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Jim Richards thought that architects should be anonymous experts who served their communities, not ‘giants’ designing buildings to express their own individual creativity. He pursued this idea throughout his forty-year career as an architectural critic, journalist and editor. This book traces Richards’s ideas about anonymity and public participation in modern architecture and how they weathered the changing contexts of architecture in the mid-twentieth century. This is a story of shifting relationships between the architectural profession, public audiences and the media. The Architectural Review (AR) was first published in 1896 and by the 1930s was closely aligned with modern architecture. James Maude Richards (Jim to his friends) was the longest serving editor of the AR working from 1935 to 1971, with colleagues including Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Casson and Reyner Banham. Richards developed a specific approach to architectural criticism, which was based on promoting architecture to a public audience. He used criticism as a bridge between architects and their patrons and users. This book explores the changes and continuities in Richards’s work in the context of broader cultural shifts between experts and the public during this period. This is a history of modern architecture told through magazine articles, radio broadcasts and exhibitions, rather than buildings. Richards’s career and his position among a network of journalists, architects and artists, shows the centrality of media and promotion to architecture. It also shows how ideas about public participation, vernacular design and popular culture were key to defining modern architecture.
.1 Front Line by C.R. Leslie published by Ministry of Information, 1942, edited by J.M. Richards. The visual language of the book is reminiscent of the AR . Richards employed the same visual techniques that he had used at the magazine to engage the readership. Back at the AR , Nikolaus Pevsner had replaced Richards as editor. 34 In 1942 Barbara Chermayeff, wife of Serge Chermayeff, wrote to Peggy Angus
Denys Lasdun, ‘J.M. Richards, a Memorial Tribute’, AA Files 25 (Summer 1993), 32. The obituary was written the year after Richards died in 1992. 2 J.M. Richards, A Critic's View (Melbourne: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 1971). 3 Richards was, to date, the longest serving editor at The
. Notes 1 Richards was replaced at the Architects’ Journal by Myles Wright. 2 J.M. Richards, Memoirs of an Unjust Fella (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 117. 3 The two men
Richards wrote to Peggy Angus that all of his evenings were taken up by work for the programme. Letter from J.M. Richards to Peggy Angus, undated, PEG 2: Correspondence, Peggy Angus Archive, East Sussex Records Office. Although architecture was discussed much less than theatre, literature and art on the programme. 10 Alison and Peter Smithson started the decade working in the LCC architects’ department but in 1950
Piper's article ‘Nautical Style’ ( Figure 1.3 ). Figure 1.2 J.M. Richards, ‘Black and White: an Introductory Study of a National Design Idiom’, The Architectural Review , November 1937, 165–75. Featuring photographs from Richards's and Piper's driving trip to Devon and Cornwall
responsibility to serve their civic communities. He was adamant that architecture was a public service, not a commercial enterprise nor a consumer product. Notes 1 J.M. Richards, ‘Architect at the Local Level’, The Architectural Review , December 1970, 376. This issue was a Special Issue dedicated to Conservation. The Council of Europe had designated 1970 as European Conservation Year in an attempt to highlight the importance
be expected, but criticism from the liberal Left was often couched in similar terms. J. M. Richards, writing in the Architectural Review, explicitly contrasted the pavilion with the ideals of national projection and, echoing the Daily Express ’s views, found it wanting – still essentially a trade show and lacking in the new kinds of subject-matter that Tallents had advocated. 54 For the New Statesman’s Raymond
Introduction The days when war was an interval between periods of peace – even the days when peace was the interval between wars – have gone. (J.M. Richards, 1941)1 By the summer of 1941, the old concepts of peace and war had been surpassed by the realisation of a nightmare and the implementation of a policy. Airpower had transformed war and created a condition of permanent vulnerability for cities and civilians. The bombing of British cities that began in earnest in 1940 was the fulfilment of the promise of the interwar years. In the pregnant skies of the 1930
‘wartime’ ‘becomes a justification for a rule of law that bends in favour of the security of the state’. This distortion of law has generally been accepted according to the assumption that wars end. But, she asks, in the twenty-first century, an era in which the ‘war on terror’ has no foreseeable endpoint, ‘how can we end a wartime when war doesn’t come to an end?’20 Dudziak here echoes the quote from J.M. Richards in the summer of 1941 with which this book began: the time when ‘war was an interval between periods of peace […] when peace was the interval between wars