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Britain: Modern Architectures in History
The story of modernism in architecture is international, yet each country adopted the movement in its own unique way, inspired by individual artists and schools and in response to specific social needs and political pressures. Britain explores the British approach to modern architecture, and, with due regard for the separate identities of England, Scotland, and Wales, discusses British modernism from its beginnings to the present day.
Alan Powers gives equal weight to the technical and aesthetic aspects of modernism, as well as its often controversial reception within Britain and around the world. He examines the works of key British architects and delves into the influence of non-British architects within the United Kingdom. Powers then turns his attention to postmodern architecture as a global movement, looking at contemporary efforts to make architecture sustainable and adaptable to the new challenges of urban life.
Thoroughly illustrated with images of the buildings under discussion, advertisements, and other historical photographs, Britain is an authoritative, yet highly accessible, account of twentieth-century British architecture.
Alan Powers gives equal weight to the technical and aesthetic aspects of modernism, as well as its often controversial reception within Britain and around the world. He examines the works of key British architects and delves into the influence of non-British architects within the United Kingdom. Powers then turns his attention to postmodern architecture as a global movement, looking at contemporary efforts to make architecture sustainable and adaptable to the new challenges of urban life.
Thoroughly illustrated with images of the buildings under discussion, advertisements, and other historical photographs, Britain is an authoritative, yet highly accessible, account of twentieth-century British architecture.
272 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2007
7 people want to read
About the author
Alan Powers
84 books4 followersAlan Powers is a teacher, researcher and writer specialising in architecture and design.
Powers trained as an art historian at University of Cambridge, gaining an undergraduate degree and a PhD.
As a writer Powers has been prolific, writing reviews, magazine articles, obituaries of artists and architects as well as books. He has concentrated on 20th century British architecture and architectural conservation. He has also written books on the design of book jackets, shop fronts, book collectors, and the artist Eric Ravilious as well as monographs on Serge Chermayeff, and the British firms of Tayler and Green and of Aldington, Graig and Collinge.
Powers trained as an art historian at University of Cambridge, gaining an undergraduate degree and a PhD.
As a writer Powers has been prolific, writing reviews, magazine articles, obituaries of artists and architects as well as books. He has concentrated on 20th century British architecture and architectural conservation. He has also written books on the design of book jackets, shop fronts, book collectors, and the artist Eric Ravilious as well as monographs on Serge Chermayeff, and the British firms of Tayler and Green and of Aldington, Graig and Collinge.
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January 18, 2023
According to Alan Powers, British architecture in the modern age has always been “at its most radical when aiming for such goals as compassion, happiness, and conscience, rather than in its moments of material or purely aesthetic success...these are not frivolous or accidental issues”. His book places those Ruskinian ideals at the centre of an incisive, detailed investigation that covers all the most important events and developments over the long 20th century. In crudely Manichaean terms, this might be summarised as one set of architects who were focussed on “efficient delivery” counteracted by another set of architects who worked to promote and protect humanitarian values through sensitive design.
Powers' account spans the 100-year period from Reyner Banham’s discovery of the UK’s first air conditioning system (the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, by Henman and Cooper, 1900) to its conclusion with the environmentally sustainable technologies of the BedZed housing project (Bill Dunster, 2001). Potted monographs on the work of the most important or interesting architects of the era are supported by political, strategic, and technological investigations into governmental construction programmes, building booms, urban plans, social, cultural, and political transformations, and - a constant theme - the rebuilding again and again of the British city: bigger and bigger projects that since 1900 gradually replaced urban diversity with monolithic developments and privately owned open space.
Whilst Powers’ scholarship and even-handedness are beyond question, he gently makes us aware of his unease about the most hard-edge modern architects; his preference is for the slightly nostalgic work of regional modernists like Tayler and Greene. Because of that he is dismissive of architects that others might consider important; the "hard edge" Tony Fretton, Caruso St. John and David Chipperfield are liquidated as “precious and introverted minimalists”. Some might take issue with his contention that (more than the formalist divas of HighTech, Postmodernism, and New Classicism, etc.) it was “modern successors to the Arts and Crafts” like Edward Cullinan, Richard MacCormac, and the little-known David Lea who in the 1980s made possible a “recovery of credibility” for modern architecture in the public perception.
Refreshingly, he gives prominence to radical activist architects like Walter Segal (who in the 1970s developed the idea of self-build) and 1960s local authority architects like Neave Brown or Darbourne and Dark, who wrestled with the logic of industrialised large-scale construction to create council housing projects of architectural quality and dignity.
He discusses the often murky relationships between architecture and power, as in the case of Dan Smith and architect John Poulson in 1960s Newcastle, or the shenanigans of developer Harry Hyams at Centrepoint, London (architect: Richard Seifert, 1963). He makes space to discuss the grassroots activists who in the early 1960s tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent the speculator Joe Levy from building Euston Tower on north London and who in 1972 stopped a massive redevelopment of the whole Covent Garden area. Such movements (he writes) represented a “new way of thinking” that offered “a new means of giving insight into cities” challenging an otherwise unopposed trend towards homogenisation.
Although his elegant scholarship prevents him from becoming a polemicist, it is clear from the way his emphasis falls on these themes rather than others, and in his choice of chapter headings (Efficiency, Compassion, Poetics, Production, Happiness, Conscience and Difference) that Powers is always led by humanitarian convictions. Not that he is not also tough; he sees architecture as an inherent component of the most important sector of the British economy (construction) and even when writing about architecture as culture, aesthetics, or critical theory, he discusses them in terms of society, the media, politics, and how they influenced the real world of planning and construction. His analyses of the relationship between architects and industry are hard-headed and technically solid, and he has a firm grasp of how politicians, managers, developers, and planners think strategically.
His skill at synthesising complex events and discrete episodes results in a discourse that flows elegantly, eruditely, but unpedantically and allows particular themes to emerge: the multiple modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s; foreign influences from Sweden, Holland, France, and America; the role played by large-scale urban planning in post-1940s reconstruction; the 1951 Festival of Britain; Colin Buchanan’s influential “Traffic in Towns” (1957) which caused the strangulation by ring-roads of every English city; the mass housing programmes of the 1960s and in parallel, the emergence of the large private developer; the use of system methods like CLASP to construct schools; rebel modernists like the Smithsons and Stirling; Archigram of course, but also Portmeiron, John Betjeman and also Cedric Price; Ricoeur, Frampton, Kant, and critical regionalism; Jane Jacobs and chaos theory.
Most importantly of all, he discusses the transformation of urban form through ever bigger and more monolithic projects, and the seemingly irresolvable housing crisis which despite a hundred years of effort, seemed as much out of control at the end of the 20th century as it did at the beginning. Marred only by an inadequate index and an unprepossessing cover, this is the only comprehensive history of twentieth-century British architecture and although you may not share its viewpoint, it is essential reading.
Powers' account spans the 100-year period from Reyner Banham’s discovery of the UK’s first air conditioning system (the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, by Henman and Cooper, 1900) to its conclusion with the environmentally sustainable technologies of the BedZed housing project (Bill Dunster, 2001). Potted monographs on the work of the most important or interesting architects of the era are supported by political, strategic, and technological investigations into governmental construction programmes, building booms, urban plans, social, cultural, and political transformations, and - a constant theme - the rebuilding again and again of the British city: bigger and bigger projects that since 1900 gradually replaced urban diversity with monolithic developments and privately owned open space.
Whilst Powers’ scholarship and even-handedness are beyond question, he gently makes us aware of his unease about the most hard-edge modern architects; his preference is for the slightly nostalgic work of regional modernists like Tayler and Greene. Because of that he is dismissive of architects that others might consider important; the "hard edge" Tony Fretton, Caruso St. John and David Chipperfield are liquidated as “precious and introverted minimalists”. Some might take issue with his contention that (more than the formalist divas of HighTech, Postmodernism, and New Classicism, etc.) it was “modern successors to the Arts and Crafts” like Edward Cullinan, Richard MacCormac, and the little-known David Lea who in the 1980s made possible a “recovery of credibility” for modern architecture in the public perception.
Refreshingly, he gives prominence to radical activist architects like Walter Segal (who in the 1970s developed the idea of self-build) and 1960s local authority architects like Neave Brown or Darbourne and Dark, who wrestled with the logic of industrialised large-scale construction to create council housing projects of architectural quality and dignity.
He discusses the often murky relationships between architecture and power, as in the case of Dan Smith and architect John Poulson in 1960s Newcastle, or the shenanigans of developer Harry Hyams at Centrepoint, London (architect: Richard Seifert, 1963). He makes space to discuss the grassroots activists who in the early 1960s tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent the speculator Joe Levy from building Euston Tower on north London and who in 1972 stopped a massive redevelopment of the whole Covent Garden area. Such movements (he writes) represented a “new way of thinking” that offered “a new means of giving insight into cities” challenging an otherwise unopposed trend towards homogenisation.
Although his elegant scholarship prevents him from becoming a polemicist, it is clear from the way his emphasis falls on these themes rather than others, and in his choice of chapter headings (Efficiency, Compassion, Poetics, Production, Happiness, Conscience and Difference) that Powers is always led by humanitarian convictions. Not that he is not also tough; he sees architecture as an inherent component of the most important sector of the British economy (construction) and even when writing about architecture as culture, aesthetics, or critical theory, he discusses them in terms of society, the media, politics, and how they influenced the real world of planning and construction. His analyses of the relationship between architects and industry are hard-headed and technically solid, and he has a firm grasp of how politicians, managers, developers, and planners think strategically.
His skill at synthesising complex events and discrete episodes results in a discourse that flows elegantly, eruditely, but unpedantically and allows particular themes to emerge: the multiple modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s; foreign influences from Sweden, Holland, France, and America; the role played by large-scale urban planning in post-1940s reconstruction; the 1951 Festival of Britain; Colin Buchanan’s influential “Traffic in Towns” (1957) which caused the strangulation by ring-roads of every English city; the mass housing programmes of the 1960s and in parallel, the emergence of the large private developer; the use of system methods like CLASP to construct schools; rebel modernists like the Smithsons and Stirling; Archigram of course, but also Portmeiron, John Betjeman and also Cedric Price; Ricoeur, Frampton, Kant, and critical regionalism; Jane Jacobs and chaos theory.
Most importantly of all, he discusses the transformation of urban form through ever bigger and more monolithic projects, and the seemingly irresolvable housing crisis which despite a hundred years of effort, seemed as much out of control at the end of the 20th century as it did at the beginning. Marred only by an inadequate index and an unprepossessing cover, this is the only comprehensive history of twentieth-century British architecture and although you may not share its viewpoint, it is essential reading.
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