You might think that a sense of purpose, furthered by the experience of total war, would be infused throughout the architectural profession in 1946 – that an aspiration to create a better society was prevalent, and this might be expressed in vociferous debate in its journals.
The reality seems to have been more banal, and the sense of direction muddier – there are few manifestos or clarion calls; debates are often mundane or territorial; and there is little sense of change in the air. Page counts are reduced, paper cheap, adverts are few and joyless – a small gas stove, bicycle sheds or garage doors, although a couple do hail the benefits of electricity or zinc (‘New Houses need Zinc!’).
- Happy Swedish apprentices enjoying a building that meets ‘the triple demands of human requirements, architectural design and engineering excellence’
The Architectural Review
The Architectural Review is the most focussed – a special issue on ‘Industry and Education’ in collaboration with the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction. Four paper stocks (including blues and yellows) are deployed, along with classy maps and diagrams, and many large, emotive photographs, often of happy Scandinavians. There are nine articles (including a nice spread by Lazslo Moholy-Nagy), but the end result is rather disparate.
Much of the text dwells on historical developments in technical education or on case studies (Outward Bound schools or enlightened practices at Mather & Platt). Creating a post-school system to operate alongside manufacturing – a ‘university without walls’ – alongside the 1944 Education Act is the common theme, but there are few proposals or visions, apart from a belief in universal employment and a self-confident, if ill-defined, feeling that:
… others beside the architect must grasp the opportunity that present itself, but the architect’s role could well be the one that in the end makes possible and influences their work.
There are two more detailed pieces on architecture – a practical one on the lighting, equipment and accommodation of the technical college by H.E. Broadbent, and one on ‘The Technical College and its Buildings’ by Coventry’s City Architect, Donald Gibson. The latter is perfectly suited to the Review, deploring the ‘nondescript and uninviting’ qualities of existing colleges, which have ‘numbed [the craftsman’s] eye and feeling for significant and pleasing visual form’. Modernist Scandinavian alternatives are the goal, and it is decreed that:
Dignity must be created by reliance upon skilful composition, by the right use of modern techniques of building and by the judicious employment of modern materials, rather than through the medium of elaborate and decorative forms associated with past architectural styles.
This analysis is, predictably, a jumping-off point for a description of Gibson’s own, unrealised Adult Education Centre in Coventry, to be built with a ferro-concrete or steel frame, with sections of cladding that can be altered over time, although with appropriate use of local brick.
Photographic contrasts are scattered throughout this and other articles, counterpointing the inefficient, destructive symmetry of British technical colleges, which banishes the essential working purpose … to the back regions’, and the ‘logical arrangements of the plan’ of Hans Brechbühler in Berne and Paul Hedqvist in Stockholm.
The effect is rather like reading a few interesting if loosely related articles in the Reader’s Digest, with photos (often Modernist, and with embarrassingly bland captions) super-imposed. The journal is finished off with a brief appendix of war damage in Germany and the newly knighted Percy Thomas’s complaints about the LCC’s proposals to transfer architects to a Housing and Valuation Department. It does not amount to an architectural or educational manifesto for industrial colleges – the AR was to find it rather easier to wage negative campaigns over the next few years…
The ultra-glamorous 'Coventry House' by D.E.E. Gibson
Architectural Design & Construction
This was probably Monica Pidgeon and Barbara Randell’s first issue as editors, but the magazine is a rather scrappy affair at only 30 pages, with content scavenged from Architectural Forum (one article about the architecture of SOM’s ‘Atom City’ at Oakland Ridge, with no comment on social or political aspects, and photos for a drab piece on the use of brick in gardens). The editorial betrays the magazine’s origins, attacking the ‘absurdity’ of price control on private housing, which resulted in middle-classes with ‘no prospect’ of homes yet unable to gain ‘an entré into the privileged ranks of the proletariat’.
Ten pages are given over to prefabrication – alongside photographs of an Airey house and a concrete-only ‘G.M.G. Bungalow’, the partial completion of a ‘scientific’ two-storey house by Donald Gibson (as featured in AR above, suggesting the career benefits of war damage…) is described in detail. This experimental project is rather strange, with all the services, including refrigeration, run on gas (it was sponsored by the frightening-sounding Radiation Limited) and carried in one central flue, which included recesses for pot racks.
Internal and external walls were constructed out of concrete slabs carried on a steel frame, which created a clear span and a basic decorative grid on the outside wall. The garage came as standard for the ‘car-minded city’; the open staircase was tubular steel. Whether it, or ideas it explored, had a future I don’t know, although others of Gibson’s reconstruction houses still stand.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/3317048/The-century-makers-1941.html
The rest of the magazine is pretty hit a miss – a spread on government backing for private sewers; one on the public outrage and confusion (described in somewhat patronising terms) caused by Picasso and Matisse at a British Council Exhibition; news on knighthoods; a few books. What these do suggest is the dripfeed of new building type studies and BSI standards that was forthcoming after the war, suggesting a desire for rational, standardised approaches to building and services.
The Architect and Building News
Squeezing four 14-page issues into January, A&BN also suggests reduced circumstances – the letterpress is somewhat wonky, with the occasional typo creeping in. Editorials tend to be on practical aspects of housing – grumbling about the new Government Supply Department or giving a measured welcome to the decentralisation of planning policy. All is written with wry, pro-industry air that extends across the journal, with a single tone of voice that suggests limited resources.
Much of the content relates to new government building studies, whether on Farms or Heating and Ventilation, or new British Standards for WC Seats (Plastic) or Metal Windows. There are a few longer pieces though – one good one by John Eccles attempting to cover ‘The Creation of a New Town’, an attractive photo-study of the Drawing Offices for the Bristol Aeroplane Company by Eric Ross and a brief summary of the proposed Bentley Estate near Walsall. Despite the cynical air, this magazine at least conveys a sense of activity and competitive tension between architects, builders, unions and government that the post-war housing shortage engendered.
