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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.
In Reyner Banham's 1966 book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic , he described the gulf between the ‘middle aged’ architects, artists and critics and the ‘younger generation’ after the war. 1 Banham argued that the Second World War had ‘served to confuse the aims and blunt the intellectual attack’ of the men of Richards's generation, which resulted in the ‘depressing sense’ during the 1950s that ‘the drive was going out of modern architecture’. 2
examines vernacular habitats and remains focused on passive relationships, as described in the work of Victor Olgyay and of Amos Rapoport, the latter approach is structured around the superiority of technology and its progress. 5 From the mid-1960s onward, engineering became an essential element in the relationship between architecture and the environment. James Marston Fitch, Leo Marx and the more radical Reyner Banham brought technology to the forefront of architectural history. 6 Although Banham examined the role of utilities in architecture in The Architecture of
or information connections. In Megastructure: Urban Features of the Recent Past (1976), Reyner Banham explained the resonance of the city-machine analogy, stressing that: As against the International Style’s classicizing view of technology and machinery as neat smooth regular solids of anonymous aspect, the younger megastructuralists clearly saw technology as a visually wild richness of piping and wiring and struts and cat-walks and bristling radar antennae and supplementary foul tanks and landing-pads all carried in exposed lattice frames, NASA-style. 1
formative and offer a vital context for understanding his approach to architecture. Looking at his work in relation to that of his colleagues such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Philip Morton Shand, Reyner Banham, Ian Nairn and many other critics and architects shows how as part of this network Richards contributed to the meaning and character of modernism. Pierre Bourdieu's writing on the ‘biography illusion’ and Michael Freeden's work on the ‘individualist fallacy’ were helpful in thinking of biography as something more than an
– from F.R.S. Yorke's 1933 demand that architects should never pander but always lead public taste in architecture; to Richards's insistence in The Castles on the Ground that architects should understand the material conditions that shaped public taste and Reyner Banham's argument in the 1950s that architecture was a consumer object, shaped by consumer taste. Each of these perspectives was accompanied by a particular form of architectural criticism. This chapter will trace how a new definition of the architectural public and changing ideas about participation led
architecture that he would defend throughout his career, this position aimed to shift the boundaries of architectural practice to encompass industrial production and energy innovations. This criticism of the separation between architecture and technology echoed the theories that Reyner Banham developed in The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment . Â Pike, however, went beyond the analysis of passive systems and focused on the scale of a building to reflect on the network and autonomy from a different angle to Banham. Pike left Arcon in 1962 to join Taylor Woodrow
bracketed within the ‘specialist’ category 3049 Experimental British Tele 98 16/5/07 08:02 Page 98 Experimental British television of arts programming. Its low viewing figures highlight that, whilst it attempted to locate ‘cutting-edge’ experimentation within the popular (especially in the realm of advertising), it never itself entered the realm of the popular.20 Its status as an arts programme scheduled on a Sunday afternoon may have made popularity unlikely, but the series also failed to achieve critical acclaim.21 Even Reyner Banham, who helped organise the Pop
as a humanisation of modern architecture, a new vision for town planning based on historical and regional particularities and the rediscovery of architectural history in relation to modernism. 135 Townscape was a visual agenda for postwar town planning. It explored visual solutions to the question of how to design modern urban spaces. It was unpopular with the new generation of architects and critics, including Reyner Banham, who interpreted Townscape and its focus on history and regionalism as a betrayal of
in Mechanical Wing (1938), abandoning the inhabitable structure to focus on the mechanical core. He built it around a frame that could be attached to and supply any type of structure to make it viable. Reyner Banham praised the daring of this mechanical reduction. 50 The idea of the utilities box was continued with the Autonomous Living Package (1948), which opened and unfolded. In 1952, during a lecture on mass production at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, three Autonomous Living Package prototypes were presented by students working under Fuller