1st Edition
Man-Made Future Planning, Education and Design in Mid-20th Century Britain
This anthology of essays by a group of distinguished scholars investigates post-1945 city planning in Britain; not from a technical viewpoint, but as a polemical, visual and educational phenomenon, shifting the focus of scholarly interest towards the often-neglected emotional and aesthetic aspects of post-war planning.
Each essay is grounded in original archival research and sheds new light on this critical era in the development of modern town planning. This collection is a valuable resource for architectural, social and urban historians, as well as students and researchers offering new insights into the development of the mid-twentieth century city.
Preface Iain Boyd Whyte (University of Edinburgh) 1. 1947 and all that: why has the Act lasted so long? Jules Lubbock (University of Essex) 2. Otto Neurath and the sociology of happiness Iain Boyd Whyte (University of Edinburgh) 3. Surveying and comprehensive planning: the ‘co-ordination of Knowledge in the wartime plans of Patrick Abercrombie and Max Lock Michiel Dehaene (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) 4. Everywhere at any time: post-Second World War genealogies of the city of the future Volker M. Welter (University of California Santa Barbara) 5. Perceptions in the conception of the Modernist urban environment: Canadian perspectives on the spatial theory of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe (University of British Columbia, Canada) 6. Selling the future city: images in UK post-war reconstructions plans Peter Larkham (University of Central England) 7. Paper dream city / modern monument: Donald Gibson and Coventry Louise Campbell (University of Warwick) 8. Conceptions and perceptions of urban futures in early post-war Britain Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast) 9. ‘Into the World of Conscious Expression’: modernist revolutionaries at the Architectural Association School, 1933-39 Elizabeth Darling (University of Brighton) 10. Plan: A student journal of ambition and anxiety Clive B. Fenton (Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) 11. ‘Destroy all humans!’ Simon Richards (University of Essex) 12. The English university of the 1960s: built community, model universe John McKean (University of Brighton) 13. The tall barracks artistically reconsidered: Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks and the total environment of military life Miles Glendinning (Edinburgh College of Art)
Biography
Iain Boyd Whyte is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, a Getty Scholar and, more recently, a Senior Program Officer at the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and has served as a Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland.
'The essays ... are fascinating if only because the period of certainty and decisive action that they describe is so different from town planning today.' – The Architectural Review
