‘Inigo Jones Makes a List’. Professor Christy Anderson gives an online lecture for Jones’ 450th Anniversary.
The SAHGB welcomes Professor Christy Anderson, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in the field of Architecture, Planning and Design at the University of Toronto, to give a lecture in celebration of architect and artist Inigo Jones.
This event will take place online through Zoom. A link will be circulated to all who registered the morning of the event. Thank you for understanding.
Cover Image: St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden ©Christy Anderson
One of the many talents of the designer and architect Inigo Jones is that he was a great reader. The surviving books from his collection are filled with the notes and markings of his response to the images and text. Throughout his books, and sometimes on the back of drawings, Jones made lists of the things that he read, buildings he studied, and sometimes just a list of things that he needed to remember from home. This talk looks at Jones’s list making and how it was a method of study that shaped his architecture and design practice, and even his own public persona. Within Jones’s notes are records of his careful study of buildings both in England and in Europe and indicate how much he relied on his study of things close to home as well as to the more exotic art and architecture of Italy, France, and Denmark. Finally, the talk will suggest that list-making as a practice was closely tied to Jones’s study of classical architecture, that was a list-based system of its own.
Queen’s House, Greenwich ©Christy Anderson
BIO
Professor Christy Anderson teaches at the University of Toronto. Her most recent project is a study of the Renaissance ship as an architectural type. Appearing this year is a second book on the architect Inigo Jones, to be published by Reaktion Press. Previous books include Renaissance Architecture (Oxford, 2013) and Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2006). In 2010 she was named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in the field of Architecture, Planning and Design. She received her PhD from MIT, and was a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin.
Book a place
Calling SAHGB Members!
Please explore our Summer events on our website: the Annual Conference ‘Constructing Coloniality’ (UCL, London, May), Study Visits, and celebrations of Wren, Jones and Adam for 2023. Sincere thanks for your support. Please get in touch if you have any questions.
Post-War Architecture in West Africa
We are delighted to announce this SAHGB/IHR Seminar
Please note that this event will be Online Only, via Zoom.
A Zoom link will be circulated on the day of the event to all those who registered.
Post-War Tropical Architecture in West Africa: Knowledge Production and Affluent Consumption
Tropical Timber: The United Africa Company and Modern Interiors in Mid-Century Britain
Speakers: Iain Jackson & Rixt Woudstra
Floating logs down the river to the factory site, Sapele, Nigeria, African Timber & Plywood Company,
1950s - Unilever Archive, Port Sunlight
Post-War Tropical Architecture: This paper is concerned with modernist architecture in “British West Africa” produced in the aftermath of WW2 and the independence period of these countries.
These experimental and often provocative structures were designed for climatic comfort, as well as becoming didactic vehicles for ideas sharing ideas of a modern and liberated Africa. The paper will discuss attempts at forming an ‘Bauhaus’ Art School in Accra, followed by various commissions of libraries, community centres, and museums that sought to blend the most radical architectural designs with decoration, murals, and sculptures. The West African context seemingly presented a ‘blank canvas’ for newly qualified architects eager to ‘experiment’ in ways that would be impossible in Britain. Whilst these buildings were often presented as symbols of an emerging nationalism and expectation of liberation, they also reveal the ongoing neo-colonial methods, with many relying on the patronage of multinationals such as the United Africa Company.
Finally, the paper will discuss how these projects were reported, especially through the high-brow magazine “Nigeria”, which regularly featured extensive articles written by the architects on the latest designs. The result was a diverse and extremely fertile context that reveals an often-overlooked set of important structures responding to a period of political flux and cultural exchange.
Tropical Timber: In 1960, the new, modernist headquarters of the United Africa Company (UAC) opened in central London, designed by the partnership Kenneth Wakeford, Jerram and Harris. Since the late nineteenth century, the UAC was one of the leading British trading companies extracting a variety of raw goods, including palm oil, cocoa, as well as tropical timber from colonial and, subsequently, independent British West Africa. While the structure’s concrete and glass exterior may have seemed cold, inside, the architects used a strikingly large variety of tropical timber. The doors, floors and panelling, as well as most of the furniture, were made of honey-coloured idigbo, pinkish makore, fine-textured guarea and deep-brown African mahogany. What were once stately trees standing tall in the dense, remote and humid forests of the Niger Delta and Western Ghana had become office chairs, parquet floors and cocktail cabinets, transformed through the labour of hundreds of African workers.
Although an exceptional example, United Africa House was certainly not the only building decorated with tropical timber in mid-century Britain. This talk focuses on how ‘empire timber’ left an imprint on British post offices, university buildings, civic centres, housing estates and sport facilities. Tracing the origins of this specific material and examining how and by whom it was logged, sawn and shipped, shows, I argue, the extent to which British modernism was dependent on imperial and neo-imperial networks of extraction.
BIO
Rixt Woudstra is a historian of modern architecture, material culture and colonialism. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, she worked at Liverpool University as part of a Leverhulme-funded project on the architectural and urban history of the United Africa Company in British West Africa. She completed her Ph.D. at MIT.
Iain Jackson is an architect and historian at the Liverpool School of Architecture. His research is mainly focused on 20thC architecture in ‘the tropics’. After completing his PhD on the Indian city of Chandigarh, Jackson co-authored a monograph on Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. He has continued to work in West Africa and is currently PI on a Leverhulme Trust funded project to research the buildings of the United Africa Company. Jackson co-curated an exhibition with ArchiAfrika in 2019 on the 20thC architecture of Accra.
Vignola and the Culture of Architectural Copying
We are delighted to announce this SAHGB/IHR Seminar
Please note that due to unforseen circumstances this event will now be Online Only, via Zoom.
A Zoom link will be circulated on the day of the event to all those who registered.
Vignola and the Culture of Architectural Copying
The advent of printing has long been derided as enabling individuals with little capacity for invention to design buildings by means of copying.
While scholars have challenged this understanding of architecture in the age of printing, little attention has been paid to the practices of copying at the heart of this belief. Confronting this paradigm through a bottom-up approach, one that focuses on the use of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (first published in 1562), this talk explores how the reproduction of printed images, including commonplace acts of copying, processes of direct translation, and monotonous processes of manual replication, shaped architectural practice.
In doing so, I reveal these seemingly mundane, transmedial techniques as critical elements in the production of architectural knowledge and part of a larger culture of copying that flourished in the Renaissance.
Composite capital from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (1562); Anonymous draftsman, Composite capital after Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (late sixteenth century) [Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, B7797] (images in the public domain)
Michael Waters is an assistant professor at Columbia University. He earned his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and was previously the Scott Opler Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is the author of the forthcoming book Renaissance Architecture in the Making and co-curated the exhibit Variety, Archeology, and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice at the University of Virginia Art Museum in 2011.
Symposium with SAH- Afghanistan: Architectural Heritage and Global Politics
We are delighted to announce this event with SAH US.
The event will run on 3 times zones
11:00 USA-EST
16:00 UK-Time
19:30 Afghanistan-Time
There will be two sessions of 1 hour 20mins each with brief introduction and a 15-minute break
This event is fully online. A Zoom link will be sent to all who have registered 24 hours before the event
Please also note that this event will not be recorded
Organised by:
SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS OF GREAT BRITAIN
[Prof Murray Fraser, Chair]
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SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS (US)
[Dr Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Interim Board Member]
Can architecture survive politics? Located at the heart of Eurasia, Afghanistan has been of global importance for millennia, from the time of Alexander the Great’s invasion to the ending of the US military occupation last year. Marking one year after the Taliban’s return to power, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain – in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians in the US – invites members and the wider public to join an online international symposium to discuss Afghanistan’s architecture and built heritage in the past, present and future. Invited Afghan and international architects, cultural specialists, historians and UNESCO officials will share their insights about how global politics impacts upon Afghanistan. Each will also talk about the ways they are striving to protect and preserve Afghan built heritage amidst war, political turbulence and international pressure.
Right: Bamiyan, the smaller 38 metre Buddha surrounded by the caves of cells and monasteries, Afghanistan, Image Courtesy of Warwick Ball. Left: The Minaret of Jam, Afghanistan, Image Courtesy of Warwick Ball
SAHGB Symposium for PhD Scholars and Early Career Researchers
SAHGB’s Annual Architectural History Symposium for PhD Scholars and Early Career Researchers
Using What We Have: Architectural Histories of Fragments, Ruins, Rationed Resources and Obsolete Spaces
SAHGB are pleased to invite you to a hybrid symposium this year.
Attendance can be either on-line (£6) or in person (£12) at the University of Liverpool, School of the Arts. With support from the Liverpool School of Architecture, the symposium will be held on 31st March 2022 from 9:30 – 5:00 pm (GMT) in the recently restored Arts Library.
All places, All periods, All welcome.
For complete details and to register please click here to register
Each year, the SAHGB scholars hold an event to provide a forum for emerging architectural history scholars. Open to everyone, the annual event connects researchers across sectors and around the world.
The call for papers received an excellent and global response, with researchers investigating architectural histories from the twenty-first century to early interventions at the Parthenon. The symposium seeks to raise awareness of traditions of vernacular adaptation and reuse, including cultural responses to ruins, layering of settlements, repurposed architectural fragments, temporary habitations and obsolete building typologies.
Organised into two sessions, the morning session addresses historic traditions and the afternoon examines current theoretical and practical approaches informed by architectural history research. There will be a concluding round table session to draw these themes together where examples from the past can be considered in context with current design solutions.
We are delighted to welcome Professor Ola Uduku, Head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, who will introduce the symposium and our keynote speaker, Dr. Konstantina Georgiadou, who will deliver her presentation ‘Only Temporary! Housing the Lausanne Treaty refugees in Greece.’
Programme of the day
9:45 - 9:50
Welcome, session format, and schedule
9:50 - 10
Prof. Nwola Uduku
Opening remarks
10 - 10:30
Dr Konstantina Georgiadou
Only Temporary! Housing the Lausanne Treaty refugees in Greece.
10:30 - 11
Dr Matthew Steele
My Place or Yours? The Adaptation of St Matthew, Brixton, London (1976 - 1983)
11 - 11:30
Danielle Hewitt
14 Million Tonnes of Debris:
Demolition, Salvage and Re-use in London’s World War II Bombsites, 1940-1945
11:30 - 12
Maria Brewster
Speaking Columns: A Critique on the Parthenon’s (De)(Re)Construction
12 - 12:30
Murray Tremellen
“Open and Manly” or “Discordant Mixture”? Conservation and stylistic propriety at the Palace of Westminster, 1794-1836
12:30 - 1
Sasson Rafailov
Permanence in Matter and Memory
1:00 - 1:55 LUNCH BREAK
1:55 - 2 Introduce afternoon session
2 - 2:30
Nadin Augustiniok
Meaning of Heritage and Reuse in the 19th and 21st centuries. A case study analysis of the Moritzburg in Halle/Saale, Germany
2:30 - 3
Thomais Kordonouri
Upcycling: a bricolage of memory and new meanings - Three façades
3 - 3:30
Dr Madalena Costa Lima
(Re)Thinking the (re)use of endangered buildings in the age of the Enlightenment and its decay: the Portuguese case
3:30 - 4
Lisa Kinch
All [ex]Change: Reusing the Lee Circle Telephone Exchange
4 - 4:30
Irma Delmonte
Indigenous Architecture of the Ecuadorian Amazon
4:30 - 4:50
Round table discussion
4:50 - 5 Concluding remarks
Info
Date: 31 st March 2022
Time: 9:30 am – 5:00 pm, GMT
Where: On-line via Zoom, or In person at the Arts Library, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZG
Cost: Online: £6. Bookings close on 29 th March for online attendance.
In person: £12 (hosted at the recently renovated Arts Library and includes lunch and tea and coffee throughout the day). Bookings close on 26 th March for in person attendance. Please advise if you have dietary requirements (vegan, vegetarian, allergies, intolerances, or other dietary requirements) when completing your booking.
Notes: The Arts Library is on the first floor.
If you need support with access, please advise the event organisers when booking and they will arrange to meet you to provide access to the lifts. University of Liverpool asks all attendees (who are not exempt) to comply with University Covid requirements and to wear masks while indoors. Presenters are exempt during their session.
RIBA Learning/SAHGB Evening Course
Becontree: Housing a History
Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Collections
Becontree Estate
The Becontree Estate is celebrating its 100th year since it was constructed as the largest public housing estate in the world, the home to more than 100,000 people in four square miles.
In collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, contributors will examine different aspects of how Becontree came into being, the changes that have occurred, life on the estate and how recent history has changed its architecture.
This 4-week online course explores the social and design history of the estate, and of council housing in Britain more widely, in the 100 years since 1921.
The course is inspired by the RIBA's current exhibitions celebrating the Becontree Centenary and is aimed at adults who have a general interest in architecture. A reading list will accompany the course, advanced reading will not be required before the sessions.
Tuesday, 8th Feb 2022
The Beginnings: Becontree and Beyond
Mark Swenarton - "Background to Becontree: the bigger picture"
The London County Council's Becontree estate was the largest of the municipal garden suburbs built in Britain under the nationwide 'Homes fit for Heroes' campaign of 1918-19. This talk will set out the background by looking at three main areas. First, the design innovations developed by the garden city movement in the early 1900s, particularly by Raymond Unwin at Hampstead Garden Suburb and elsewhere. Second, the adoption of this new form of housing by the
government as the solution to the political crisis created by the ending of hostilities. Finally, it will look briefly at the earlier housing schemes built by the London County Council in the 1890s and 1900s before it embarked on Becontree.
Mark Swenarton is an architectural historian, critic and educator, known particularly for his writings on twentieth-century housing. Mark co-founded and edited the monthly review Architecture Today (1989- 2005) and then took up the headship of the architecture school at Oxford Brookes University. He was subsequently appointed inaugural James Stirling Chair of Architecture at Liverpool University, where he is now emeritus professor. His books include Homes fit for Heroes (1981/2018), Artisans and Architects (1989), Building the New Jerusalem (2008), Architecture and the Welfare State (2014) and Cook's Camden (2017). Mark is the editor of the SAHGB's journal Architectural History.
Karen Ruston - "Building Becontree: Aspirations and Realities"
This talk will showcase the range of archive material held by Barking and Dagenham Archive Service documenting the early years of the Becontree Estate, much of which has been catalogued over the past year as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project, 'Building Becontree'. The archive includes architectural drawings and plans of the estate created by the London County Council as well as reports of residents' experiences of life on the estate and medical and educational records kept by the local authorities of Barking and Dagenham. A comparison between the ambitions of Becontree's designers and the experiences of its earliest residents will be an important focus.
Karen Rushton is the Borough Archivist for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. The archive collections are all based at Valence House Museum and document the history of the local area and its residents.
Tuesday, 15th Feb 2022:
Landscapes, Housing, and Community
Rebecca Preston - "Clean Streets, neat houses and bright gardens, with parks and sports fields between': the landscape of Becontree and other London County Council cottage estates"
'With their clean streets, lined with neat houses and bright gardens, with parks and sports fields between, they make a very pleasant impression' - a journalist noted of Becontree and other municipal cottage estates in 1938. New ideas about town planning, drawn from Garden City responses to overcrowding and disease and fired by the need for homes 'fit for heroes' following the First World War, placed gardens and open space at the heart of housing policy from 1919.
While many people were rehoused in urban block dwellings, the garden ideal came to the fore in low-density cottage estates on the city fringes, where their greens, parks and other open spaces created an aesthetically pleasing and healthy landscape of light and air. At the same time, the new cottage gardens were intended to encourage thrift, self-sufficiency and family centred activity, while it was hoped that the parks and recreation grounds would foster community life, outdoor leisure and play.
But what did the settlers make of this new landscape and how did they make themselves at home in what could be challenging circumstances? Considering Becontree from its early days, this presentation will look at the design of the landscape and its relationship to the built environment, and then focus a little closer on how tenants used their gardens up to the Second World War. We will also look at how gardening was encouraged by the London County Council and other agencies as a form of social work - and whether the men, women and children who settled the new estates might have welcomed this advice, ignored it, or participated on their own terms.
Rebecca Preston is a Historian with the English Heritage London blue plaques scheme and also works freelance on landscape and building history projects. Her research interests and publications span the relationship of people to place, of landscape to the built environment and of gardens and outside spaces to the home in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.
nimtim Architects - "Squaring the Corners"
Squaring the Corners by nimtim architects with artist Katie Schwab was the selected proposal for the corner plot commission. As part of the commission, proposals were sought from selected architectural practices to redesign neglected corner plots on the Becontree estate to mark its centenary. A junction of four corner plots creates one civic square. Each square suggests new activities and performs new functions by inviting residents to take ownership of them. Their designs borrow generously from geometries, colours, and materials within the estate
- both in their original and current customised manifestations. With a strong focus on biodiversity, the ambition is to encourage the re-establishment of the original ecosystem of the heath, thus creating a part wild, part intimate public space: much smaller in scale than the large municipal parks, and much more social than the adjacent front gardens.
nimtim are a practice who want to make and talk about architecture in a different way. Our work is about people and the stories and ideas they bring to the projects we make together. We create buildings that reflect the personalities and values of the people and communities that will live, work or play in them. We want to tell stories that resonate with everyone. To bring people inside the extraordinary process of making and reimagining buildings and landscapes.
Tuesday, 22nd Feb 2022
Council Housing Beyond Becontree
Andrew Turnbull - "Desirable Homes and Communities - Goldsmith Street, Norwich"
An overview of how we commissioned and delivered the Stirling Prize winning development at Goldsmith Street, the largest 100% Passivhaus, 100% social housing scheme in the country.
Andrew Turnbull has over 20 years' experience in the housing field and has worked for Norwich City Council since 2008 as a senior housing development officer and more recently as manager of the development team. Andrew was the council lead for the Stirling Prize winning Goldsmith Street development and has led this project from inception through to completion.
Mary Milton - "Sea Mills (Bristol): Council Estate to Conservation Area"
This talk will focus on the development of Sea Mills council estate in Bristol from the early visions of Christopher Addison, who visited two sites and planted a tree that still bears his name to the development of the estate 100 years after: What has worked and what has not worked, and the effect of right to buy on the look of the estate. It will also discuss the Garden Suburb Movement in shaping the estate's layout and other influences behind the key designs of the houses on the estate, their building materials, and the major alterations that followed, as well as the importance of public buildings on the layout of the estate, shaping a community that contributed to what was eventually built.
Mary Milton is the Project Co-ordinator of Sea Mills 100, a National Lottery Heritage funded project celebrating the centenary of the Sea Mills Garden Suburb in Bristol. The project's legacy is the Sea Mills Museum, based in a formerly derelict K6 phone box in the centre of the area.
Mary has a Post Graduate Diploma in Building Surveying from the University of the West of England and currently works at Bristol Archives.
Miles Glendinning - "Mass Housing, Modern Architecture, State Power: the international context of British 'council housing'"
This talk will set the British system of 'council housing' into its international context. In the case of Britain, council housing was built and rented out directly by local government, by 'councils' - a national system not found anywhere else in the world. Its central decision-makers were elected local politicians, and it consequently became bound up with local political and civic micro cultures to an extreme degree. But it also featured distinctive national characteristics as well, notably the way in which the organisational reliance on direct municipal building and ownership was bound up spatially with a preoccupation with extensive inner city 'slum clearance' - very different from most other countries, where the mass-housing norm was vast arrays of slab blocks on the city periphery, exemplified by the grands ensembles of France. This focus on the inner urban helped generate a very distinctive architectural outcome - an idiosyncratic vernacular of modern housing, with multi-storey public housing blocks in Britain tending to be concentrated in quite individualistic inner-urban clumps of tall towers, usually not 'system built' - very unlike the arrays of prefabricated slab blocks typical of many countries.
Miles Glendinning is Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh. He has published extensively on modernist and contemporary architecture and housing, and on Scottish historic architecture in general: his books include the award-winning Tower Block (with Stefan Muthesius), The Conservation Movement. His current research is focused on the international history of mass housing, and he has just published the first comprehensive global overview of this topic: Mass Housing - Modern Architecture and State Power - a Global History (Bloomsbury Academic Press, February 2021). Other planned books include a history of public housing in Hong Kong (Routledge; likely publication 2023) and a history of postwar housing in London.
Tuesday, 1st Mar 2022
Postwar Period and the Fall and Rise of Council Housing
Nicholas Bullock - "Reconstruction and Renewal in Newham and Barking, 1945-1979"
With the formation in 1965 of the GLC, Becontree, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham, became part of Greater London, formal recognition of a long process of assimilation. However, though now part of East London its development and housing had long differed from its western neighbours. Comparing these with the policies pursued by its western 'neighbour', Newham, the presentation will seek to draw out the contrasting approaches adopted by the two boroughs between 1945-79 to the challenges of reconstruction and renewal.
Nick Bullock has long taught at Cambridge and the AA and has written on European architecture and urbanism of the 20th century, particularly in Britain, France and Germany. His research has ranged from social/housing policy and regional planning to the architectural debates of the moment and is currently completing a book on architecture, urbanism and the modernization of post-war France.
John Boughton - "Council Housing under Attack: Politics and Design since 1979"
John will discuss the politics and changing nature of social housing since 1979, examining the impact of Right to Buy, new ideas around planning and design, and controversies surrounding regeneration.
John Boughton is a social historian, the author of Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, published by Verso in April 2018, and a forthcoming book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool. John has published in the Historian and Labor History and gives talks on housing to a range of audiences. He blogs at municipaldreams.wordpress.com.
Registration fee:
· Standard £60
· Student, over 65 and unemployed £50
· RIBA/SAHGB Members £45
Online booking in advance is essential. Click below to purchase your ticket:
For more information, please contact: savia.palate@sahgb.org.uk
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