Gordon Cullen Archive: A Multimedia Case Study
Dr Carla Molinari, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Leeds Beckett University
Dr Marco Spada, Lecturer in Architecture, University of Suffolk
A drawing of cable works, titled ‘G.E.C. Cable Works, Eastleigh Southampton’, drawn in black ink, watercolours and pastel on hot-pressed Whatman Board. CUL_Box13_36. © Gordon Cullen Estate/Reproduced courtesy of University of Westminster Archive.
The Gordon Cullen Archive, held at the University of Westminster, was deposited by Cullen’s family in 2015 after it had been stored in Cullen’s workspace for over 20 years. It consists of 125 boxes of documents created and collected by Cullen during his life.
Cullen’s body of work, some of which was published in his famous book Townscape (later published in the UK as The Concise Townscape), made him one of the most interesting figures in the British urban-design panorama of the 20th century. He had a long and various career as an illustrator, a designer, an editor at the Architectural Review, and later as an urban planner and consultant. His archive reflects the variety of his practice and research. Despite the fact that drawings probably constitute the most famous and most published aspect of Cullen’s cultural output, only about 30 of the boxes contain sketches or illustrations. The collection provides a series of different documents, such as notes, letters, collages, photos and videos, that have been mainly overlooked.
Photographs of a street. CUL_Box1_158. © Gordon Cullen Estate/Reproduced courtesy of University of Westminster Archive.
Photograph of Docklands buildings and a plan of a waterside development, believed to be Swedish Quays, with accompanying text. CUL_Box1_28. © Gordon Cullen Estate/Reproduced courtesy of University of Westminster Archive.
The Gordon Cullen Archive, like the majority of architectural archives, is a multimedia collection of original pieces that goes far beyond our current understandings of his work. These documents represent the ‘behind the scenes’ thinking process of an architect, and suggest how Cullen’s conceiving of work was based on a method that transcended the boundaries of media. The archival researcher, jumping from a sketch to a note handwritten on a page cut out from a magazine, has the chance to retrace Cullen’s complex steps in creating and developing his ideas and projects. In the figures published here, we can only partially see the enormous variety of pieces held at the archive, and imagine the narrative potentials of this biographical collection.
This is one of the greatest treasures of architectural archives. There is no future for archives, digital or analogue, if we do not recover the fundamental role of historical research into how architects think about process – a research that is also interpretation, as it explores the realm of memory. As underlined by Adrian Forty, following John Ruskin’s ideas, “memory is a concept that relates not only to the past, but is a duty that present has over future.” In this gap between the role of memory as an operational device, and the aseptic spaces and rationally organised documents collected in archives, lies the role of researchers. Finding small details and connections, reviewing and understanding thoughts and ideas: this biographical research should maintain the freedom of creating doubts and making open questions. Collecting small pieces of realities, and always following a plausible path, the archival research can create a series of alternative new autobiographical narratives, open to future interpretation and reassessment – a process of investigation finally able to overcome the traditional constraints of archives, suggesting them as creative multimedia interfaces for architectural studies.
Eight drawings of buildings, streets and urban plans, titled ‘Page 47’. CUL_Box3_3’. © Gordon Cullen Estate/Reproduced courtesy of University of Westminster Archive.
A print of a collage of buildings and people, no title, printed in black ink on white paper. CUL_Box4_78. © Gordon Cullen Estate/Reproduced courtesy of University of Westminster Archive.
