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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.
Architectural publishing was a crowded arena in the early 1930s: there were hundreds of publications about building and architecture. 2 The two magazines published by the Architectural Press had to forge a unique identity to stand out. The Architects’ Journal was a weekly publication and was oriented towards the business and trade of the architectural profession. The Architectural Review was published monthly and had a broader remit; it was concerned with architecture in the context of art and culture and targeted a
AR was finding its place. The magazine was exploring different modes of address and different audiences. The magazine was never a monolith and many different ‘causes’ and types of criticism were pursued simultaneously. Figure 5.1 Outrage, Special Issue of The Architectural Review , June 1955. Edited by Ian Nairn
The Architectural Review , the BBC and Penguin Publishers: the architectural public, a shared imagined audience In January 1940 the Bulletin of Standard Designs, which appeared sporadically in the Decoration Supplement at the back of the AR , featured the Isokon Penguin Donkey, a plywood bookcase and magazine stand produced by the Isokon company ( Figure 3.1 ). The Isokon company had been set up by Wells Coates and Jack Pritchard. In 1934 Isokon built the Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, designed by
the AR , Richards wrote an article called ‘The Architectural Review and the War’, which set the tone for the magazine's new coverage of the damage caused by the war and the plans for rebuilding. He explained that the AR 's policy of not engaging with the war (discussed in the previous chapter) had come to an end because of the ‘remarkable degree of public interest … in the idea of reconstruction and in plans for a better world after the war’. 13 He explained the magazine's hopes for after the war
public audiences as much as style in buildings. Looking at Richards's life and work offers a perspective on the history of modern architecture beyond what was built. This view from elsewhere within the history of modern architecture reveals continuities and entanglements that complicate the story of change throughout the five decades of his career. There remains much research to be done in the history of architectural criticism and architectural media. The Architectural Review continues to be published and the story of the fifty years since
could fulfil this purpose of ‘raising the general level’ of building and avoid simply aggrandising individual architects. This book is about how Richards's ideas contributed to modern architecture. Having trained as an architect in the late 1920s, he began his career in journalism as an assistant editor at The Architect's Journal ( AJ ) in 1933, moving in 1935 to The Architectural Review ( AR ), where he worked until his retirement in 1971. 3 After the Second World War he became architectural
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
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
profound break from the past and an uncertain future, the militarisation of rural landscapes and the emphasis on modernisation for security and survival suggested that traditional visions of the countryside were severely threatened. The importance of the Highlands and the potential implications of new industry for the landscape and lives of the people living there were discussed in a number of articles in the Architectural Review electricity issue in 1945.19 The connection between people and place had frequently been articulated in terms of the healthiness of the country