MASTER PLANNING FOR ARCHITECTURE: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DESIGNING BUILDINGS AS DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORKS.

By Keith Billings. London: John Wiley. 1997. [pounds]50

This is a curious book. Its subject is the design of large building complexes and it purports to offer a theoretical basis for the execution of this task in practice. At face value, this seems a worthwhile project at a time when so much of contemporary life is enacted in such places as shopping centres, large hospitals, airports, industrial parks, theme parks, even holiday complexes. But the problem is that its concentration on a particular view of theory' renders it almost irrelevant to the problems of contemporary development.

Almost 40 years ago the schools of architecture embarked upon the development of research as the necessary foundation of the academic discipline of architecture. In the United Kingdom some of the most significant work was done at the Bartlett and at Cambridge. At that time Prime Minister Harold Wilson had won a general election on the promise of fuelling 'the white heat of the technological revolution', and the welfare state was promoting extensive programmes of construction of housing, hospitals, new universities and so on. In this context much of the new research was, not surprisingly, placed upon the development of logical models and systematic methods for structuring the statement of the problem and shaping the solution in the realization of these projects. The literature derived from this research constitutes the core of Billings's theory. The problem is that this kind of theory is always provisional, never absolute. It must be subjected to and respond to the test of application. No attempt is made here to do this. The examples of practice are outdated and superficially presented. Why is there no reference to, for example, Kansai Airport or Potsdamer Platz? What 'theory' informed their design? Why is there no real discussion of the implicatons and potential of computer systems in the process of master planning, or any reference to the spatial implications of the Internet? And how can we discuss the nature of development in this century without any substantial reference to sustainability? Without any of this the book is sadly irrelevant.