Abstract:
Reyner Banham’s concise account at the beginning of his 1966 book The New Brutalism, Ethic or Aesthetic of the arguments that occurred within the Architect’s Department of the London County Council in the early 1950s, has been immensely influential for histories of post-war British architecture. He described ‘a violent and sustained polemic on style, such as England had not seen since the nineteenth-century.’ Banham was an active partisan in the debate he was recounting. He was friends with those that identified as ‘hard’, and was consistently rude about the other side, with much of his invective couched in distinctly gendered terms. Much of his polemic against the softs has stuck, however unfair: they were flimsy, effeminate, middle-brow, cutesy, and lacking in exactitude: they practiced an architecture that was ‘watered-down, un-rigorous, prettified, whimsical and parochial’, and a retreat from the true path of modernist architecture. This talk attempts to take the Swedophilia of the ‘softs’ intellectually seriously – to purloin Banham’s words about Brutalism being both aesthetic and ethic, Sweden offered not just an aesthetic set of possibilities, but an ethical and political basis for them. What was particularly attractive about Swedish architecture in this period wasn’t just a set of stylistic tropes, but a political and methodological approach to architecture. The talk makes use of the extensive material kept in the Michael Ventris archive, held by the Institute of Classical Studies. Ventris is celebrated for his remarkable decipherment of the Mycenean script Linear B. The archive also provides rich insights for architectural history, and through his close friendship with Oliver Cox, a window onto their lives and ideas whilst finishing their architectural studies after the war. The archive helps to explicate what was so tantalising for this generation of architects about Sweden.
Speaker Bio:
Otto Saumarez Smith is assistant professor of art history at Warwick University and the author of Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain.
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