britain. Another restaurant built near to the Serpentine in Hyde Park was recently demolished (one remains). Meanwhile, his practice flourished and included many new houses, residential conversions and the like for actors and celebrities.

Above: the bar at the Royal Festival Hall, from the official record, 1951. Regrettably, the recent refurbishment by Allies & Morrison filled-in this dropped area around the bar which had a peculiarly strong impact upon surrounding areas (health, safety and disabled access is quoted). Above: the bar at the Royal Festival Hall, from the official record, 1951. Regrettably, the recent refurbishment by Allies & Morrison filled-in this dropped area around the bar which had a peculiarly strong impact upon surrounding areas (health, safety and disabled access is quoted). ndrew Derbyshire, once a well known post-war English architect, reminisced that, “When | left the AA [the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture] in 1951, fired with enthusiasm to build the welfare state, | sought, like most graduates, to join the public service. We thought of private practice as money-grubbing, unfitted to pursue the ideal of social architecture.” Similarly, Ron Herron, a member of the Archigram group, another well-known and respected architect of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, went to meet his maker proudly knowing that he had never worked for a speculative developer. And one of the more prestigious figures of those years, Leslie Martin, appears to have built upon his success at the Festival of Britain in 1951 by taking on large planning consultancy projects and handing on their development and execution to young architects he worked with in his studio and at

Above: Archigram Eight, 1968: ‘Popular Pak Issue’, including description of an Archigram exhibition installation in Milan (a ‘Milanogram’) on the theme of “personal choice that one can have over one’s environment and the ways in which new combinations of parts can catalyse that choice.” The ostensibly satisfying reassurances of neo-Platonism had at lasi been superceded by hedonistic consumerism. The issue's editorial claimed that, in the future, “we can take advantage of techniques like market research, high- stress technology, consumer-assembly but make sure that the context for them breaks out of the limited barriers of taste, town-planning and the various mystiques invented by so-called ‘experts’ — the latter being of poini of populism that was almost a throw-back to an Arts & Crafts anti-academic sentiment bearing echoes of Adoli Loos’ scathing voice. However, Loos would hardly have shared an enthusiasm for the sentiment that the future was to be bottom-up, not top-down. Anything resembling Shaftesbury’s (dreary) notion of taste was utterly rejected; all that Wren had deemed to be (hedonistically) creaturely, arbitrary, material and mutable was to enjoy a Futurist embrace. Architecture and architects had to dump their baggage and adapt to the circumstance oi Pop.

Despite its early 1960s refronting, the addition of é surrounding concrete deck and a certain degree o sanitising during the RFH's recent refurbishment, i remains one of London’s most important architectura works. Above: the river frontage. Below: the soutt facade. Left: Cullen image and section through the auditorium, from the Official record. Bottom: the refurbished interior, beneath the auditorium.

Above: photos by Leslie Collier, 1951, of the riverside and south frontages of the RFH.

Top left: overall view of the British Library. Scott's hotel building is on the right. Left: typical section, indicating how the book stacks are deeply underground and Wilson made extensive use of top-lighting. In true British tradition, he was knighted in 1998, upon the Library's completion.

To get onto the Barbican deck pedestrians have to negotiate perimeter ‘gateways’ that self-consciously

fated Robin Hood Gardens social housing project at the north end of the Isle of Dogs (1968-72), and the sublime Economist group of buildings in St James (1959-63). The ‘streets in the air’ of the former was never satisfactory and nowadays merely another monument to how badly architects with good intentions could get things wrong during that period. In contrast, the Economist group is Listed Grade | and remains a superb work. They should have stuck to Culture. This page and opposite: the Economist group. Above is a view from St James. Below is a view from the opposite side; the tallest tower is on the left.

Top: diagram of the Economist group. St James’ is on the left hand side. Above: Mies’ cladding at the Seagram Building, 1958, and how the Smithsons handled a similar problem (in a neo-Mies manner) at the Economist. Opposite page top: the cladding of the office tower.

If Robin Hood Gardens is a late example of gritty, ‘60s inner London borough social housing values offering a sentimental nod toward the ostensible romance of packed, working-class East End streets (now raised in the air), then the speculative Span developments represented a middle-class counterpoint: the Outer Borough suburban dream for those enjoying the good life of Costa Brava holidays, the kids in a good local comprehensive school, a Morris car, Modernist tastes leaning toward the novelties of Heal’s and Habitat furniture, and a lifestyle that was implicitly conservative (with, perhaps, a touch of liberality). The former was in the tradition of urban renewal, charitable housing trusts and the first LCC social housing estates which sought to address urban poverty and deprivation. The latter was in the tradition of middle-class Arts & Crafts values, middle-class growth and its affluence in the late Victorian period (engendering Queen Anne fashions), and also those gentrified cottages satirised by Osbert Lancaster, now urbanised as terraced town houses set within an ‘urban village’. High density apartments in tall concrete was what the state provided; houses was what everyone — in every class — desired. Here was culture and Culture: one as a way of life, the other as pretension and aspiration; one addressed by welfare state policies and the other by the market. While the ill-fated Robin Hood has been layered with (usually)

Now and Ungless represent the tail end of a long programme of social housing values in London: architects with an agenda distinctly different from the Smithsons, Neave Brown, Hodgkinson et al — even from Cullinan, and Darbourne and Darke, although all these architects shared an underlying set of concerns. Intent, however, was rarely the issue; it was how that intent was to be given form within a broader context of prevailing socio-economic values. And, with Neylan and Ungless, that meant a return to the neo-vernacular. Neylan was born in London (son of an employee of the Bank of England) and was to study architecture at the Wimbledon Art School and Kingston School of Art (1948-54). Ungless was born in Ipswich (son of a miner and master butcher) and became articled to Johns Slater and Haward (1952- 54) and attended the Bartlett school of architecture (1957-9). He then worked for Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (where the met Neylan), Gnecchi Ruscone in Milan, Bernhard Hermkes in Berlin, and Denys Lasdun in London. Neylan worked for Chamberlin Powell and Bon, 1954-61, before starting his own practice, and later (in 1966) joining together with Ungless when they won a competition for 270 dwellings in Harlow New Town. Perhaps their best and most indicative housing schemes are in Southwark. With hindsight they suggest a suburban romanticism (‘a homely feeling’) arguably inappropriate to an inner London context. But that, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was their point: the opposite of the Barbican, Keeling House, Alexander Road, Robin Hood Gardens, the Brunswick Centre, Lillington Gardens, Branch Hill, etc. Unfortunately, the N&U schemes have slowly transmogrified into a local DIY store vernacular undermining any vestiges of Modernist sentiment which Neylan and Ungless gently insinuated.

Above: G.E. Street's St James-the-Less church at Lillington Gardens (its original intent and atmosphere somewhat buried beneath contemporary modes of usage that would probably have shocked Street).

Below: Branch Hill, Hampstead, inspired by Mediterranean hill towns and how other, contemporary Swiss architects were interpreting this theme on sloping sites. Hidden away, it is a fine scheme.

Above: the National Theatre. Below right: the RCP, at Regents Park. Below left: the University of London Institute of Education.

Below: composite views to the street front and south (garden) side.

Below: the National Theatre today - an old lady being given a temporary make-over for a consumer carnival (the make-overs made inside are permanent). The umbrellas on the terrace are a thin parody of what Lasdun was ultimately suggesting for his river / promenade / building equation that has found it difficult to adapt to changing consumer notions of what it means to go to the theatre. Lasdun’s vision was of “space, walls, light’, with nothing between the theatre and people's experiences of the drama on stage. Changes at the entry area (by Stanton Williams) have not been kind to Lasdun’s schematic concept.

Above and below: the flats off St James. Lasdun’s East End cluster block of 1954 and the luxury St James’ flats of 1958 are, of course, related designs, although their tenants and locations could not be more different. The somewhat implausible community concept of ‘streets in the air’ in the former were matched by a paid porter at the door in the latter. And, at St James’, the section provides extensive balconies and grand double-height spaces unaffordable in Bethnal Green. It is somewhat ironic that the latter is now also private. Lasdun’s characteristic stratification is an aesthetic theme of both designs.

Above: the Keeling House ‘cluster block’, now privatised. Below: Milton Gates, all glass offices in the City (a very uncharacteristic scheme).

Above: the Swiss Cottage Library. Left: Swiss Cottage Library as refurbished by John McAslan. Below: 50 Queen Anne’s Gate. Holden's Broadway building for London Underground is across the road. The Knightsbridge barracks are around the corner.

Above: Phillip Powell and John Moya In 1951 the couple won the competition for the Skylon at the Festival of Britain: a symbol of hope when “everything except hope was strictly rationed’, as Powell put it. Later work in the practice (what, in 1960, Banham described as ‘gentlemanly’ modern design: “Nice, modern and British?) was dominated by hospitals but included notable residential work in Cambridge. Young architects working in the practice included Richard Burton and Paul Koralek (later ABK), James Gowan, and Richard MacCormac. However, what Powell described as the practice's ‘pragmatic modernism’ was to become unfashionable in the 1970s when names such as Foster and Stirling were coming to the fore. Characteristically, neither Powell nor Moya was interested in pursuing commercial work, particularly speculative office schemes, and the Miesian office block located on top of the Museum of London was not a building of which Powell was proud.

Top: Robert Matthew. Bottom: Johnson- Marshall. Sir Stirrat Andrew William Johnson-Marshall 1912-81

Above: Hillingdon Civic Centre - a 1970s work of emergent successors at the practice of RMJM during an era suddenly unsure of the Modernist idiom and returning to picturesque and Arts & Crafts themes, now on the level of civic design. Opposite page: in contrast, New Zealand House,

Extant London works of GMW include: - Castrol House (now Marathon House), Marylebone Road, 1955-60. A classic podium-and- tower equation; 15 floors. (In collaboration with Casson Condor. Later reclad and spoilt by a later GMW generation.) - Commercial Union (now Aviva Tower), tees Gee

Above: 150 Leadenhall, with 6-8 Bishopsgate behind. Below: the CU building seen from Lime Street, with the Lloyds ‘86 building to the left (what is fundamentally another standalone tower and piazza building, but with a residual piazza reduced to the status of a ‘concourse’).

idmore Owings & Merrill's Lever House, on Park ‘Avenue, in New York, was completed in 1950- 52 and was a Modernist icon of enormous influence, seeing to satisfy two demands: the purity of a tower statement, seen at a distance; and a podium block that aligns itself with the street and provides architecture at, as they say, ‘a human scale’. Two outstanding London

Alford was the son of a factory worker and had studied at Sheffield University from 1944-52 (a period interrupted by three years in the RAF) and came to YRM as his one and only job. He was made partner in 1958, Senior Partner in 1975 (after working for nearly ten years on the Warwick University project with Rosenberg, and the Middle East, Berlin, etc. But it all came to grief after an ill-fated flotation on the stock market in the hedonistic heydays of the late 1980s when architects (after changes affecting their self-regulation) thought they could get rich by drawing in City investors. This all changed with the arrival of the recession. First Alford and then, two years later, Henderson, withdrew into timely retirement. Work-loads fell, returns could not meet shareholder's expectations, and a break up of the multi-disciplinary practice began, ending with a middle- management buy-out in 1997 that produced a third generation practice which still survives and continues the firm’s name. Chairman in 1987, at which time Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall became simply YRM). He was made CBE in 1984, and retired a few years later. If Alford was the man in the duffle coat, Henderson (b.1920) was the man in the tailored suit, being the son of an Edinburgh banker who studied at the school of architecture there, did his ‘year out’ with Basil Spence and enjoyed the usual extensive European tours before starting work in London in the early 1950;s on housing projects in the firm of Armstrong & McManus. There followed National Service which included one year in Egypt (where he learned to sail, as well as travel in the Middle East), and a ‘call-up’ immediately afterward, going to Suez. Upon his return, he found work conditions still rather bad but managed an interview with Yorke. Alford had arrived a few months earlier.

Above: Seifert’s turn to granite, at 19-22 Alfred Place (Whittington House; 1972), one of the best examples of his firm’s work. Left: the former NatWest Tower, with 150 and 6-8 Leadenhall to the right (the building on the opposite corner, left of the photo, is by Jestico Whiles, 1988, just after the nearby Lloyds building was completed by Richard Rogers).

was perfect. Within this scene, Archigram, appeared to give architects a new kind of voice, to suggest a value agenda that locked them firmly into the desires characterising the vital heart of the consumer economy and to promise a future of relevancy and legitimacy free from what Banham referred to as historical ‘baggage’. Not that their agitation was intellectual: this was purely instinctive stuff. However, there is a (dreary) issue at the heart of celebrating Archigram: is expressive fantasy a legitimate basis for a Gold Medal? This is hardly a trite question and one sees it posed when comparing the two strongest members of the group — Cook and Herron.

One of Herron’s most famous proposals was for a ‘walking city’ (1964) — a marvellous fantasy of something like an aircraft carrier on legs stomping the planet. But its provocative contrast was to be the charged magic of something it perhaps inspired: the ‘walking castle’ of Diana Wynne Jones’ novel (Howl's Moving Castle, 1986), made into a film by Hayao Miyzaki in 2004. As translated by Miyzaki this wonderful, magical, bumbling beast (above) arguably belongs to a tradition of the romantic, picturesque and mythic — certainly to a world of dreams that is alien to the mechanistic and consumerist heart of Archigram’s architectural fantasies, speaking of an alternative set of values.

Bottom: MacDonald’s in its architectural heyday (Buffalo, mid-1960s) — all signage, wrapping and disguising a cheap ‘n’ cheerful shed, as opposed to merely juxtaposing sign and shed. Below: the ‘suburban strip’ in Los Angeles, with the cheap sheds plus expensive signs celebrated by the likes of Banham and Venturi. Beyond the drive-in, ‘strip’ aspect of West Coast architecture, architects on their Grand Tour (such as Farrell, Foster and Rogers) would travel from the east Coast via Chicago to seek out the works of Eames, Soriano, Schindler, Ain, Lautner, Ellwood, Neutra, Jones, and the California Case Study houses promoted by John Entenza.

Below: an elliptical geodesic dome - a typical experiment in dome-making of the late 1960s/early ‘70's which extended Fuller's investigations and, in some ways, is at the beginnings of the distorted mathematical building shapes that have now become so familiar (see the Gherkin in the photo opposite, a building whose form strangely compounds such geometries with military and erotic associations).

Two other fascinating figures of the period are Sir Terry Farrell and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw — partners during the 1970s (until 1980) and, in the 1990s, respective and opposed representatives of Post-Modernism and the High-Tech. These architects are now the old, established men of the profession. They remain prominent London architects, but each is in that transitional stage during which a younger generation is taking over the reins and having to do battle with other practices who sometimes Norman Foster has had a major impact upon London’s fabric in the post-Millennium period, but his practice’s output enjoys none of the consistency of the Rogers’ output, reflecting its huge size (over 400 chartered architects) and, the challenges of control. The practice’s most impressive London work is perhaps projects

enjoy the continuity of acronyms or are now themselves established mainstream figures such as Bob Allies and Graham Morrison, Will Alsop, Zaha Hadid, and David Chipperfield — the latter two without any (or any significant) London work.

Below and opposite: the Gresham Street speculative office building is a rare example of a City building with an informal entrance, one that has been cleverly design in relation to an existing former graveyard that fronts the site. Much of the architectural presence and expression of the building is also at this front end — particularly in the form of a typical acrobatic structural gesture that is again without precedent on such an office building (the entire front end is suspended). The outcome is a mix of the gestural and the considerate that produces a simple (but again rare) entry sequence: street/lobby/glass ift/ view out to the City from the floor lobby/office area. It is simple and it works.

Institute, 2007. Architecture with clarity and a (now) rare exercise in sophisticated tectonics.

Below: the Grandstand at the Lords cricket ground equals its Hopkins precedent (directly opposite) in structural virtuosity, providing structure-free views of the action on the pitch.

Above: the interplay of a remarkable historic structure and Farrell's equally remarkable shop fronts at Tobacco Dock. The development currently stands moth-balled and unloved. The first office was in the basement of Farrell's Canonbury home. The second was in Fitzrovia, where Archigram briefly rented a room. (This was before everyone went to Clerkenwell; John Winter and Foster had an office up the street; Cedric Price was a few blocks away.) Both partners taught part-time at the Bartlett, Farrell also at the AA. The first significant job — the student hostel — came through Grimshaw’s uncle. Grimshaw worked on the add-on tower of bathrooms and Farrell on the main building conversion — a pattern that continued through the fifteen years of their partnership.

Above: Villiers Street side of Embankment Place. Below: Embankment Place.

This page: the Sainsbury Wing to the National Gallery. (Photos below courtesy of VSB).

Opposite page top: the Ionic Villa, one of a set along the Regent's Canal, Regent's Park. (Note the security devices — high-tech has no stylistic loyalties.) Centre: the Gothik Villa. Bottom: Richmond Riverside.

principal facade); the loading bay is as well designed as any other part. And its principal parts (especially the elaborate, load-bearing facade game that was an answer to Prince Charles’ complaints about thin-skin buildings) is eminently ‘readable’. However, later work, such as Portcullis and the restaurant in St James’ Park, merely seemed to confirm the impression that — no matter how impressive the detail was — there was a lapse at issue: a loss of intent and nerve; no longer a concern to surprise and even shock, to gesturally demonstrate novelty. The Hopkins’, it seemed, had matured.

Above: Bracken House. The Hopkins team had decided to keep two old brick wings, convert them and add to them. And he played strange games with the facade of the new parts. Fans were shocked. It was confusing: why wasn’t it all new? Why was the facade not slick glass? Why did it play hierarchical and overtly contextual games? The scheme was received as a form of heresy. If fact, itis distinctly within the Modernist tradition. There is, for example, no ‘front’ and ‘back’ in the sense that Post-Modernists were then enjoying (a more traditional architectural approach that dispenses with the need for sartorial show once one turns a corner from the

Below: the Schreiber House, adjacent to Hampstead Heath, described by Gowan as having ‘a Scottish puritanical exterior and a concentration of effort on the interior which is preoccupied with the tiniest detail.”

owan began in partnership with Jim Stirling in 1956, when the latter, frustrated at being unable to get a scheme of houses at Ham Common through the planners, called upon Gowan’s advice. They were in partnership until 1963, the year the engineering faculty building at Leicester University was completed. The partnership was then dissolved, with Stirling becoming an international celebrity and Gowan fading into the background as the architect's architect of those in the know — a man of immense talent and remarkable precision in his work.

Above: the Clore. The meeting between old and new, where Stirling clearly enjoys the game of picking up selected aspects of Sidney Smith’s 1897 building as informants of his own facade design. A similar game is played at the other end of the facade, now in relation to the only remaining building of the hospital once here. Below: the garden view to the principal facade (with

the foreground area modified by Allies & Morrison from soft to hard landscaping). Here, Stirling is perhaps an architect frustrated by the political machinations of internal gallery arrangements, withdrawing to a place where he can get on with what he wants to do and play games no one can object to: after all, this is Stirling the genius at work. the only remaining building of the hospital once here. Below: the garden view to the principal facade (with

Above: The Royal Opera House project (which lasted sixteen years) confronted Dixon Jones with innumerable problems, not only in terms of the brief but also in terms of a rationalisation of new and old, and quite disparate urban conditions around the building. The Covent Garden facades prompted a reinvention of Inigo Jones’ arcades as a shopping occasion (with the addition of an upper loggia), and each of the other facades (including E.M. Barry's of 1858) was dealt with in a different manner. The net result — filling an entire urban block — is inventive, clever, hugely impressive and has its moments, but possibly bears the weight of its long gestation period (as the British Library). Later, Wilkinson Eyre added a rather acrobatic twisting bridge between the old building and an adjacent block (below).

Above: Tower Bridge House (former K2), a building that fits into a family of designs produced by the Rogers practice. It bears a marked similarity to the strategy of identity given to Channel Four, but the general design strategy of these buildings, at 88 Wood Street and the Lloyds Register of Shipping (below) is rooted in what was established for the Lloyds ‘86 building in the mid-1970s. In essence, a typical schema seeks to establish a rational constructional heart at the centre of the site, taking up the residual site geometry (around the perimeter) with lifts, escape stairs, and services. At Lloyds Register this strategy is contained within a perimeter of surrounding buildings and even by a former graveyard that forms the entrance courtyard.

Above: The transformation of the British Museum took place around the Victorian British Library drum that sits at the heart of the building's central court; circulation was entirely reorganised by the new court roof and additional space was provided beneath the court and around the drum. This was the Foster team at its best, but (under their leadership) it is arguable that the real heroes of the project were the engineers, Buro Happold. By late 2007 Foster had withdrawn from a strangle-hold on practice ownership (structured in marked contrast with the culture of the smaller Rogers’ practice). External investors had been brought in and the partnership extended. Foster was perhaps exiting to live as a tax- exile in Switzerland and fly gliders and the 747’s he is qualified to make airborne - what he once referred to as his favourite building.

Above: 100 Wood Street — not the finest of Foster's works, but one of the more interesting simply because of its inconsistencies and mix of strategies on different facades. The east facade is top (with diagrid roof); the west facade is below (note the redundant and theatrical huge steel, canted ‘props’). Both work in their disparate contexts (Wood Street as the eight-storey north-south axis of the old Roman fort; the other side adjacent to a former graveyard).

Above: the spectacular stair at the Asprey shop. Below: the grand hall of Canary Wharf Jubilee Line station (Arup engineers). Right: Foster's ‘blade of light’ concept that served as the basis of Arup’s engineering for the Millennium Bridge.

Opposite page: the office building at 10 Gresham Street, in the City, at the bottom of Wood Street (which was the north-south axis of the Roman fort). This rather elegant and well proportioned building fills the urban block and has a central atrium, with escape stairs ai each outer corner (in addition to internal cores). It is conventional steel frame, with permanently shutterea decks. The interesting thing is the cladding: Mies in New York and Chicago, reinvented as aluminium profiles that look as if they might be steel. The reflection in the facade is Terry Farrell's Alban Gate building at the other end oi Wood Street (adjacent to other buildings by Rogers and Parry).

Ross Anderson

The Journal of Architecture, 2016

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

The Good Metropolis: From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture

Alexander Eisenschmidt

The Good Metropolis, 2019

Architecture has always been engaged in a dialogue with the city--a relationship often dominated by tension. The architectural avant-garde in particular is commonly understood in its opposition to the existing metropolitan terrain (architectural form vs. urban formlessness). This book, however, unearths strands of thought in the history of 20th-century architecture that actively endorsed and productively engaged with the formless metropolis. Revisiting early experiments that question the city/architecture dichotomy, Eisenschmidt reveals how the formless metropolis has long been a prevalent force within architectural discourse. The works analyzed span almost an entire century: They range from August Endell's urban optics and Karl Scheffler's metropolitan architecture in Berlin, through Reyner Banham's motorized vision of Los Angeles and Situationist performances in Paris, to OMA's city architectures and Bernard Tschumi's cinematic urbanisms. The author constructs new narratives that reposition architecture vis-à-vis the city, by exposing hidden histories. He uncovers architecture's continuing interest in the formless city and elucidates our current fascination with and anxiety about ongoing urbanization, revealing the "good metropolis" that was there all along. Reviews: "The Good Metropolis brilliantly explains how the formless, unpredictable, unknowable, and out-of-control metropolitan condition--seemingly the assassin of architecture and of "the good city"--became an exhilarating resource for architecture (think of the enormously influential work of Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, for example). Moreover, the book's deep scholarship of Berlin reinstates that city as a veritable laboratory of modernization, alongside London, Paris, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, in effect combining two long-needed studies into one." Simon Sadler, University of California Davis "Modern urban history frequently grounds the postmodern recognition of the city's indeterminate dynamism in earlier planners' failed efforts to wring rational and geometric order from the rough currents of industrialization, rapid technological change, and unprecedented demographic growth. The Good Metropolis presents an alternative trajectory: a searching determination on the part of key figures over more than a century to see in the alleged chaos of the city alien and potentially productive orders otherwise impossible to envision. In this theoretically crisp and elegantly written essay, Eisenschmidt identifies the generative tradition of urban inquiry that designers forged to come to terms with, and to learn from, a human creation beyond human comprehension: the modern city." Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

'The Concept of Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form'

David Cunningham

Radical Philosophy, 2005

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century

Alexander Potts

History Workshop Journal, 1988

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

The City as Stage: Rebuilding Metropolis after the Colonial Wars

Luis Fernandez

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 1999

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

PERSPECTIVES ON THE CITY: FOR THE NON-CONFINEMENT OF THOUGHT

Irandina Afonso

Diálogos: revista del Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Puerto Rico., 2020

The current pandemic forced restrictive measures upon the population’s way of life and spatial confinement of citizens in their homes. This summons urban thought to reflect about the present but also, or mostly, the future of the cities. I will grasp this opportunity to draw a few lines of flight that depart from the streets’ silenced rhythm, and to deal with relationality as the city’s own constitutive matter. Cities are usually thought in a dualistic mode (understood as oppositional or even as an ontological dualism), and they actuallygather different elements: physical city, discursivity, human, non-human, subjectivity, sensitivity, body. To take into account this relationality and its current outbreak from invisibility (like a virus), can help transform and diversify theoretical and practical perspectives on the cities, where the majority of human population is currently living.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Fictions of the City Reviewed in the International Journal of Housing Policy

Matthew Taunton

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Hegemonic visions about urban spaces: "(Urban) Form follows (urban) function - (Urban) Function follows (urban) form

Gerhard Hatz

The ongoing discussion on the privatization of cities primarily focuses on the controlled spaces of gated communities in the outskirts just as in inner city neighborhoods. However, the physical gating of neighborhoods is increasingly being replaced by other, soft forms of inclusion and exclusion. Not being physically gated or walled has become one of the Unique Selling Points of communities designed according to the concepts of new urbanism. The production of hegemonic urban spaces in these areas is accomplished by tight regulations on the physical environment and “declarations of covenants”, stretching beyond the public governmental realm and into the control of personal lives. More subtle forms of control have evolved and have been transferred to privatized public spaces of inner city areas. The paper puts the discussion forward by extending the discursive context of soft urbanism to the strengthening strategic role of urban governments. The Historic City Center of Vienna serves as an example of converging policies set in effect by private actors and the city administration. In contrast to a privatization of the public realm, in the Historic City Center of Vienna power relations are continuously shifting towards the institutional networks of the municipality, becoming the major player, developer and investor in the production of the meaning, the narrative and the affects attached to the Historic City Center. The tightening regulations for the Historic City Center indicate a programmatic convergence between the concepts of new urbanism and regulations, enacted by the urban government. Empirical analyses, presented in the paper, reveal how power and control are increasingly exerted over residents, private entrepreneurs and private developers alike. The analysis is based on different multi-scaled approaches. The introductory section examines the accelerating deployment of regulations and control. General codes and directives are increasingly supplemented by more detailed, small-scale guidelines just as their objectives are shifting towards the production of ambience based on the thematic production of the city’s narrative. Akin to privatized urban spaces, power is exerted by the cultural reproduction of the Historic City Center, reducing the discrepancy between the imagined and the real city. The mediated translation of power is examined in the second section, critically dissecting the conceptualization of downtown redevelopment projects. Social control and control of social interaction are becoming unfolded by the continuous negotiations of the urban stakeholders. The incremental closing down of options in the public realm is supported by empirical data on the changing economic, social, cultural and institutional assets attached to the Historic City Center of Vienna. The urban functions of the city center follow the new urban form. The third section refers back to the broader conceptual framework of urban renaissance. The re-definition of the strategic function and power of the municipality in the context of urban renaissance is scrutinized in terms of power enacted by constraints of economy and globalization and raises the question of alternate solutions. References: Allen J., 2006, “Ambient Power: Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and the Seductive Logic of Public Spaces”, Urban Studies, Vol.43, No.2, 441-455 Bodenschatz, H., 2005, "Vorbild England: Urban Renaissance in Birmingham und Manchester", kunsttexte.de, No. 3/2005, 18 p. (http://www.kunsttexte.de) Fassmann H., Hatz G., Patrouch J. F., (2007), “The Historic City Today”, in Fassmann H., Hatz G., Patrouch J. F., 2007, Understanding Vienna. Pathways to the City. Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Wien-London-Zürich, LIT Verlag Füller H., Marquardt, N., R., 2007, " Soft Urbanism: Safeguarding the private city", research network: private urban governance, Paper No. 043, 11 p. (http://www.gated-communities.de) Hatz G., 2007, “Struktur und Entwicklungstendenzen der Wiener City“ in: Kretschmer I. (ed.), Das Jubiläum der Österreichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft. 150 Jahre (1856-2006, Wien, Österreichische Geographische Gesellschaft

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Portraits of the City. Introduction with Finola O'Kane

Gillian O'Brien

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Critical Distance: Walter Benjamin's Pathos of Nearness and London's Building Boom. In Black Box: A Record of Catastrophe, Volume 2.

Günter Gassner

How can we critically engage with capitalism in the 'urban age,' at a time when more and more people live in cities? How can we do so with regard to the built environment of a global city? I distinguish between two different approaches. The first starts from contradictions of capitalism such as the juxtaposition of overabundance and poverty and examines the ways in which these are represented in the cityscape. The second starts from a detailed exploration of practices of city making in order to explore the multiple different and often unexpected ways in which capitalist economies are justified and embedded in texts and images that are deemed to be socially meaningful. In other words, the first develops a critique of the capitalist city; the second allows a critique of capitalism through the city. These two approaches interrelate and overlap. However, their claims and scopes are not the same. Both have unique starting points and different directions of critique. In this essay I discuss these two approaches with regard to London's current tall building boom. At the time of writing, approximately 400 skyscrapers are in the planning stage or under construction in the city. Between fifty and eighty of them are towers that will be built by private developers not exclusively but to a large extent for industries that are pivotal for financial capitalism: banks, insurance and real estate companies as well as globally operating business service firms. These buildings are amongst the most visible manifestations of finance capital. Several of them are located in the City of London, which is London's historical core as well as a commercial center of Greater London. This essay, then, explores the relationship between history and financial capitalism or, better, the ways in which historiographical approaches are related to a critical engagement with urban processes under financialized capitalism. Put differently, I examine the ways in which urban historians criticize the visual impact of office towers on the historic built environment.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Andrew Payne

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2004

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

"Nora Pleßke: The Intelligible Metropolis: Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels"

Bettina Jansen

2015

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Urbanism beyond the City

Vyjayanthi Rao

Public Culture

The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

RETURN TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY Or about the extinction of urbanism (part 1

Miguel A Medina

Article, 2025

According to the UN-Habitat 2020 Population Data Booklet, the world population living in the existing 1934 large metropolises is 2.6 billion people: one-third of the world's population. By the year 2050 will be 66% of the world population living in cities. There are 8936 intermediate cities in the world and urban agglomerations today occupy 7.6% of land mass of the planet. These data are alarming due to the density of construction, the consumption of resources, emissions into the atmosphere, the amount of waste and a long etcetera that they imply. However, beyond all those factors that today are "integrated" into the "planning" of the city, there is the failure of architecture and urban planning, which around the world is evident in the daily lives of people, every time that, in contemporary urban conglomerates, the intersubjective relationship of their inhabitants, with the environment and among themselves, is almost impossible for the exercise of a truly free, fraternal, fair, equitable and happy life. Therefore, I call for a deep reflection on what I consider should be a return to the Architecture of the City and on the possible extinction of urbanism.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

The matter of cities

Per Otnes

2008

This important book revives core issues from age-old albeit recently half forgotten debates over urbanity, its problems and advantages. The author suggests that the city concept itself is ripe for being transcended, socio-material condensation serving as its successor. He further outlines a dialectics of today's hardships and comforts of city/condensation life, in the grand tradition of a Howard (1902), Mumford (1938), Le Corbusier (1935), or a Williams (1973). To-day's condensations are analysed as socio-material sediments, each with its political code. Sartre's thinking is the main theoretical basis. A number of hardships and their remedies are discussed and a proposal for reform outlined. As important, a whole family of new concepts are put to use, e.g. the sub-individual, the imaginary.-We analyse the local reviews of the book as a "howl of hurt habitus": While most objections are repudiated, we

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Shaping and urban world

Richard Rodger

Journal of Historical Geography, 1982

the handmaiden of private property interests. At the end of the book Sutcliffe points out that town planning provided a resolution of public and private interests that had counterrevolutionary implications : The years 1890-1914 were a time of growing social tensions in which the idea ofrationalizing the structure of cities acquired an unprecedented appeal. If lower rents, better housing and richer community facilities could remove the need for a major redistribution of income or wealth, then urban planning had a great deal to offer the middle and upper classes in addition to the simple creation of a pleasant urban environment. This is a provocative statement and an antidote to the complacency of much planning history but although implied in parts of the main text it remains a hypothesis tagged on to the end of the study not a conclusion to it. The issues Sutcliffe raises here about social and ideological control are clearly central to an adequate understanding of town planning and need to be argued through with close attention to particular planning projects, to details of economic and social developments and also to the current theoretical debate among historians on bourgeois hegemony. The theoretical implications of Sutcliffe's book are considerable, particularly on the question of the role of the State, but it is for others to pursue them. Sutcliffe's only theorizing-on the spread of planning ideas-is a mixture of art criticism, psychology and economic history and is the least convincing part of the book. But it did yield two delightfully absurd examples of international influence: the Teutonic turrets of Hampstead Garden Suburb and the "Beautify Bolton" movement. The originality of Sutcliffe's study is its international perspective. Its strength is a lucid and scrupulously researched reconstruction of the mentality of the early movement and here the author conveys something of the excitement of town planning before disenchantment and cynicism set in.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

L'ADC 3-4-5 (2014) The City in the Evolutionary Age (Foreword)

Lucio Valerio Barbera

Prior to the Second World War Europe’s ruling classes had no perception of the destiny of the modern city. This despite the fact that almost a century earlier Baudelaire had intoned the decadence of their most beautiful city. Proud of their ordered, authoritative, and often authoritarian capitals, Europeans saw history as a course predestined to create that miracle of civilisation exemplified by the metropolis of the old continent: wealthy, with a rigid social hierarchy, symbolically, physically and culturally rooted in history, firmly established at the summit of a providential, though still highly dramatic process. The metropolises of Europe were perceived, in the end, as organisms at the pinnacle of their conscious maturity and the height of their industrial and financial might. They appeared to posses an ability to self-regulate internal and external conflicts, imposing models of assimilation and reciprocal adaptation upon sources of imbalances, conceived by imagining the possible effects of disturbances and anticipating their transformations – thus adopting planning in the form of a series of direct systematic operations. Two years later, in 1939, Claude Lévi Strauss went much further; his direct experience with São Paulo, Brazil (and New York) convinced him that the modern metropolis, which he observed and which observed him with a thousand hidden eyes as he, a foreigner, crossed it, cannot be judged according to the parameters of architecture (thus also excluding those of planning), but with those of the landscape; and to the same degree that everything in the natural landscape is in transformation, simultaneously luxuriance and putrefaction, he claimed that «the cities of the New World […] pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage». With no intermediate stage: this is the most important clue, the tag that for the great anthropologist implicitly, though peremptorily, invalidated the idea that the cities of the New World are truly part of history. Lévi Strauss, who certainly learned to be a narrator of cultures and ethnographic contexts as Walter Benjamin learned to be a narrator of cities, froze – despite being captivated – in front of the metropolises of the New World, home to a coexistence between past and present, and between proximity and distance. Perhaps the time has come to truly study the world’s metropolises as individuals in the midst – or at the beginning – of their evolutionary age seeking to establish their stage of development and that of their parts, in the concreteness of reality. The term stage is used here to refer to a recognisable and well-characterised structure that is organised and relatively balanced – equivalent to one of the stages of Jean Piaget’s theory of development. This would make it possible in the most appropriate terms to solicit different urban communities to autonomously imagine the effects of on-going disturbances, accompanying them as they realistically express their fears and desires and anticipate the form and objectives of tangible operations to be implemented within the limits of a community’s available resources and level of organisation and the pedagogic capacities of the city and its government.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

MUTUALLY DISAFFECTING: THE DYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITY AND ITS CHARACTERS

Joni Tan

Having recognized the city as transcending its physical mores and emerging as more than a mere setting and backdrop for the story to unfold, this essay sets out to show that characterizations within three selected texts produce an aggregated and calculated image of the city which mirrors the psychological and sociological burdens of the 21st century. Further anchoring the essay are the chameleonic perspectives of a city and making a case for how a city’s depiction can be used to expound on the sensitivities of its characters.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Setting up the metropolis: Unpacking the historical spatial cultures of London and Manhattan

Garyfalia (Falli) Palaiologou

London and Manhattan constitute unique urban configurations which have claimed and conquered the metropolitan vision. This paper travels back in time to look for the foundations of these cities’ architectural and urban morphology. The study is focused on the architecture of the everyday, the vernacular buildings which collectively form the character of a city’s historical built environment. It discusses how both preconceived frameworks and emergent architectural decisions and societal rules have shaped the two cities throughout their spatial histories. Drawing evidence from historical and empirical data the analysis presented in this paper builds on space syntax research which investigates morphological processes in urban configurations. The paper looks at two contrasting cases of urban grids to contribute to the understanding of the way different spatial arrangements influence city form. The urban past of London and Manhattan is considered in terms of planning intentions, architecture, urban form and the embodied socio-cultural models and ideals. The approach emphasises the way architectural and urban scales were configured together to produce each city’s historical morphological identity and spatial culture. This stems from an effort to form a parallel understanding of both the building unit and the urban realm where this is situated. In this perspective, the discussion provides an overview on the one hand, of the building aggregation rules of the London terraced house and the Manhattan row house schemes; and on the other hand, the structure of the urban grid in each case. The aim is to shed light on the interplay of these two elements, underlining the challenge for any urban design approach: to tackle both buildings and streets along the lines of a unifying and diachronic spatial logic. The study considers the syntactical and morphological properties of urban space, looking at the building, the block and the city scales. The paper aims to highlight that both for London and Manhattan there exist inherent cross-scale organisational consistencies that hold the spatial cultures of each city together.

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

The form of the city

Stephen Read

downloadDownload free PDF View PDFchevron_right

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

Architects and Architecture of London

Sign up for access to the world's latest research

AbstractAI

Related papers

Related topics

Related papers

Abstract
AI