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Being or Nothingness: Private Experience and Public Architecture in Post-War Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Adrian Forty
Adrian Forty*
Affiliation:
A revised version of the text of the Society’s Annual Lecture for 1994, delivered at the Courtauld Institute of Art on 7th November.
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Extract

In the last ten years or so, there has been a growing historical interest in the architecture of post-war Britain, marked by a succession of historical monographs. I must apologize for turning again to what is becoming a rather familiar subject, especially as I have nothing to add to what is already known about it. Instead, I want to reflect on some of the reasons why the period absorbs so much interest, and on some of the things that stand in the way of our understanding of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 38 , 1995 , pp. 25 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1995

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References

Notes

1 See for example, Esher, Lionel, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940-1980 (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

2 Summerson, John, Victorian Architecture in England, Four Studies in Evaluation (New York, 1971), ch. 1, ‘The Evaluation of Victorian Architecture: The Problem of Failure’, pp. 1–18 Google Scholar.

3 My thanks to Robert Thome for making this interesting point.

4 See the paper by Richard Hill, summarized by Potts, Alex, ‘The New Right and Architectural Aesthetics’, History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), pp. 159-62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Marshall, T. H., Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950), p. 56 Google Scholar.

6 Marshall, Citizenship, pp. 58-59.

7 Finnimore, Brian, Houses from the Factory. System Building and the Welfare State (London, 1989), pp. 244-45Google Scholar.

8 Cherry, Bridget and Pevsner, Nikolaus, Buildings of England: London 2: South (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 347 Google Scholar.

9 Franki, Paul, Principles of Architectural History: the Four Phases of Architectural Style 1420-1900 (first published 1914), transl. O’Gorman, J. F. (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 47 Google Scholar.

10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness (first published 1943), transl. Barnes, Hazel E. (London, 1957), p. 351 Google Scholar.

11 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 364.

12 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 354.

13 Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of Cities (London, 1938), p. 480 Google Scholar; see also especially chapter VII, section 9, ‘The Undifferentiated Background’, pp. 448-54.

14 Allan, John, Berthold Lubetkin. Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (London, 1992), p. 379 Google Scholar.

15 See Allan, Lubetkin, p. 541, for a discussion of staircases and their significance in Tecton’s later housing schemes.

16 Lubetkin later expressed the distance he had felt from other architects in Britain at the time: see his remarks in 1985, quoted Allan, Lubetkin, p. 554.

17 Mumford, Lewis, ‘Old Forms for New Towns’ (first published in 1953), reprinted in Mumford, Lewis, The Highway and the City (London, 1964), pp. 35–44 Google Scholar (p. 44).