Ethics versus aesthetics: AD 1965-74

A 20 minute paper/talk I gave at the student-led theory forum on the subject of "ecology" at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture this weekend:

I want to start with a bit of a long quote from Warren Chalk of Archigram*. This quote was published in AD in April 1971 and also as the last piece in the 1972 Archigram book which essentially became their monograph. In other words, it represents their last word:

Ecology - there, I've said that word - is a social problem. We have been told so by Time, Life, Newsweek, Look and the Nixon administration. Pollution is insidiously growing. Either the environment goes or we go. And you all know what will happen if the environment goes. We have produced a society with production for the sake of production. The city has become a market place, every human being a commodity. Nature is a resource. Human beings are a resource. Well. Our very survival depends on an ecological utopia, otherwise we will be destroyed.
The technological backlash we are experiencing must be fought with a more sophisticated technology, a more sophisticated science … But if we are to prevent eco-catastrophe it can only be done by more sophisticated environmental systems, not by dropping out. Nor the hippy type philosophy. Did you see Drop City in Easy Rider?...Let's face it, total dispersal won't work economically any more than total centralisation. Apart from being a head-in-the-sand attitude, we need to fight technology with technology, to produce David Greene's cybernetic forest … What we look for is technological play, so that individuals can create an even greater environmental stimulation. A person switched on to the electric tomato, or the proud possessor of the personalised robot like Manzak, can extend an existing situation, and a new man/machine [relationship] be established getting people, through their extension with a machine, into action.
Experiments such as these could achieve a people-oriented technology of human liberation, directed towards pleasure, enjoyment, experimentation: a try-it-and-see attitude …
Hopefully some environmental magic will then prevail and we will again think up the impossible in order to be realistic.

What I'm going to do in this paper is look at the ongoing, changing relationship between the non-mutually exclusive, twin themes of 'ethics' and 'aesthetics' as they appeared on the pages of Architectural Design between 1965 and 1974. You will see that many of the issues we are talking about today were being discussed 40 years ago – even before the oil crisis of 1973 – and that therefore the architects' political capacity to affect change has proved extremely limited despite continuous calls to architectural arms.

The magazine Architectural Design was already successful and widely read by the time Robin Middleton took over as Technical Editor in 1965 but for the next ten years, under the direction of Middleton and his successor, Peter Murray, it was to become the architectural magazine that defined the period.

Earlier, from 1953 to '62, Technical Editor Theo Crosby had used the magazine to promote architecture-as-building, and especially the New Brutalist movement and Team X of the Smithsons et al. In 1966, Reyner Banham published the canonical The New Brutalism, with the subtitle “Ethic or aesthetic?”. Its content was heavily based on articles from each of the Architectural Review and Architectural Design, and in it, Banham documented his search for “une architecture autre”. He oscillated between the two defining characteristics of ethics and aesthetics for this now unfashionable movement, finally deciding that the movement was all about aesthetics after all: “For all its brave talk of 'an ethic, not an aesthetic', Brutalism never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of reference.” he wrote in his summation.

It could be argued that Brutalism as an avant-garde (or neo-avant-garde) movement died with that last sentence, but in fact as the vanguard, it had barely moved into the sixties: the Smithsons' Economist building had already by that time betrayed Banham's belief in une architecture autre and once more demonstrated the avant-garde's propensity to be absorbed into the larger movement of modernism. But by that time anyway, Banham had transferred his allegiances to The Brutalists' natural heirs to the neo-avant-garde title who were already well established and continuing to push architecture in the direction of pop culture, Americana and beyond. I speak, of course, of Archigram.

Half of the Archigram group (Dennis Crompton, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron) had already been working on the Brutalist structure of the South Bank Centre for the London County Council and they joined the other half (Peter Cook, Michael Webb and David Greene) at Taylor Woodrow Construction working on the Euston redevelopment under the supervision of former AD Technical Editor Theo Crosby and alongside future AD Technical Editor, Robin Middleton. Although Archigram as a “fanzine” had been going since 1961, the group behind the fanzine wasn't published in the mainstream British architectural press – the “trade rags” – until 1965. As mentioned above, earlier that year, Robin Middleton had become Technical Editor of AD and by this time, Archigram were on to number six with a circulation of 2,500 themselves. In November of that year, Architectural Design was among the very first to publish Archigram's work with Reyner Banham's two page article called “A Clip-on architecture” and a 15 page chronological survey later in the same issue. From that point onwards, and for the next ten years, Archigram as a group and as individuals were to dominate the pages of AD.

While the “ethic versus aesthetic” split remained a subtitle throughout the New Brutalist years, it was to become a more obvious dichotomy in the late sixties and early seventies. This was clearly seen on the pages of AD and readers spelled it out in their letters, such as the following:

There is no doubting that Archigram was all about the aesthetic. Whereas the New Brutalists sought to drag art down to the level of life, Archigram wanted to raise life to the level of art. Rather than addressing existing society's problems, they chose to envision exciting new worlds and solve completely non-existent problems, viewing the user as consumer and turning architecture into another product of consumption. As Banham wrote, in that “Clip-on” article, “Archigram can't tell you for certain whether Plug-in City can be made to work, but it can tell you what it might look like.” The emergence of Archigram demonstrated the shift from architecture-as-building to architecture-as-concept and to seemingly keep abreast of the architectural profession's shift in attitude, Architectural Design changed its name to AD in May 1968. There is a distinct shift from the main features being concerned with building studies, products and technologies in the April issue to more sociological concerns in May. For example, April's issue features the Nuffield transplant surgery unit in Edinburgh; student accommodation at Oxford University; a service station and several features comprising experimental designs for large scale cable supported roof spans, all of which were entirely in-keeping with the magazine's content up until that point.

The title for May's issue, however, guest edited by Cedric Price, is “What about Learning?” Its cover sports a hand with a mock-up of a futuristic video watch. The articles inside enforce the idea that learning isn't just for schools, that technology can enable long-distance learning, learning by closed circuit TV (for children in Niger), and other different models of learning focussed on the individual. Peter Cook's Ideas Circus appears: “A proposal for a system of trucked units containing a power plant, printing press, library, teaching machines, various audio-visual assemblies and minimal transformable enclosures.” It's a kind of educational precursor to Archigram's later Instant City. The month May 1968, of course, chimes with political unrest in Paris and beyond, a topic taken up by historian Eric Hobsbawm later that year in AD when he wrote about “Cities and Insurrection” in an issue called “Metaphoropolis” dedicated to a socio-political study of the city. Anti-establishment reaction had been rising in young people throughout the sixties and while the shift in editorial direction of an architectural publication and riots on the streets of Europe's capital cities and sit-ins in the universities are poles apart in terms of scale, they can both be seen as symptomatic of a tectonic shift in underlying thinking, especially amongst students.

Archigram came face to face with the student unrest at the Milan Triennale in 19685 where they were exhibiting the “Milanogram” (Archigram number 8). No sooner had the exhibition opened than it was occupied and trashed by students for 10 days. While Archigram talked of “direct action” they were uninterested in politics and left Milan non-plussed.



If Archigram represented the aesthetics of AD during this period, the ethics appeared through the pervading preoccupation of ecological issues that were wafting from the US, such as Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog first appeared in the Autumn of 1968 and was published regularly for only three years. In contrast to the European model of insurrection of the time, the Whole Earth Catalog encouraged an American counterculture of grass-roots radicalism. As the write-up in AD's Cosmorama put it, “the Whole Earth Catalog is a unique compendium of the hip and the home-spun, of far-out technology and down-home atavism, dedicated to the proposition that “we are as Gods – and might as well get [good] at it,” and to the assumption that anything practical, cheap, of high quality and easy availability can serve as a tool towards that end.”

The Whole Earth Catalog was basically a compendium of tools aimed at those who wanted to challenge conventional lifestyles. The word “tools” included books, of course, and many of the entries were book reviews. Architectural Design itself made it into the first number, featuring the “Architecture of Democracy” issue with the comments “This is the only architectural magazine we've seen that consistently carries substantial new information, as distinct from the stylistic eye-wash characteristic of most architecture journals. It galls my jingoistic soul to see the British publishing so much of the best technological information … Dave Evans, a local Australian whiz, says it's because English bright guys don't have much to grip them commercially, so they spread their brightness around. (Also they flock to America in search of commercial ferocity.)"

Peculiarly, even Archigram made it into the last Whole Earth Catalog (right above the feature called “You'll Build Your Next House of Molasses”). Of it, they say, “Archigram is the “Captain Billy's Whiz Bang” of architecture, with lots of imitators by now and still no equals. Dream architecture, joke architecture, blasphemy architecture, science fiction architecture, adolescent wet dream architecture, leather architecture. Sin. Fun. For a while.”

The Whole Earth Catalog supported hippie, artistic communities like Drop City and inspired future alternative thinkers such as Steve Jobs, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. The folk who were into that culture at that time seem to have migrated into internet culture at the end of the century.
The Whole Earth Catalog also inspired other catalogs such as the Domebooks, number one of which was featured on the first page of September 1970's AD and sold through the magazine from then on: “a practical account of the construction of ten different domes built at an experimental high school in the California hills within a period of four months.” Domes were everywhere on the pages of the leading magazines of the time and some were even being built. While it couldn't claim to save the world in itself, it at least could represent an aesthetic of a new way of thinking – that of Buckminster Fuller's ethos of doing more with less.

Richard Buckminster-Fuller can, in fact, be considered the spiritual father of both sides of AD's dichotomy of aesthetic and ethic. He was Archigram's hero, largely due to his technological aesthetic and techno-babble way of talking. Simon Sadler points out that whereas Fuller espoused the economics of lightweight component architecture, Archigram pursued its pleasures (note the scantilly clad female occupants of Warren Chalk's Capsule and Fuller's Dymaxion house). Fuller is, of course, most famous for his geodesic dome – a structure that envelopes maximum volume with minimum material. This found its way into the Taylor Woodrow Design Group's (which, as mentioned above, employed the Archigram members) Fulham Study of 1963 and Montreal Expo '67 Tower of 1964. Subsequently, the geodesic dome's triangular steel struts were the substructure for Peter Cook's megastructural Plug-In City of 1964 and many other projects beyond. Fuller epitomised the “technology is the answer, what's the question?” stance of twentieth century modernism and Archigram adopted and adapted this for their hedonistic zoom-wave designs. Whereas Fuller's world assumed plentiful provision for a limited population, Archigram's assumed infinite resources for infinite pleasure for infinite people – as long as they were good looking.


If Archigram were apolitical, then Fuller was simply politically naïve. On winning the RIBA Gold Medal in 1968, AD published an abbreviated version of his 16,500 word (!) acceptance speech containing a paragraph on politics: “I am transcendental to all political thinking. I am utterly convinced that the world can be made to work and I'm convinced that all the politicians of both sides have really an extraordinary sense of responsibility to their people. I don't question their integrity as human beings; I'm sorry for them, however, because nothing in their particular art can ever help man to be a success.” Fuller was so blinded by technology that he was ignorant of the fact that nothing is ever done but by political will. As an aside and contemporary analogy, if he were alive today, he would no doubt subscribe to the benefits of genetically modified crops due to the argument that it would make yields more plenty and we would be able to feed the world, completely ignoring the fact that we already have the technology to feed the world now,but not the political will.

Monica Pidgeon, who was the editor of Architectural Design from 1946 to 1975, was quite taken with Buckminster-Fuller, who she met while helping organise the VIIth congress of the UIA held in London in July 1961. Although not architecturally trained himself, Bucky believed that the world could be saved by designers – and architects in particular. During the UIA Congress, Pidgeon invited him to contribute his views on the role of the architect in the present world situation and published his call to arms the following month as “The Architect as World Planner” declaration of intent. It starts, “I propose that the architectural departments of all the universities around the world be encouraged by the UIA to invest the next ten years in a continuing problem of how to make the total world's resources serve 100 per cent of humanity through competent design.” (In 1965, it served 40%). He goes on to claim, “It is clearly manifest … that the architects are able to think regarding such world planning in a manner transcendental to any political bias.” Fuller's vision was implemented as the “World Design Science Decade” starting in 1965, intent on spanning exactly the same years as is being looked at here. AD continued to publish Fuller's ideas throughout the 1960s as it suited AD's international perspective and target student audience. The outcome of the World Design Science Decade was six verbose documents of ideas, research and tools on resource planning for use by architectural schools worldwide in the pursuit of his initial declaration. The last document, The Ecological Context, Energy and Materials, was published by Fuller and his associate, Independent Group artist John McHale in 1967.

While Archigram took Bucky's faith in technology to an aesthetic conclusion, AD was looking all over for inspiration for architects. The New Scientist magazine was a favourite and features from this often became topics for publication in the Cosmorama section, fuelled by the excitement of the moon landings and questions of where man would inhabit – and therefore architects build – next. In contrast to this “high-tech” editorial approach, they were simultaneously publishing “low-tech” features similar to those espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog. During this period, features appeared on shanty towns, squatting, ecology, with columns called “Eco-tech” and “Recycling” by Colin Moorcraft. They looked at wind and solar power. July 1972's issue – a year before the oil crisis – was concerned with “designing for survival” and a year earlier, they published Martin Pawley's Garbage Housing. That year, AD also published extracts from Victor Papanek's “Design for the Real World” which was anti-good taste and pro-social responsibilities for designers. It was almost universally derided by design professionals at the time of the first edition in 1971, but it demonstrated a radical alternative to design practice that Pidgeon was looking to promote, especially to the students and young architects who were her main target audience at this time. AD had slipped into “little magazine” mode by this time, using the “book economy” whereby subscriptions were the magazine's main income rather than advertising, and this allowed them considerable editorial freedom as opposed to, for example, the Architectural Review, which at this time was quietly self-destructing with the Manplan and Civilia issues. AD was therefore free to explore the very fringes of acceptability to architects and enter into whatever agenda they chose to be important.


Eventually, at least some members of Archigram conceded to the ecological wave. Archigram Nine included a packet of seeds and its cover of an allotment was inspired by David Greene's Bottery (“a fully serviced natural landscape”) and the disappearance of architecture completely into the landscape. Greene published his LAWUN (Locally Available World Unseen Networks) project number one in AD in 1970, where he explained, “Lawun means the striving after basic objectives – doing your own thing without disturbing the events of the existing scene and in a way which is invisible because it involves no formal statement, and because it is related to time, may or may not be there at any given point in time.” Lawun project two, published in AD the following year utilises Greene's earlier Rokplug and Logplug designs ostensibly to promote mobile architecture. However, this is a loss of confidence Archigram, one that's less discussed and less famous, representing the opposite pole of their thinking, striving for the complete dissolution of building and, as the quote at the beginning showed, reluctantly coming to terms with the ground swell of ecological thinking that was happening at the time.


In summary, I've looked at the decade of 1965-74 in Architectural Design, covering the Technical Editorships of Robin Middleton and Peter Murray. This period exactly spans Buckminster Fuller's World Design Science Decade and sees the arrival and decline of Archigram within the mainstream architectural press, at least in AD (the Architectural Review were to leave Archigram well alone until it had passed as a phenomenon). Archigram promoted a consumerist, throw-away architecture and were about as ecological as they were feminist: which is to say, not at all. Nevertheless, in its shift from promoting architecture-as-building to architecture-as-concept (essentially reflecting the shift from an industrial to post-industrial society) AD was keen to engage students and young architects and become a radical mouthpiece for alternative architectural culture. This didn't stop at a de-politicised aesthetic, but followed through with Fuller's more ethical ideas, looking at how to save a doomed spaceship earth.
While ethics and aesthetics were kept apart as concepts on the pages of AD, they were at least united on the page.



* Thanks to Owen for introducing me to this quote.

2 questions

Q1: While recently reading Simon Sadler's excellent "Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture" I came across the term "crush of architects" (p.23). Whether he meant it as a possible collective noun for architects is not clear, but it got me thinking what a suitable collective noun would be. A cult of architects perhaps?

Q2: Another long held question of mine is when did the term "built environment" become common terminology? It seems so commonplace and natural nowadays that it's hard to imagine a time before it was coined, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't common parlance when I did my degree in the early nineties. So when was it first used and by whom?

Jencks, Goldschmied, Rogers and 2 pineapple heads

Last week's Stirling Prize demonstrates what a strange, small, autonomously incestuous world architecture really is.

Richard Rogers (rightmost male above) won the prize for a building designed for the architecture critic, Charles Jencks (leftmost male above). And how galling for the new sponsor, former RIBA president Marco Goldschmied (middlemost male above), to have to give his former partner and current tenant the prize money after only 3 years ago suing him. The picture above was taken at the moment he handed over the cheque. Lord Rogers never shook his hand or even looked him in the face.

But who cares? Nobody but architects stayed in to watch the programme buffeted by a pair of pineapple heads (each trying to out-pineapple the other for Ms Saunt's attention below). A 450,000 viewing figure will surely threaten its televisation next year.

St. Peter's Seminary at Cardross

There's no sorrier site than a great building less than 40 years old lying in ruins. Here are some recent photos of St. Peter's Seminary design by Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan of Gillespie Kidd and Coia (finished in 1966). They were taken a few weeks ago after the lovely, patient locals helped us find it amidst the undergrowth, next to the golf course. The concrete is amazingly still in fine condition, but precious little else is. It's hard to imagine this building can be usefully salvaged - it would be so incredulously expensive - and for what use? A 19th hole? Urban Splash were linked to it but in today's credit-crunched market, it's hard to see it being used as housing, especially in this fairly remote - and stunningly beautiful - site.






"The machine has rejected ornament and the machine has everywhere established itself. We are irrevocably committed to a machine age" Herbert Read










The high altar.









Other photos and features here:
20th Century Society's casework report
20th Century Society's Risky Buildings Register
Photos of the Seminary in its original state.
Wikipedia entry
Brian Dillon's Guardian piece
Concrete Quarterly's feature from Spring 1967 (p. 16 of this pdf)

The Apollo Pavilion

Peterlee was founded in 1948, one of the first and few New Towns to be built outside of what is now commuting distance from London. Lubetkin designed a first high rise version but this was considered unsuitable for the mining-compromised land where Peterlee was to be built. Lubetkin resigned and BDP founder George Grenfell-Baines stepped in his place. Artist Victor Pasmore was teaching at Newcastle at the time and was brought on board as "consulting director of urban design" for the Sunny Blunts estate of Peterlee. Pasmore's contribution was, of course, aesthetic, dealing with the landscape layout and appearance of the houses - a cold fusion of art and architecture. This aesthetic culminated in the Apollo pavilion, which has just been refurbished for its 40th birthday. The pavilion, optimistically named after the moon landings, is a focal point for the picturesque Arcadia-in-the-abstract layout of the estate.


Art like this isn't supposed to exist in places like Peterlee. The pavilion is a great hulk of concrete: a strictly Cartesian, constructivist sculpture at the scale of architecture in the context of an urban masterplan. It's a monument to concrete relying on the sun to give the monochromatic material depth and character primarily through its cantilevers and perpendiculars but more subtly through its smooth and rough textures. You can't help but be reminded of war-time bunkers by the horizontal slit in the central block. As you move around and through it, new compositions of the planes are revealed: a Cubist's dream. Any shadows provide the diagonals and a typical amoeba-like Pasmore mural is painted at either end. The pavilion originally boasted a stair at either end too, allowing passage over a feature pond.

The pavilion itself could therefore be cynically deemed a solution to an artificially created problem - it was essentially a bridge across an man-made pond, around which two-storey houses cluster. This wasn't its real function, of course. As Pasmore wrote in a letter of 30.05.76 to Gary Philipson, General Manager of Peterlee Development Corporation,

the object of all the sculpture, including the Pavilion, was to give dignity, focus and “impact” at various central points in the environmental complex of what is virtually a Council housing estate. But, to my mind, Peterlee is not a housing estate, but an important town. If for nothing else, therefore, the function of the sculptures is justified to underline and demonstrate this.

The subsequent story of the pavilion is one of high art meeting working class life. Peterlee was a town for miners, a fact ingrained in its very name: Peter Lee was an early twentieth century miner and trade unionist. Victor Pasmore, in contrast, was educated at Harrow.

During the pavilion's early years, over the channel in France, Pierre Bourdieu was doing some sociological research into taste and art and class. This was published as Distinction in 1979 where he demonstrated that working class taste doesn’t see any beauty in anything that isn’t functional, whereas the learned and well-bred appreciate form over function. The most modernist of tenets, “form follows function” (which incidentally, first appeared as “form ever follows function” in Louis Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered", Lippincott's Magazine of March 1896) should therefore imply a unison of aesthetics and use, leading to a style acceptable by both high and mass culture. This turned out to be far from the case in reality, demonstrating how taste is artificially constructed rather than innate. As Bourdieu wrote, “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.”
According to Bourdieu, working class taste considers that art should be of something – and something beautiful no less. Failing that, an artefact should be useful in order, the theory goes, that it reduce the labour required to get through working life. Having financial means implies that things of no use can be purchased and kept – follies, trinkets, art. Additionally, having an educated taste implies that art can be appreciated beyond the object and the beautiful – art that imitates art rather than art imitating nature.
That the ethic or aesthetic dilemma appeared as a sub-title to Banham's The New Brutalism is no coincidence. In the end, Banham decided that it was all about the aesthetic after all, despite the Brutalists' case to the contrary.

Despite best intentions, then, on behalf of the Peterlee Development Corporation and Pasmore, a useless behemoth of abstract sculpture in that modern, grey, stubborn material was always going to have a difficult time in a working class neighbourhood, regardless of its quality and the reputation of its creator. Perhaps this was the reason that a second stair was added to Pasmore's original design, effectively turning the sculpture into a bridge. The correspondence between Pasmore and Philipson as well as the press cuttings and corporation meeting minutes, constantly return to the subject of a suitable use for the sculpture. Throughout the seventies, it was being used "as a meeting place for the idle and the ill-disposed" (letter from Philipson to Pasmore, 12.02.82) which was apparently a bad thing. The Corporation's minutes from the meeting held on 08.04.82 talks about a “functional use” being found for the sculpture, as “Residents living nearby … claim it is used as a brothel and urinal and say it must be knocked down immediately.”

By 1978, when ownership of Peterlee was passed from the Peterlee Development Corporation to the District of Easington Council, the pavilion became the subject of what would now be labelled serious anti-social behaviour:



Rather than an aesthetic focal point, the pavilion had become a focal point of a rather different quality with youths congregating to do youthful things at youthful times in youthful volumes. Remember that this was the era of the ghetto blaster rather than the iPod. Residents who lived nearby the pavilion (and some of them are VERY nearby) complained. The Council clearly felt they had inherited a costly liability and a campaign was started for its demolition. A letter of 12.02.82 Gary Philipson to Pasmore confirms the sad situation:

In fairness to the local authorities, they have no real animus against the Pavilion itself: they are simply pestered by complaints about vandalism, noise, litter, courting couples (with the emphasis on the coupling) and demolition seems a simple if drastic solution to their problems.

In other words, it's not a question of either aesthetics or ethics, but of costs. The pavilion had become the symbolic and innocent target in a battle of art against life. It was pointed out that if the pavilion were demolished, youths would still congregate and be youthful either there or elsewhere. Pasmore's reaction to the residents calling for the pavilion to be removed was that the families who caused the trouble should be removed instead. To be fair to him, when he visited the tortured pavilion in 1982 he was sympathetic to the residents who he had placed too close to the pavilion. He also actually delighted at the impromptu use of the upper deck as artist's studio for children:

I fear that I upset some members of the deputation by my jocular response to this ‘mess’. But I had expected something really sordid and objectionable over the whole building: but when I was confronted upstairs with a gay and colourful exhibition of free child art I was so relieved that I could not help laughing and joking about it. It never occurred to me or my colleagues that the Pavilion would become a children’s painting studio:

(letter from Pasmore to Philipson of 23.04.82)


Fortunately, Apollo was too expensive to demolish. Instead, in 1985 stair access was removed to the upper deck which was turned into a “garden of Babylon” with planting which is how it remained until 2002 when, as Apollo moved into middle age respectability, albeit in a state of sorry disrepair, a ground swell of either pride or pity moved some members of the local community to try and restore it to its former original and optimistic glory. Thus in July of this year, at a cost of over £400,000 (more than 14 times its original cost to build), Apollo's refurbishment was complete.

It was decided to reinstate only the southern stair, as per Pasmore's original intention. Unfortunately, and contrary to Pasmore's original intention, it was also decided to keep a gate locked to the upper deck . There are signs at the top of the stairs warning of “risk of falls” from the roof to deter the local asbos and architectural historians alike from youthful exuberance. Today's suing culture means that there are also signs warning of the risk of banging one's head on the low concrete soffit of the upper deck. It goes without saying that there are also CCTV cameras overlooking the area.




The houses of the Sunny Blunts estate were vandalised themselves by the council in the 1980s with the addition of pitched roofs. Where tenants had exercised their right to buy, the roof remains flat (and one would speculate, leaking and under-insulated). Elsewhere, Pasmore's strict rectilinear lines and layered rectangles of timber, render, glass and brick on the façades are largely gone, never to return. Previously, it was compositionally consistent if materially distinct. Now, the pavilion stands out even more as a separate object rather than part of a whole, attracting the occasional passer-by, the odd architectural tourist and a multitude of local youths for whom the swings in the playground round the corner aren't cool or hard enough.






More photos from I like's Flickr stream.
A gallery of photos from the Apollo Pavilion's official web site.

Writing Design

I'll be presenting a paper at the Writing Design conference at the University of Hertfordshire which goes from Thursday to Saturday this week. The title of the paper is: From Sublation to Sublimation: Brutalism and Archigram in Architectural Design. The abstract, originally written at the end of 2008, is below and I'm glad to say that the final paper isn't too far removed from those distant ideas.

In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger maintains that all avant-garde art intends in some manner to bring together art and life. Richard Murphy builds on this in Theorizing the Avant-Garde by suggesting that art can serve as an ideal model, or utopia, for life to aspire to (sublimation) or alternatively, art and life can be brought together by a shift in the opposite direction by bringing art down to the banal level of mundane reality (what he calls “sublation”).

This paper applies Murphy's theory to post-war architecture by looking at the beginning and end of Monica Pidgeon's editorship of Architectural Design (1946-1975). In this period, Pidgeon employed a series of talented technical editors that made Architectural Design the most influential architectural magazine in the UK, taking over from the Architectural Review's pre-war dominance. Through Theo Crosby (from 1953), Kenneth Frampton (from 1962), Robin Middleton (from 1965) and Peter Murray (from 1972), Architectural Design became the reflector and director of architectural discourse of its time and where the architectural neo-avant-garde launched their ideas. The beginning of this period saw the arrival of New Brutalism as a reaction to high modernism and the end of the period – Architectural Design's “little magazine” era – witnessed the architecture of Archigram. New Brutalism grew out of the Smithsons' involvement with the Independent Group and was very much about the every-day and using materials as-found. The Smithsons' ideas were heavily published in AD in the 1950s and 60s and these formed a core part of Banham's book, New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? A decade later, Architectural Design turned to the sublime and endlessly published the paper architecture of the Archigram group, itself an evolution of the influence of popular culture on architecture.

The paper, which forms part of a PhD in the architectural journal's role in the social construction of architecture, examines texts by these two movements as published in Architectural Design between 1953 and 1975. It seeks to understand how each neo-avant-garde movement, while on opposite sides of Murphy's theory, could naturalise their ideology into the mainstream architectural profession using the same journal and editor.

2,454 boring, unillustrated words about my PhD

The great thing about having a blog that nobody reads is that I can write pretty much for myself. And as I need to start splurging and archiving and generally find out what I think for my PhD, I may as well attempt to do it publicly here. To start, then, with why I'm doing it in the first place – a question I don't ever stop asking myself, but rarely try to answer.

1: Architecture is more about the book than the building
So why do a PhD at all? Firstly, I'm academically minded and as such, was terribly disappointed with my architectural education. Although I enjoyed it and all the design it involved, I felt short-changed at the lack of rigour and study of architecture beyond a token dab of history here and theory there. Secondly, when doing my Part 3, I became (somewhat surprisingly) increasingly interested in the profession itself rather than its products. Combined with a growing disillusion while in practice, this led to some informal “research” into why the profession is the way it is (and no other). I came to understand it as a social construct rather than something that was natural. This seems obvious now, but after so many years of architectural indoctrination, was a small step for me and a giant leap for me-kind – I stepped outside of the profession and started to examine it critically. It's a rather difficult step to take for anyone in the “tribal long-house” and many choose not to make it. For example, it's rather annoying but amusing that whenever any of my AJ pieces contain the phrase “the social construct of architecture” or such-like, it gets edited out or changed. My last Back Issues column originally started with “The architectural magazine holds an unparalleled place in the construction of the profession and its values.” which got changed to “The architectural magazine holds an unparalleled position in the way the profession recreates itself and its values.” Annoying that it's not what I wrote or intended, and amusing because the people who are doing the constructing either don't understand their place in it, or do understand it and desire to cover their tracks. There goes my chance to ever contribute to the AJ again!

Anyway, I digress. The obvious questions to ask on this discovery (of the social construct of the profession, which isn't unique to architecture of course) are “how has it been constructed?” and “why?” The “why?” is more difficult, so I started with the “how?” I hypothesised several devices that were used in the construction of the profession – the professional bodies, the press, education, the awards system and exhibitions – and chose one to look into in more detail. The press seemed most interesting, mystifying, collusive, naturalising and misunderstood, so I chose that as my general area for deeper study. Besides, I've always enjoyed “reading” archiporn. As a general rule, I always try to take the opposite viewpoint to see how things look from there, and my starting point was that architecture today is more about the book than the building. That's why this blog started as a review of architectural books. I will still stand by this argument if need be, but it's more interesting here to follow the evolution of thinking.

2: Architecture is whatever architects say it is
From understanding the architectural project generically as anything to do with architectural culture (a term and concept I will explore later hopefully) including publishing, the question arises who decides what is architecture? In other words, how is architectural taste formed? This thinking was aided greatly by Garry Stevens' The Favored Circle which led me directly to Pierre Bourdieu. My second hypothesis, therefore, was that “architecture is whatever architects say it is” and that it is possible to identify what architects say it is by reading the magazines over a long period of time. Viewed this way, the journals become the trace of architectural thinking, an archive of architectural 'knowledge', and a gradual writing of history-in-the-making. Whatever is important to the powerful few in the world of architecture at the time gets published, and the rest gets forgotten. This editing process frames a version of history and defines the dicta of good taste. This is why it is so important to be published in architecture.
It was gratifying to discover that the modern project, professionalisation and the publishing industry all grew up together (again, not unique to architecture) and this is no accident. Modern architecture can only be understood in relation to the media and professionalisation is a modern concept. Stylisation aside, and for better or worse, we cannot escape the fact that we are still all the result of modernity.
Maybe I was onto something here. Andrew Higgott's Mediating Modernism came out just as I started my PhD and was a general survey of 20th century archiporn, but nobody else seemed to have looked at the magazines as a version of historical writing. Beatriz Colomina had looked at little magazines with her students and this resulted in the Clip/Stamp/Fold exhibition, but little magazines are different to the trade rag. The architectural trade rag is a commercial venture aimed directly at the architectural practitioner and student and almost nobody else. It delivers this audience to advertisers and therefore must appeal to their (the audience's) interests (in both senses of the word). It therefore can be argued to represent the state of architectural culture at the point of publication. Little magazines, on the other hand, represent the avant-garde boundaries and are not representative of the masses (such as they are in architecture). Panayotis Tournikiotis' The Historiography of Modern Architecture was hugely influential at this point. He writes about how the history of modern architecture was written differently by various architects, art historians and architectural historians, depending on how they wanted to project the future. Each magazine could well be another chapter in this book.

I clearly couldn't survey the whole of modern architectural history through all the magazines, so I had to chose a period and a magazine to focus on. Erdem Erten had previously written about the Architectural Review for his MIT PhD in 2004 (Shaping “The Second Half Century”: The Architectural Review 1947-1971). However, the AR was more influential in British (and perhaps Western) architectural culture before The War and AD took over after. I also interviewed Sunand Prasad a couple of years ago, in which he mentioned Architectural Design as being hugely influential at the time: “Architectural Design as a magazine in the 70s and 80s – that was fantastically influential. Very influential and I used to read that fairly avidly.” (Sunand Prasad, interview with the author discussing architectural publication, 22.08.07). I jumped on this and arbitrarily chose a vague post-war period and these have been stuck to ever since (although I've honed the period to between November 1953 and September 1972, which covers the Theo Crosby, Kenneth Frampton and Robin Middleton technical editor years, all under the editorship of Monica Pidgeon). I've found that AD has been cited as influential by many others since, both famous and not-so-famous:

“For me, the exhibition was Architectural Design magazine.” (Will Alsop, interview with Florian Kossak discussing architectural exhibitions, 15.08.05)

“Architectural Design got everywhere to young architects. One of Alison's lines: you can walk down the High Street in Venezuela or Bombay and there's some kid coming towards you carrying Architectural Design.” (Peter Smithson, interview with Louise Brodie – an oral autobiography, fourth tape, side B (8th recording of 19) 16'08'', 04.09.97 (second session))

“As Mark Hartland Thomas wrote in 'Architectural Design' (at that time the preferred magazine of the younger generation)” Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), (p. 18))

The period goes from modernism's high point (the Festival of Britain in '51, the completion of Corb's Unité d'Habitation in '52, the Independent Group's Parallel of Life and Art exhibitions at the ICA in '53) to its disillusionment and the beginnings of post-modernism (Pruitt-Igoe's demolition in '72, change of long time editors at both the AR ('72) and AD ('75)). It also spans the neo-avant-garde movements of the New Brutalism and Archigram, which were both heavily published in AD at the time. The end of the 1960s and beginning of the '70s also witnessed the introduction of critical theory into architecture from literary theory, starting in the US (for example, the introduction of Oppositions and the establishment of the MIT HTC PhD programme both in '73). This is something that has baffled me for a long time – how architectural “theory” could be so rubbish and have such a large impact on architectural production rather than criticism. It became apparent that the whole relationship of history, theory and criticism (HTC as they say in the US) were three sides of the same thing, what I've come to call the holy trinity of the god of architectural knowledge.

Reading the old journals as architectural history made me think more about how architectural history was written – in other words, its historiography. Modern architectural history has largely been written by two groups of people – the art historians and practising architects. Not until Manfred Tafuri was this lineage broken. Tafuri trained as an architect but famously chose history and was instrumental in defining it (architectural history) as a profession in its own right. I have come to love and loathe Tafuri and only just beginning to understand his difficult writings. Tafuri considers the writing of history (and therefore theory and criticism) as an architectural project in its own right. It is quite a simple, but non-obvious step to reverse this and consider architecture as an historical project. Historians create architecture – it is they who decide what does and does not get canonised and written into history. It has everything to do with the editing of taste and nothing to do with what bike sheds and cathedrals look like. There is much more to write on this at some point and I will probably explore the writing of architectural history by these two groups at some later date and make the argument for an independent profession of architectural historian-critics. Interestingly, the two main monthly architectural trade rags, Architectural Review and Architectural Design in the UK after The War were edited by members of each group – although one of AR's editors, J.M. Richards had trained as an architect, it was also hugely influenced by Pevsner and his rebellious doctoral student, Reyner Banham. Banham is an interesting character because although he did his PhD in art history (under Pevsner at the Courtauld – this became Theory and Design in the First Machine Age of course), he started in engineering and became something of a polyglot, contributing to both AD and AR as well as many, many other magazines. He never trained as an architect, however. Compare this with AD, which was overseen by Monica Pidgeon who did the first 3 years of an architectural education. Her technical editors, who were the main influence on the magazine, were also architecturally trained and had practised. Crosby and Frampton even continued to practise while working at AD. Crosby returned to practice after AD (for Taylor Woodrow, where he was in charge of a nascent Archigram) whereas Frampton and Middleton went into academic posts. AD's contributors were also mainly practising architects.

3: Architecture is an institution
I thought I was being original when I came up with “architecture is whatever architects say it is”, but of course I wasn't. It was Banham again who pricked my bubble with his fabulous essay A Black Box – the Secret Profession of Architecture. This was the last essay Banham wrote and is profound on so many levels. In it, he wrote, “What is it that architects uniquely do? The answer, alas, is that they 'do' architecture.” it is equally possible to obversely define architecture as the product of architects, so whether they write, draw or build, it's classified as architecture. This definition has been described by David Dunster “as convincing as defining eggs as what chickens do.” (AD November 2001) However, this only goes to show that just because something is written by a well-known professor from a top school of architecture and published in a leading journal, it does not necessarily make it correct. The sentence demonstrates even here that the institution of architecture is not fully understood to be something invented rather than discovered. While poultry and their progeny are part of the natural world, we can define architects and their products however we choose and this definition does not have to be consistent across time. Jeremy Till has also adopted this view in his recent Architecture Depends: “in a circular logic, the knowledge as to what constitutes architecture is defined by architects, who in turn are therefore deemed to be the only people capable of delivering that self-defined architecture […] The implications are clear: architecture is defined by architects.” (p.153)

The facts that architectural history has been largely written by art historians and that architecture is unquestionably called an art (in fact, the mistress of the arts) mean that architecture is largely considered only in terms of aesthetics, styles, evolution, oeuvres, periods, the individual genius author and so on. This actually interests me very little – I'm far more interested in architecture as a process than a product … in the underlying social, cultural, technological, economic and political forces that underwrite architecture (even though I know nothing about them!) And this is I think where Banham ended up in his Black Box essay, calling for an anthropological and sociological investigation into architectural culture. Although I read Banham's Black Box two years ago, I re-read it recently and got so much more out of it due to the two years of thinking which has led me practically full circle to thinking of architecture as an institution rather than a product, or an aesthetic, or a profession. So this is where I am now. Architecture is first and foremost an institution. It is a framework, a mode of thinking, an indoctrination, a thought process. It's all the magazines and exhibitions and books and awards and competitions and un-built projects and blogs and lectures and occasionally a building. The questions to ask therefore, are when, how and why did it become more about the institution than the building? My suspicion is that something happened between 1953 and 1972, between the New Brutalism and Archgiram, between Crosby and Middleton, and that there are clues to be mined in them there pages of AD.

There again, of course, I could be completely wrong.

Why I Tweet

I hate Twitter. Here's why I Tweet.

I'm a bit of a binge Tweeter. I can't afford to do it from any mobile devices and therefore only do it when logged on. So I'll go to Twitter a couple of times a day and splurge out a bunch of tweets in a row, sometimes related to each other and sometimes just random. Those following me probably get sick of it, but they can always stop following. I have no idea why anyone would follow the turgid rants and moans of this grumpy old man, but a few do.

So why do I do it? I don't know. I hate it. Maybe it's one of those habits I rent and therefore can't afford to break. Perhaps it's the interminable loneliness of the long-distance PhD-er who cries out into the wilderness "is anybody out there?" only to receive the reply of "Eating a battenburg slice, listening to Fat Freddie's Drop".
And yet I can't stop. I tried, once, only reading and not writing but then felt the tweet force in my fingers and before I knew it I had tapped and updated and there I was again, placing more meaningless pixels into the ether, forcing servers all over the world to feed this vacuous 140 character pulp to followers, most of whom I've never met, only a couple of whom I know in real life and none who I go for a drink with on a regular basis. Strange world we have built.

Twitter has attracted an architectural contingent of which, I think, I am on the margins. I tend to follow this architectural Twitterati (neither of my real friends who I really meet have a Twitter account) as it weaves its eclectic narrative, casting judgment and consensualising taste. The people I follow are mainly linked to this group, forming a new high-tech version of a closed circle. I don't see the point of following anybody famous like @alaindebotton or @stephenfry.

But most of all, it's interesting to see how it's used. Twitter takes Facebook's one simple question, "what are you doing?" and gives 140 characters to compose an piece of aphoristic haiku poetry. Some people do simply answer this question, but most use it as a kind of very abbreviated speaker's corner. Conversations emerge that would perform better in a chat room or even a message board. These platforms are considered geeky, however, and Twitter's advantage is its simplicity and slick interface. There are very few hoops to jump through or rules to observe and the etiquette is pretty much up for grabs. I doubt many, if any, of the architectural Twitterati would subscribe to a chat room and do there what they do on Twitter. The amazing thing is how often people update. Don't they have real things to do? Don't I? Yes. But I don't smoke, so can consider this my fag break without having to go outside. Maybe every loo will soon be fitted with a Twitter interface to guarantee being regular.

I try not to share links of things I've found on the internet. That's what delicious is for. Although I don't really use delicious, so I do sometimes break this self-imposed rule. I never, ever tweet a blog post I've just written. Mainly because I rarely blog at the moment, but also because a blog's a blog and a tweet's a tweet and feeds are available for a reason. I'll occasionally share a photo. But generally I try to keep it random. Sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes personal, sometimes architectural. I often have my tongue in my cheek, but that attitude has got me into trouble many times in the past. I'll share the odd thought with Twitter if I'm online because most of the time, I don't have anyone else to share it with. I'll have forgotten it by the time I get home to my wife. Twitter doesn't laugh. But it doesn't groan either. I've started tweeting the books I'm reading as an archive for myself. I don't really consider an "audience". It's just mouthing off and occasionally archiving. There's definitely a propensity to justify my existence and be completely self-obsessed. This twitter character I've constructed is stranger than the blog one and not very like the real me. If people met me in vivo, I'm sure they'd wonder where the in silico version went because in reality I'm quite a shy, quiet person lacking in confidence, whereas in twitter format, it's only possible for me to be a man of words whose 140 characters are the same height as everyone else's.

Then there's the image. Big dilemma - should I put something abstract? If so, should it be related to who you are or be completely arbitrary? Will people judge me if it's not something interesting/clever/pretty? Or should I put a head shot? If so, should it be a full-frontal nude, or half a three-quarter obscured? Or a cartoon version? Or just a picture of something I like. How often should I change it? I've opted for the thing that means most to me in life, my son.

Sometimes it's an exercise in self-censure when you have to fit your words into the 140 character allowance. I hate myself when I see the counter go negative and red. Even more than when my bank balance goes the same way. But my bank balance is always like that whereas with Twitter, there is always the chance that I'll stay in the black. Then there are the ellipses which is the cheater's device to run one update to the next. Unfortunately, you can't read Twitter up-side-down and so to catch up with a "conversation" or to read several of these cheating devices together, you have to go bottom-up, which I still can't get used to.

Watching a Twitter "conversation" reminds me of some crits. Somebody mentions something trivial to which others will attach and the mentioner can wish (s)he'd never said it. Didn't even really mean anything. Then it's a downward spiral and impossible to recover from. Similarly with opinions - the person who gets there first usually sets the tone of the opinion. People tend to chime in if they agree and keep quiet if not. Unless it's a hot topic, in which case the debate can turn into a flame war just as in a chat room. There's never any real debate, however, as the 140 character censor turns everything into "good" and "bad" with little opportunity to generate a sensitive, considered argument.

I doubt if Twitter will still be popular in a year's time, which is good because I freakin' hate it. I agree with @WillSelf that "one day we will look back at this and weep".
You can follow me on @steveparnell. But don't. Seriously.

Sheffield 5: Castle Markets

Until Owen's recent accurately insightful post on Castle Markets in Sheffield, I'd forgotten that a whole 4 months ago (time is just dripping away) I went round them to try and re-create the photos from September 1961's AD. This edition of AD was remarkable for 2 reasons: Firstly, it was the only edition ever to be devoted solely to an English city and secondly, it had the most number of adverts ever in an edition of AD, both of which indicate how important Sheffield was considered architecturally in the late 1950s/early 60s. Of course, it wouldn't even pretend to lay down such an outlandish claim 50 years on.
I am no photographer, so apologies in advance. I hope it gives a flavour at least. Unfortunately, it seems as though the original photographer just walked in, moved around about 50m and walked out again. I would have tried to capture more interesting internal aspects if I hadn't been thrown out due to photographing without permission! At least I managed to get all those from the magazine:

























The markets are still well used although clearly not nearly as much as when AD's photographer arrived in 1961. I'm not going to write anything more (Owen's piece pretty much sums it up) other than to say that I love Castle Markets. It's a real warren of fantastic fonts and greasy spoons and people who go there for a cup of tea and a rest from shopping for cheap stuff. I love the over-stylised chimney on top too, which you can see the back of in the penultimate colour photo above and which I always look for from the Parkway when arriving home from the M1. I'll miss it when it's gone.

Hydrological production

My thinking and production cycle is like the hydrological cycle.

I do rivers of reading, leading to oceans of notes, all jumbled up with other rivers of reading.
Then sunny thinking evaporate this knowledge into clouds of confusion, floating around my head until the cold fronts of deadlines condense it all into written production. Which will possibly lead into further rivers of reading for myself and others. Sometimes it drizzles, sometimes there are short, sharp showers and sometimes heavy downpours accompanied by thunder and lightning. All entirely unpredictable.
And sometimes there's a drought.

I could take the analogy further (transpiration, depression, saturation, brain-storm, mind-shower etc) but I'll leave it with the comment on how many English words there are for precipitation as opposed to the paucity of terms for thinking.

Sheffield 4: Concrete exoskeletons

The following isn't very good. I wrote it a couple of months ago, but there's been a lot about Park Hill recently, so I didn't post it because it has nothing new to say. But if only to prove I'm still alive, and in orderfor me to be able to move onto another post, here is yet another post on Park Hill with a few photos and scans from AD September 1961, when it was being reviewed, and from June 1955 when Theo Crosby previewed it.




Sheffield currently has two concrete skeletons staring each other out across the railway tracks: Park Hill and St. Paul's Place. Anyone who has alighted from Sheffield train station cannot have failed to notice the huge inhabited wall of a building on the hill to the east, protecting the city centre from the marauding suburbs of ill repute beyond. It's reminiscent of Stanage Edge, a few miles west in the Peak District where all the climbers who congregate in Sheffield cut their teeth along with other body parts. Reminiscent in that it meanders along the hill offering a permanence and definition to a city that is desperately searching for such qualities. Being from quite literally the wrong side of the tracks is still a problem for Park Hill. Between it and the city centre are two tram lines, nine train platforms, four lanes of traffic and a steep valley. The station operator (East Midlands Trains) is also wanting to build gates that only people with a train ticket will be allowed through – big business's privatisation of a previously public route. If this preposterous proposition goes ahead, Park Hill will be all but cut off – terrible news not only for the city, but also for Urban Splash who are currently developing the building almost beyond recognition.


Now the cooling towers have gone, Park Hill is really Sheffield's last remaining icon of any credibility and certainly its only building of international standing. Designed in the 1950s by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith under the supervision of city architect Lewis Womersley, and finished in 1961, it is Europe's largest listed building. And as Reyner Banham noted somewhat incredulously, it is a single building. One that starts at a human four storeys and follows the hill as it falls away, maintaining a level roof height, so that at the other end, it is an impressive 14 storeys tall. The streets in the sky, influenced by the Smithsons' Golden Lane competition entry and of course, Corb's Unité d'habitation at Marseille, both of 1952, are not internal corridors, but quite wide decks every three storeys that forms bridges between the main blocks of flats. These decks continue until they meet the ground so that most flats are reachable without having to take the stairs or lift – as long as they don't mind a long walk round. The flats are ingeniously arranged around a huge concrete H column which encloses the stairs and forms bracing for the concrete frame. Four doors from the decks are arranged two doors either side of this huge concrete column and access four flats – one of one bedroom, two of two bedrooms and one of three bedrooms. In pre-Parker Morris days, these are all of Parker Morris space standards. Unfortunately, all flats require stair access of some sort. The one bedroom and two bedroom flats below deck access are all on a level, but are accessed from stairs down from the deck. The other flats are duplex. There were 992 flats in total in Park Hill, each connected to the communal district heating and each having a Garchey system refuse chute. For people used to outside toilets, this was the lap of luxury.




If it had not controversially been listed in 1998, Park Hill would almost certainly have been demolished. The streets in the sky would now be, quite simply, sky and we would almost certainly be left with bland boxes of dubious cul-de-sac quality. There were many in Sheffield who campaigned for it to be demolished, including the current head of our new Liberal Democrat council, Paul Scriven. The recent BBC programme on English Heritage, “Romancing the Stone”, shows him ranting against the building and then, as head of the council, appearing as martyr, trying to make the best of a bad job. Such commitment and vision is commensurate with Sheffield's loss of confidence and new tight grip on blandness. English Heritage are providing £500k of funding to help with the concrete repairs as the only thing they consider worth saving is the concrete frame. On a trip to Corb's Unité, they learn that ?7m was spent on refurbishing the concrete, whereas Urban Splash plan to spend just ?3m on the whole of Park Hill, a building over four times the size.



Urban Splash, starting from the 14 storey end, have completely gutted the building, including the gradated bricks of the façade. These are to be replaced with anodised aluminium panels. I'm amazed that English Heritage are not concerned to replace the façade faithfully as the rough texture of the bricks are very much a part of the Brutalist aesthetic and there is no architectural reasons why they could not be just cleaned up or replaced. The spandrel panels below the windows will not be missed in favour of floor to ceiling windows, but the aluminium panels reek of trendy shininess and are completely inappropriate. English Heritage is clearly out of its depth with twentieth century buildings, as demonstrated in the BBC programme where almost every comment or answer by posh Giles Proctor was accompanied by joshing and mocking. He's happier on 19th century church roofs.

Park Hill cost a considerable sum when it was built. In 1956 prices, it worked out at £1,950 per dwelling as opposed to £1,600 for an average 2-storey house of the time. Fast forward 50 years and Sheffield is desperate for inward investment and jealous of its Yorkshire rival Leeds where the terra cotta clad lawyers and accountants live.




St. Paul's Place, designed by Conran stands opposite the Hill and will accommodate 331 such “luxury” apartments. The penthouse will sell (or perhaps has already sold) for over £1m. The flats are approximately 12% larger than the equivalent were in Park Hill 50 years ago. St. Paul's is on the right side of the tracks, just a few paces from the city centre and on the site of the old “wedding cake” registry office. It is a 21st century echo of housing policy, conceived in an age when our houses earned more than we did and when housing is still conceived of as capital, pensions, and investment. It will be Sheffield's tallest tower at 32 storeys and ignores the topography in favour of standing tall, proud and arrogantly being seen from all of Sheffield's seven hills. It is a vertical rendition of Park Hill's horizontal empty hive of concrete cells. I was hoping that the recent controversy over the cladding would bring the whole thing to a halt and the concrete monolith would remain a monument to greed. But the council conceded and the developers have got away with cheap cladding which will blight the cityscape for generations, setting the low standard for future developments in the city.



In a country run by big business and banks, councils no longer see fit to provide housing, but rather to pass the responsibility to Registered Social Landlords and Housing Associations. An Englishman's home is no longer his castle, but his pension. Today's New Labour strategy is to make the rich richer and hope the crumbs from their table will feed the poor. Not surprisingly, the gap between poor and rich is widening and we are left in the ridiculous situation where councils pay private landlords to house the less fortunate (a similar situation to the government underwriting the banks to finance PFI contracts for schools and hospitals). Nobody wins but the private landlord, who is, of course, disinterested in improving the lives of his/her tenants. Hence the donation of Park Hill to Urban Splash to develop into a mix of 900 luxury flats and social housing – 200 to be rented by Manchester Methodist Housing Association, 40 for shared ownership and the remaining 660 privately owned. Interestingly, the newly formed Homes and Communities Agency, headed by Sir Bob Kerslake, will be “front-loading” £14m of grants to the credit-crunched project. Kerslake was the former, unelected, head of Sheffield's Labour council and oversaw the demolition of hundreds of council houses without replacement. Or replaced with hundreds of cheaply built “luxury” flats that now adorn Sheffield, half empty and now refusing to fart their fantasy fortunes for their owners. Kerslake was be-knighted for his contribution while, as Owen reported, Sheffield's waiting list for housing has risen from 15,000 in 2001 to as much as 90,000 today. The 21st century's definition of progress.

Sheffield shows

My reviews of both Sheffield schools of architecture shows should appear in the AJ this week.

However, what I really wanted to write was this...

If an employer comes to me to ask which of Sheffield's schools he should employ from, I would reply:

"If you know the answer to your problem is a building, then go to Sheffield Hallam.
However, if you do not already know that the answer to your problem is a building,
or whether or not you have a problem at all,
or even the nature of problemhood in society and whether they exist,
or anything of Louis Althusser's problematic from his Reading Capital,
then try Sheffield University."