Theme: Centenary, 1952-1973.

After a slightly exhausted period, the AR became as vigorous as ever, campaigning against mediocre philistinism and for what appeared to be ever more triumphant Modernism. But as that began to be questioned, the AR faced increasing troubles.

For a few years following the Festival of Britain, life seems to have been a bit tame. After the strong foreign flavour of the war and immediate post-war years, the accent was again firmly on Britain. The AR faithfully recorded the earnest efforts of architects and builders to speed up construction methods in a time of scarcity, but the results were often drab and utilitarian (at least to our eyes); perhaps the frivolity of the Festival had become cloying. The immediate post-war euphoria of victory and achievement wore off: for instance as early as 1953, Richards was decrying the 'failure' of the New Town programme, one of the key post-war environmental policies intended to make Britain a decent country for everyone to live in (p73).

Peter Reyner Banham (who did his PhD under Pevsner) joined in 1952. He made an almost immediate impact on the magazine which seemed to him rather fusty and run by elderly men. Trained partly as an engineer before becoming an architectoral historian, Banham brought what appeared to be an up-to-date understanding of materials and techniques to the magazine and he was soon writing polished polemics in defence of the architects of his generation. Perhaps the most famous (notorious?) article of his Review period was on the New Brutalism (p75), where he made dear that, in his sense, the term is derived from Le Corbusier's apophthegm that 'L'Architecture, c'est avec des matieres bruts, etablir des rapports e'mouvants',(1) and that, as well as defining an artistic territory for the Smithsons, he was defending their austerities against, among others, the Marxists who preferred 'picturesque detailing without picturesque planning' and who used Brutalism as a term of abuse for almost all Modernists.(2) Another young man, James Stirling was examining Corbusier's most recent buildings, the Maisons Jaoul (p74) and Ronchamp (p75) and cautiously coming to the conclusion that Mannerism and roughness were really all right. The others started in with new wind. A 1955 leader on Subtopia(3) attacked suburban sprawl with vigour that attracted national attention (p75).

Throughout the period, there were regular Townscape articles(4) castigating real and threatened horrors, suggesting improvements. And there was the 'Seeing Eye' series: gorgeous, mysterious photographs of strange and far-away places lavishly displayed on fold-out pages. In 1960, Banham started to edit the 'World' section, a monthly culling of more than 100 magazines which kept readers in touch with developments abroad. The major articles on contemporary buildings largely concentrated on (rather stodgy) British buildings to vary the diet.

By the early '60s, the world seemed a safe place for Modernism and the future assured: more of the same, but with a modest added measure of Corbusian Mannerism and one or two new exotic flavours. But change was on the way. In 1964, Banham left to go to London University as professor of architectural history. Pevsner finally retired from the editorial board in 1965. Hastings took the opportunity of disbanding the board itself. Corbusier died in 1965. Banham wrote a passionate tribute (p81): the architect who had for decades been the Review's cynosure was no more. The Montreal Expo of 1967 seemed to offer a new triumph of enriched traditional Modernism, but already critics were predicting the coming of 'software space'. And by 1968, Christian Norberg-Schulz was extolling Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction (p82) as a clarion call for making architecture the centre of architects' consideration.

By this time, not only was the world beginning to change, but the magazine was having to face internal problems. Advertising was beginning to move to the Architect's Journal and the AR began to face financial difficulties.(5) Hastings, whose behaviour had always been arbitrary and dictatorial (however brilliant his flashes) became ever more eccentric. He decided to try to increase circulation with a series of special issues called Manplan which set out to attempt to correct the ills of Britain with huge (and hugely expensive) photographic coverage of the problems (pp83,84) complemented by windy essays on suggested solutions. The series can now be seen as an analogy of the hubris that had grown within the profession during the previous two decades, when architects began to believe that they could build a new society by the imposition of enlightened professional endeavour. For its creators, Manplan was an even greater disaster than the architects' attempts to build the new Jerusalem (which after all often really did improve the lot of many poor people). The AR's circulation began to decline alarmingly and the magazine's financial position became much worse. By 1970 Hastings had lost interest in Manplan and spitefully sacked his faithful executive editor James Richards who had toiled (often brilliantly) for him through thick and thin for over 40 years (though Richards always refused to become involved with the hopeless Manplan).(6)

Hastings had one final fling. In June 1971, he published a special issue on 'Civilia, the end of Sub Urban Man'. It was supposedly the redevelopment of an industrial waste-heap in the British Midlands into a dense, exciting and complex city. The project was almost entirely visual, illustrated with collages by Kenneth Browne which had no sense of scale, tectonic integrity or even gravity. The pictures were supported by slabs of equally confusing and elaborate Hastings prose. As usual with Hastings' prescriptions for the betterment of his country, his last one had litre or no foundation in social, economic or political reality: image was all. Hastings largely withdrew from the firm and finally retired in early 1973. In his Parthian shot, he made Lance Wright editor of the AR, Sherban Cantacuzino executive editor and Colin Boyne(7) Chairman of Editors of the Architectural Press. In many ways, he left them with a poisoned chalice: a magazine that was losing money massively, and a disunited editorial team who were unable to agree on the way forward. P.D.

1952

Building schools

New forms of construction were busily explored to overcome the desperate shortages of the post-war period.

The planning and construction of these two schools was the result of close collaboration between the architects and the engineers who acted for the manufacturer of the prefabricated units. Three considerations determined the choice of system: speed of fabrication and erection, cost, and steel economy. The reinforced concrete units chosen required less than half the steel needed for the most economical steel construction and their cost compared favourably with that of steel, for erection as well as fabrication. To achieve speed of fabrication only ten different units were used and these were planned for either manual or mechanical erection. However, it was not the aim to design light units easily handled by one or two men, for modern methods of erection and site organization make the use of heavier and more economical units possible.

Prouve system

In housing, as in schools, huge volumes of construction were urgently needed. Prouve's system was revolutionary.

The urgent post-war need in France for easily manufactured and rapidly erected houses has produced a new constructional method using mass-produced metal components. The inventor of the system is the engineer, Jean Prouve, who is also the manufacturer. His brother, Henri Prouve, is consultant architect. A standard metal house of their design, the Maison Metropole was recently erected in five days. The system consists of one or more centrally placed portal frames, carrying a spine beam which is supported at either end by a gable beam on columns. The beams join the ends of the gable beams and longitudinal stability is provided by the rigid metal wall panels. The portal frame and beams are of steel sheet pressed to box section for rigidity and welded. Wall and roofing panels consist of double aluminium sheets separated by insulating material and supported by a light alloy frame.

The mother art

In a somewhat intemperate outburst, Frank Lloyd Wright attacked the creeping threat of 'collectivism'.

Architecture is the mother-art. Its national value lies in its natural value. No architectonic construction can exist outside the realm of significance whether so intended or not. Significance may be haphazard or conceived with vision but whatever it implies is always there to be read by human intelligence. The significance of certain buildings would, therefore, be either communist, fascist, or democratic.

There would be no escape from the consequences of significance though the builder himself might be unsure or unaware of what he was doing and, as the art of building is now in our nation, be merely executing a taste or trend without being aware of the nature of his act. On this basis the collectivism preached at certain of our colleges at present must be seen as the ideal collectivism of communism. The UN opus as a fascist countenance. Fascism and communism are at the poles of world dominion. Where then is the countenance of democracy? That inward vision of the relation and truth of things - an eye quick to note and distinguish, sensitive to design and to over-all harmony?

New towns fail

Surprisingly quickly after the War, it became clear that the New Town programme was not achieving its goals.

It is a sad moment to have reached when we have to acknowledge the failure of the new towns. But someone must candidly do so, and the politicians are prevented by feelings of loyalty to the administrations that have initiated and maintained them, and the architects and planners by loyalty to an idea which they do not want to appear to turn their backs on however weakly it is being. implemented in post-war Britain.

The fact that must nevertheless be faced is that the new towns have failed on three separate counts: socially, economically and architecturally.

Stranger abroad

Ralph Erskine's position between Swedish and English cultures quickly attracted critical attention.

The stranger within the gates often comes to seem more like a native than the natives themselves, and to many English students of recent tendencies in architecture Ralph Erskine must have seemed - with his command of surface and picturesque composition - the very epitome of the newly-risen generation of Swedish Empiricists. But this ability to bring constituent Swedish tendencies to what appears to us so convincing and definitive a realization, probably depends on his being a stranger like ourselves, for he is British and his education, training and qualifications are quite normal by British standards - born in 1914, he went to the Friends' School in Saffron Walden, did his professional training at Regent Street Polytechnic and is an ARIBA and AMTPI. It is a training which would have brought most men of his age to a newly-established private practice, or the first secure foothold on the establishment of a large public office. But Erskine subsequently found himself in Sweden, and his development has therefore been an unusual one for a man of his background.

School essay

The Smithsons' Hunstanton school was a milestone in the development of Modern architecture in Britain.

This is an extraordinary group of buildings. To an American architect like myself, and especially to a Mies van der Rohe follower such as I have been, it seems probably more extraordinary than to an Englishman or a Frank Lloyd Wright boy.

Most surprising they are allowed to build not a conventional school, not even a Hertfordshire plan, but something quite opposite to the prevailing trend: a formal, symmetrical, two-storeyed project. What a jury!(*) It is the usual fate of competitions here to have a safe, second ranking project as a winner simply out of the desire of the jury for unanimity. The scheme with the least faults wins and the startling innovation comes in second. If a strange design should somehow be chosen as first its fate is to be shelved until the programme is sufficiently changed for a safe architect to be hired out of hand. 'Radical prize winners never get built' is a safe axiom in this country. It would be interesting to find out how all these wonders come to pass in England.

The plan is not only radical but good Mies van der Rohe, yet the architects have never seen Mies's work. And though the Smithsons may not agree, much of the excellence of their work is a tribute not only to themselves but also to the genius of Mies van der Rohe.

* In fact, the scheme had a single assessor, Denis Clarke Hall

1955

Art for art's sake 

Le Corbusier's post-war work initially caused much confusion. James Stirling's essays were early steps to understanding.

Garches is an excellent example of Le Corbusier's particular interpretation of the machine aesthetic. The body of the house, built by quite conventional methods for its time, has skin-walls of concrete block rendered to a monolithic, poured or sprayed effect; an aesthetic for a structural system not yet in being. Yet while Garches is not the product of any high-powered mechanization, the whole spirit of the building expresses the essence of machine power. To be on the first floor is to witness the Mumfordian end product of twentieth-century technology, 'the silent, staffless power-house'. The incorporation of rail-road and steamship fabrication is decidedly technocrat and the integration of architecture to specialist requirements extremely considered as the boiler-house disposed like an industrial engine-room or the timber-strip flooring obviously laid by ship's carpenters. The type of detailing in synthetic materials here and at the Armee du Salut is almost the last of the steam-age period; crude maybe, it is nevertheless powerful. After this date, the number of synthetic materials per building increases, and, as at the Pavillon Suisse, the detailing becomes more refined but somehow less memorable. There is no reference to any aspect of the machine at Jaoul either in construction or aesthetic. These houses, total cost [pounds]30,000, are being built by Algerian labourers equipped with ladders, hammers and nails, and with the exception of glass no synthetic materials are being used; technologically, they make no advance on medieval building. The timber window-wall units may be prefabricated but as with technology one suspects that prefabrication must begin with the structure.

To imply that these houses will be anything less than magnificent art would be incorrect. Their sheer plastic virtuosity is beyond emulation. Nevertheless, on analysis, it is disturbing to find little reference to the rational principles which are the basis of the modern movement, and it is difficult to avoid assessing these buildings except in terms of 'art for art's sake'. More so than any other architect of this century, Le Corbusier's buildings present a continuous architectural development which, however, has not recently been supplemented by programmatic theory.

Technophilia 

Reyner Banham was always happy to prick established balloons with a critical approach based on technology.

Architects are frightened of machinery, and have been so ever since engineering broke loose from the back pages of Vitruvius and set up on its own. Even where they have paid lip service to 'the Machine' they have paid it to a simulacrum of their own invention; they have been prepared to do business with it only on their own terms, and only with those aspects of it which lie closest to architectural practice. When Adolph Loos hailed engineers, in 1898, as 'our Hellenes' he may have been speaking far less metaphorically that we have so far suspected, since his fellow-Viennese Otto Wagner had already looked to engineers to restore 'powerful horizontal lines, such as were prevalent in Antiquity.' Similarly, to admire the ranked cylinders of a grain silo was not so great a feat of visual athletics to those who had been trained to accept the lumpish columniation of the temples at Paestum.

The 'Machine Aesthetic' of the pioneer masters of the Modern Movement was thus selective and classicizing, one limb of their reaction against the excesses of Art Nouveau, and it came nowhere near an acceptance of machines on their own terms or for their own sakes.

Subtopia

Introducing the AR's attack on the reduction of everywhere to sameness, Ian Nairn prophesied disaster.

This issue is less of a warning than a prophecy of doom: the prophecy that if what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows. There will be no real distinction between town and country. Both will consist of a limbo of shacks, bogus rusticities, wire and aerodromes, set in some fir-poled fields: Graham Greene's England, expanded since he wrote in the 'thirties from the arterial roads over the whole land surface. Upon this new Britain the REVIEW bestows a name in the hope that it will stick - SUBTOPIA.(*) Its symptom will be (which one can prophesy without even leaving London) that the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.

* Subtopia: Making an ideal of suburbia. Visually speaking, the universalization and idealization of our town fringes. Philosophically, the idealization of the Little Man who lives there (from suburb + Utopia).

New Brutalism

Reyner Banham's notorious article introduced New Brutalism to a public that never accepted the proposal.

One cannot begin to study the New Brutalism without realizing how deeply the New Art-History has bitten into progressive English architectural thought, into teaching methods, into the common language of communication between architects and between architectural critics. What is interesting about R. Furneaux Jordan's parthian footnote on the New Brutalism - '...Lubetkin talks across time to the great masters, the Smithsons talk only to each other' - is not the fact that it is nearly true, and thus ruins his argument, but that its terms of valuation are historical. The New Brutalism has to be seen against the background of the recent history of history, and, in particular, the growing sense of the inner history of the Modern Movement itself.

New Mannerism

Stirling found elements of Modern Mannerism in Ronchamp chapel.

The desire to deride the schematic basis of modern architecture and the ability to turn a design upside down and make it architecture are symptomatic of a state when the vocabulary is not being extended, and a parallel can be drawn with Renaissance Mannerism. Certainly, the forms which have developed from the rationale and the initial ideology of the modern movement are being mannerized and changed into a conscious imperfectionism. Le Corbusier, proceeding from the general to the particular, produced a masterpiece of a unique but personal order.

1958

Seagram scene

Peter Smithson paid tribute to the encompassing vision of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

No other men have succeeded as have Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in building complete systems.

Their concentration is such that the nature of their systems is implicit even in the fragment. One has, for example, a perfectly clear notion of the sort of city and the sort of society envisaged by Mies van der Rohe, even though he has never said much about it. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Miesian city is implicit in the Mies' chair.

Le Corbusier's system is of course more familiar because of his constant reiteration of the part even his smallest objects play in his general scheme of things. And what validates both their systems is that they are conceived in the terms of the technology of their time and that both men have a capacity for rejection and reconsideration in the face of changing circumstances.

Structural bent

The new forms of structure seem to offer ways of adding richness to the plain fare of functionalist design.

The plain but wholesome dough of modern architecture is being flavoured with more and more currants: buildings with warps, waves, folds, droops and other unexpected shapes sharply outlined against the modular grid background. They are the shapes seen on graphs, on stress diagrams over an engineer's shoulder, and each gives a visual indication of a special structural principle. At the least they are helping to relax file stilted language of modern architecture. At the most it might be thought that they are tending to turn the movement back through a hundred years to start again following more closely to the track suggested by the Crystal Palace and the Galeries des Machines. But in fact they are on another track.

Despite their apparent diversity these buildings have in common that every one of them can be, and frequently is, called 'exciting'. But their principal motive was not to attract attention.

Neoliberty

There was a good deal of alarm about the state of architecture in Italy which was seen as a retreat from Modernism.

Paolo Portoghesi seems to have been the first to call the style of the Retreat by the apt term 'Neoliberty' as late as the end of 1958, but the Liberty content of the style has been clear from the start, and underlines the fact that this is not just an isolated piece of juvenilia (the Neolibertarians are all young) but something for which the whole body of Italian modernism must share the blame. For more than three years now, leading architectural periodicals in both Milan and Rome have been working over the remaining monuments of Art Nouveau in a degree of detail that bespeaks a more than historical interest. Works of Gaudi, Sullivan, d'Aronco, Horta, and the Viennese school ... have been described and illustrated even to the extent of the original drawings and colour-blocks of their exteriors, supported by texts that were far less expository or explanatory, than they were eulogistic and rhetorical.

Corb and time

Pevsner criticised Le Corbusier's contemporary work while calling for preservation of the '30s buildings.

Le Corbusier himself, incalculable as ever, has lately made his pact with the devil-nature and ushered her into his creations - not as a gracious contrast to the crystalline purity of his forms, as in the case of the tree inside the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau (or in the case of the waterfall in Wright's Falling Water) but as a partner on equal terms. However much Le Corbusier may protest against the desecration of his early masterpieces, his most recent ones, and especially the Maisons Jaoul, possess this same quality of the non-finito, the roughness, the sympathy with the accident, the licence for things to grow where they choose, with which nature is now trying to endow the early villas - Act of God, correcting act of Le Corbusier, you might say, or Act of God, improving Early Le Corbusier into Late Le Corbusier.

1960

Stocktaking 

Banham analysed the potential of technology and tradition in articles intended to identify 'what could be'.

Architecture, as a service to human societies, can only be defined as the provision of fit environments for human activities. The word 'fit' may be defined in the most generous terms imaginable, but it still does not necessarily imply the erection of buildings. Environments may be made fit for human beings by any number of means. A disease-ridden swamp may be rendered fit by inoculating all those who visit it against infection, a bathing beach may be rendered fit by removing land-mines left over from the last war, a natural amphitheatre may be rendered fit for drama by installing lights and a public address system, a snowy landscape may be rendered fit by means of ski-suit, gloves, boots and balaclava. Architecture, indeed, began with the first furs worn by our earliest ancestors or with the discovery of fire, it shows a narrowly professional frame of mind to refer its beginnings solely to the cave or primitive hut.

Mindless master

Meanwhile, Nairn presented a much more cautious approach to the results of unthinkingly applied technology.

In many ways the biggest problem for the second half of the century is whether man can win the war against the various technological tools which his extreme ingenuity has created in the first half. More and more, the struggle begins to look less like Communism versus Capitalism (this is a kind of family squabble anyway) and more like man versus his creations. Smog, insecticides, strontium 90, the misuse of penicillin, all seem to point in one direction - that man has fiddled a bit too much and too stupidly with the natural order and it is coming back and hitting him. Frankenstein is on the run from his monsters.

Fresh in Venice

The AR never forgot the qualities of the best works of the past. John Piper brought a painter's eye to Venice.

Venice appears to be indestructible, visually. Sketchers for hundreds of years have been trying to drain her dry of good looks, leering at every presentable feature, soaking up every trace of interest and beauty, slopping on the Venetian red, scratching away with the Indian ink, getting too much ultramarine into the sky, putting too many charcoal swirls to represent gondolas among the foreground washes. And as if the amateurs at every corner were not enervating enough, the professionals have kept at it full-time too, giving a new slant to the vision that each generation has soon learned to treat as its own. A city is as bold as brass that can outstare, within a hundred and fifty years, the searching glances of Turner, Bonington, Renoir, Boudin, Sargent, Monet, Manet, Whistler, Sickert, Kokoschka, Dufy, Masson and Sutherland. After a shower of rain in the hot and smelly season everything comes up clean-washed, and every early summer morning while the thousands of tourists are still asleep in their beds, and most of yesterday's paper and orange peel has sunk or drifted out to the lagoon, there it all is again, as fresh as if nobody had ever looked at it: St. Mark's sparkling like a million jewels in a new seam of an Istrian Quarry, the whorls on the Salute as crisp and white as if they were cut yesterday, ready to outshine everything and everyone, ready even to withstand the cameras that any minute will begin clicking away again like crickets on every hand.

Euston murder

The AR fought a vigorous but sadly unsuccessful campaign to save Euston Arch from government vandalism.

The great Doric arch at Euston is being demolished. Its destruction is wanton and unnecessary - connived at by the British Transport Commission, its guardians, and by the London County Council and the Government who are jointly responsible for safeguarding London's major architectural monuments, of which this is undoubtedly one. In spite of the Euston Arch being one of the most outstanding architectural creations of the early nineteenth century and the most important - and visually most satisfying monument to the railway age which Britain pioneered, the united efforts of many organisations and individuals failed to save it in the face of official apathy and philistinism.

1963

Townscape faith

As the Townscape campaign resulted in rows of bollards, the editors demanded a return to basic principle.

The Review has been preaching townscape for fifteen years now. Some of its readers are fed up with it, too many perhaps. If you count yourself one of these, then don't read on.

Because there is no middle way, no room for a compromise decision, or reservations. It is all or nothing. Either townscape is something which no place can do without, and by which every place has its being (as distinct from its existence). or it is merely fiddling with the floor while Hemel Hempstead burns and the motor-car multiplies.

The Review has no doubt. Townscape is something far bigger than individual buildings, modern architecture or indeed the whole professional idea of architecture and planning. It is simply the visible expression of collective life - not collectivized life - man growing together to make a higher organism, enhancing rather than destroying the individual lives comprised within it. In a century which bandies the word around like a shuttlecock, it implies true freedom. Freedom given back as a consequence of submission to the spirit of the place - the principle, stated by all those square mystics and the squarest mystic of all, that is a kind of transcendental common sense: he that loseth his life shall gain it.

Romantic, absurd, idealistic. Maybe. But not for a moment out of touch with the deepest desires of real human beings. And when the chips are down, what else is there? What else has there ever been?

Rapid transit

Banham, no car driver, hoped for new forms of personalised transport.

When the Buchanan Report says that traffic is a function of buildings, it touches a philosophical point of some consequence for urban rapid transit, because the objective of transport is to arrive at buildings, not generalized geographical locations, and to move from building to building, rather than district to district. Since the only access to most buildings is from an existing street, it is this consideration, above all others, that brought the private car into cities, and still gives the taxi or chauffeur-driven limousine the edge over all other forms of urban rapid transit. To emulate the convenience of street transport, door-to-door, is a licit aspiration for any new form of passenger-carrying installation, However, it is no longer tolerable for it to actually occupy street-space, and this conflict of ends and means has been one of the chief stimuli to the development of new types of rapid transit which are intended to resolve the conflict. But can they do so, without inflicting serious environmental damage?

Scale of action

In the '60s, size was all the rage and it seemed essential to understand the general before attacking the particular.

Perhaps the most important thing is to recognize the change of scale needed in our thought. The single town or city - even the metropolis - is now too small a concept to be useful. We have to think in terms of regions if we are to plan for twenty years ahead, and in still larger areas in planning for the end of the century. There is nothing impossible about this, so long as we face it, as has been shown by Doxiadis, by Jean Gottman in his study of the United States Eastern Seaboard, and most recently by Paul Delouvrier in the Paris Study. One consequence of looking at the picture in this way will be that the future of the countryside will no longer be regarded as something separate from the future of cities. We shall need to plan for the country and the city as one integrated operation. Human needs extend equally over both.

Vanished riches

Pevsner's review of Mario Praz's 'History of Interior Decoration' showed a gentler side to the scholarship.

He who writes like this of the privileged of the ancien regimes must be out of sympathy with the attitude of furnishing of today. But this is how he expresses it at the very end of his introduction: 'Old Europe, beautiful were the richly decorated salons of your palaces, the calm rooms of your old bourgeois homes, the rustic kitchens of your simple dwellings in the mountains; beautiful also was your furniture with its time-stained patina, your objects lovingly worked by generations of cabinetmakers, potters, and gold-smiths! We who have known all these things in their splendour, who have - if only for a day - made ours the life of so many cities that are no more, how can we forget? As long as there are four walls that still keep the aroma of that vanished Europe, it is among those walls that we wish to die.'

The formgiver

Le Corbusier had been the hero of the AR for decades. Banham paid a final moving tribute to his genius.

All genius is embarrassing, and never more so than in the immediate aftermath of death. Supporters of the deceased giant busy themselves with the public record to ensure that the good (in defiance of the normal entropy of reputation) shall live after him. Detractors, convinced that their hour has finally struck, emerge from the woodwork only to find that everyone is applying the law of de mortuis to the last letter of nil nisi bonum. When the dead genius has attained a measure of acceptance as widespread, total and unquestioning as that enjoyed by Le Corbusier, when his supporters are in such total command of the media of communications as were Corb's, the chances are that the festering resentments of the detractors, when they finally burst through the crust of conventionalized approval, will provoke a reaction so destructive of his reputation that it may take a generation or more to set the record straight ...

To drive down Sunset Boulevard is to be constantly reminded that men who never heard his name have been able to go to work on cliches borrowed at second or third hand from his notebooks. From him the modern movement in architecture learned most of its international language of architectural expression, and the fact that this language expresses practically nothing of interest for the second half of the twentieth century is the movement's fault, not his, and detracts nothing from his personal achievement in imposing it.

1967

The future city

The 1967 Montreal Expo was in many ways the last triumph of functionalist Modernism, but already new electronic systems were making an impact.

When you have got used to the excitement of a software space, it is impossible to be thrilled any more by the conventional space system. It is a difference in the scale of excitement. Secondly, as the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther said, 'the nature of the architectural surround is becoming more and more a factor in the compound of this nameless medium.' Similarly, a conventional space, however well designed, cannot compete with the thrills and effectiveness of the software spaces. These suggest what might happen when the limit has been reached with what can be done with the standard methods of designing interiors. In the same way that the new spaces are multi-media, so they are multi-purpose. The fun life has merged into the education system, and it is perhaps the influence of Expo that the medium has suddenly developed along didactic lines. To see Montrealers queuing up to learn about public health in Teheran at 9 o'clock on a Saturday night is to realize the potentials of the new methods. It makes you revise your ideas of what constitutes 'entertainment.'

Expo offers lessons about the purpose of a city, the co-ordination of a city, and the actual technology that can be used to achieve new ends. The difference between Expo and a normal city is a result of the powers that the central authority has taken for itself. It means that 'The city is a total system' in which for example all transit facilities are under one control. The fact that Expo was set up from zero means that the usual administrative divisions were not present; although branches were created, they were all under control of the Expo corporation. In a normal city there is no one on the side of 'us.' At Expo the ultimate authority is concerned with 'our' environment; 'total environment presupposes a total system.'

More or less

Christian Norberg-Schulz hailed Venturi's 'Complexity and Contradiction' as a turning point.

Architects' publications are at present dominated by studies on topics taken from sociology and psychology, economy and ecology, mathematics and communications theory. The only subject which, paradoxically, is missing, is architecture. (Not considering, of course, the direct presentation of new projects and buildings.) By the word architecture, I have in mind the concrete means an architect uses to solve the tasks he is facing, that is: architectural forms. Architects are obviously afraid of approaching this problem; it is, for instance, maintained that it would be irresponsible and egocentric to discuss 'form,' when a majority of the world's population is starving, and for the same reason it is said that we should stop talking about 'architecture with capital A.'

Venturi's observations ought to be carried further as soon as possible. His formal descriptions mainly follow the path indicated by art historians such as Wolffe, Frankl, Brinckmann, Wittkower and Sedlmayr. It is, however, possible to develop a more systematic theory of form, as a parallel to current system-theories in other fields. Venturi refers to Le Corbusier's statement that 'There is no work of art without a system', and he sometimes approaches architectural forms as simple or complex (combined) systems which reflect different functional structures. Only through a further development of this approach can our profession regain its foothold. We need more architecture, not less.

Adhocism

As his ideas on Post-Modernism began to crystallise, Charles Jencks toyed with a new fashion: Adhocism.

Any large building is subject to conventions of the moment; and when these buildings become bigger and bigger, the conventions grow exponentially. One way of coping with them is forced denial: to hide them behind a curtain wall as in the Shell building. Another way is to sacrifice them to some shared belief in universals. A third way, as on the South Bank, is to accept compromise and conventions as universal and then steer through and combine them as well as they can be. The virtue of adhocism is the virtue of ninety-nine per cent of the environment: it is lively, pluralist and immediately expedient. But the fault of adhocism is that it is not expedient in the long term; it is not radically inventive and searching for ultimate truth. It remains content tinkering with its own conventions, its own tool box, from which the ideal scientist is always trying to extricate himself with a new theory.

Man planned

The would-be revolutionary Manplan issues (p71) started with a bang in 1969.

'We face a change in demand so revolutionary that it has been called the replacement problem of the 1970s. But replacement of what? The backlog of outdated buildings, though important, is only half the problem. The other half - far more formidable - is the fact that 'values', like 'progress', are variables; so that doctrines that passed for iconoclasm at the beginning of the decade, by the middle look more like orthodoxy, and by the end, like reaction - cliche anyway.

Thus hard on the heels of one replacement comes another: the need to make new appreciations, re-think them in detail right down to the humblest moments of life-by-the-kitchen-sink.'

Shipshape

Hugh Casson, chief interior designer of the QE2, told of the strains of ship work.

Nobody leaves this battlefield without the scars. Everybody realizes that if anybody bleeds it must never be the ship. They must nurse her and cherish her as well as build her, for once she is launched she is theirs no longer. They know that a ship once on her own quickly becomes an individual with her own distinct personality. Neither the owners, nor the builders, nor the architects and designers and sub-contractors can create this personality, for it is a combination of many things, good men in charge at all levels, smooth management, courteous service - but they can help to form it or, even more easily, to frustrate its growth.

In the end all the technical skill and inspired guesswork, helped here by a fine company tradition and public affection bequeathed her by her two great predecessors, can do no more than give QE2 a good start. The final test is when at last she is on her own. A ship - to use Kipling's words - has to be 'sweetened' at sea: 'Lay your ears to the side of a new ship at sea', he wrote, 'and you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction thrilling and buzzing, whispering and popping ... like a telephone in a thunderstorm ... as all the bits and pieces of every size and weight and responsibility learn how to take individually or together the strains of movement'.

Only when she talks with one voice can she be said to have found herself and be able to bear the crown which we all believe to be her due.

1969

Manplan aims

Manplan was intended to 'restore the humanities' in an increasingly cold and alienating technological world.

The series of issues offers no magic solution, and avoids the language of political tracts. Instead it surveys in pictorial form the art of the possible by looking at what we have - or haven't but easily could have - in an unprejudiced way. It is not against technology but sees it as a means of supplying what we want. It represents neither novelty nor innovation, but the crystallisation of the priorities the Review has been establishing over a long period of time.

For by the restoration of what might be reasonably called the humanities the '70s could - and indeed may - provide a fresh vocation for Europeans in a more realistic kind of Common Market, wedded no longer only to thoughts of steel production. The real job of statesmanship is to release energy, not redeem debts or boost exports, fringe benefits that will do their own redeeming and boosting when the right kind of effervescence is generated, dispersing malaise. What is wanted now is a new image for the twentieth century in its third phase, which will unearth from beneath the lumber of war, napalm, famine, genocide, concentration camps, conveyor belts, population explosions, sonic booms and silent Springs, a mission - and a determination - to swing the new potential of technology, as revealed in the moonprobes, behind the real objectives of human society. The British are bad technocrats, good humanisers. Or were once. It could be a role.

Rome relief

Rome has posed intractable problems to planners for 2000 years. Briefly, they seemed capable of civilised solutions.

An exercise in urban conservation on a vast scale has been initiated in Rome by a group of architects and engineers, formed for the purpose and calling themselves Studio Asse. Their aim is nothing less than to relieve the increasing congestion of Rome, which is making it so inefficient as to threaten the habitable standards of the whole city, and particularly to remove commuter traffic from the historic centre. The method they propose is to create a counter-attraction in the form of a line of new developments - a string, as it were, of new nuclei - to the east of Rome, laid out for administrative and commercial use, which would provide a new centre of Government and business employment accessible from the residential suburbs and therefore capable of drawing out of central Rome a useful proportion of the thousands of office workers who flock every day into the present overcrowded city.

Cityfocus

Boston City Hall seemed a welcome precedent for a new generation of humane urban public buildings.

Kallmann and McKinnell have completed a most felicitous design for a system of new pedestrian ways which will link the new developments around their city hall to the historic core of the city around the rim of the Commons.

Whatever the ambiguities of its origins or contradictions of its design, the new Boston City Hall thus stands at the centre of a process of urban regeneration without parallel in American cities today.

Green Egypt

Hassan Fathy's experimental village in Upper Egypt can now be seen as a precursor to Green architecture.

Although it was as long ago as 1945-47 that Hassan Fathy rebuilt the village of Gourna in Upper Egypt, that exercise, unappreciated and obstructed as it was at the time, has become a classic. Its history, the frustrations Hassan Fathy experienced while he planned and constructed it and the village itself as it now stands on the western shore of the Nile, perfectly illustrate the difficulties that confront anyone who attempts to solve the problems of rural housing in an underdeveloped country in the only way possible - by exploiting that country's traditional skills and practices, reinforced where appropriate by modern technology but not supplanted by it, so that the maximum use is made of existing resources; and, what is nearly as important, so that continuity is preserved and the people rehoused do not feel they are living like strangers, denied the reassurance of a familiar setting.

Gourna may not have been an immediately successful project, due to no fault of Hassan Fathy's but partly to local obscurantism and even more to bureaucratic stupidity among the officials of an earlier Egyptian regime. But this does not prevent its being a model of its kind, both in conception and in the way Hassan Fathy set about its execution, and a quarter-century afterwards it well repays study and deserves emulation.

Rental values

A small sociological comment shows the AR editors' attitude to British working-class values.

The weekly rental on a 19in colour television set is [pounds]1.43. The average national weekly rental on a council house or flat is [pounds]2.23. So, of the households in Britain that sport such over-valued status symbols of consumer affluence as 'colour tv', the greater number will be spending per week half as much on their 'telly' as on their home.

Environment

In one of his last essays, H. de C. Hastings (de Wolfe) continued to call for inspired environmental initiative.

The aim of statesmanship - and for that matter environmental planning - is not to achieve a balance of payments but to release a race of activists from their chains and so spark off the energies that will create amongst higher things (like music and sailing) the fringe benefit of exports. In that cause could there be a better bet than Alexander's side-line, the founding of cities, designed in the British case to redress - quite literally - the rubble of the old. Remembering meanwhile that overspill exists anyway and has to be confronted, not by housing - that word should go on the index from now on - but by a major act of environmental reconstruction whose main lines will have to be laid down in this decade unless we want to say goodbye to England in the coming millennium.

1971

Venice in peril

As usual, Venice was threatened by commercial forces from the mainland.

A straightforward Italian politician asked straightforwardly yes or no would probably agree that politically the best thing that could happen to Venice would be that it would sink and the sooner the better.

This does not mean that they are just a churlish lot of Philistines; but Venice in political terms is a highly undesirable property. At least the historic centre is; the part which most people regard as Venice, disregarding - as they are inclined to do - that the old city is only a part of the municipality of Venice, which includes the industrial quarters on the mainland.

In retrospect

J. M. Richards' valediction summed up his struggles over the 36 years with his usual grace and modesty.

Because of the occasion on which this is written, readers must forgive a more personal expression of views than is usually proper in an editorial article. I am naturally tempted to begin by looking back at the changes I am conscious of since I joined the REVIEW (as assistant editor in succession to John Betjeman) in 1935 - changes in which the magazine itself can claim to have played some part.

The biggest change has not really been, as one might have supposed, that the battle for modern architecture, as distinct from period-revival architecture, which occupied all our thoughts in the 1930s, has been won - at least won in the sense that we are all modernists now, though what that means I am not sure that we know, nor whether what it means any longer matters. It did matter then, and the situation is not so much that the light we saw at the end of the long dark tunnel has failed to create the Utopia we imagined (and it would take more space than I have at my disposal to inquire how much this was due to mistaken objectives and how much to unforseeable changes), but that the battle for modern architecture has inevitably been succeeded by other battles, equally engrossing while they are still being fought ...

The more significant change since the 1930s is that we no longer believe that reason can provide the answer to everything ...

Nothing is fixed - certainly not anything as ephemeral as an editorial policy. Editors must accept change as readily as architects; indeed welcome it, like architects, as a challenge. Who can foresee what future circumstances may require of an architectural magazine?

1 All proper critics read and quoted from Le Corbusier in French.

2 He presumably meant to conjure analogies of movements like the Impressionists and the Fauves that were named ironically by their critics but then found that the titles became terms of respect. This affectionate recognition has not happened to the Brutalism. Robin Boyd wrote 'The Sad End of New Brutalism', vol CXLII, 1967, p9.

3 Invented by Ian Nairn and defined as 'Making an ideal of suburbia. Visually speaking, the universalisation and idealisation of our town fringes. Philosophically, the idealisation of the Little Man who lives there (from suburb + Utopia).' The AR was nothing if not elitist.

4. At first by Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen, then as Cullen withdrew, by Nairn and others: finally by Kenneth Browne.

5 It consistently lost money from this time until the mid '80s.

6 He had soldiered on, producing every other issue as a more-or-less normal one. The method of his sacking was scandalous: Richards came to the office and learned from the noticeboard that he was no longer editor. He was kept on for a while, mainly editing special issues, so that he could get his pension.

7 The brilliant, tough, experienced editor who had made the Architects' Journal into a great success in the '50s and '60s.