Suchergebnisse

The creation of an Architect's Department at the London County Council provided a platform within the mechanisms of local government which challenged definitions of professional boundaries and accepted forms of practice. In contrast to their peers in private practice, the structures of employment within the Council placed these architects within a broader network of extra-professional resources. Alongside the connection with legislative, economic, and industrial agency, the Department's human resources included the services of the sociologist Margaret Willis, who was based in the Reconstruction Group of the Town Planning Division in room 694 of North Block, in the midst of the Architect's Department.1 Whilst early attempts by the Department at engaging public participation to inform their urban and architectural propositions had been obstructed, Willis' act of infra-professional collaboration established a connectivity to agencies and experiences beyond the domain of the Department, facilitating ingenuity in the architecture produced as a result. It is an oft-cited fact that the LCC employed a sociologist, yet whilst the influence of her work upon the urban and residential schemes proposed by the Department in the post-war period has been celebrated, her work itself has gone unseen. This obfuscation developed in three phases: in producing work anonymously in the spirit of collaborative contribution common to contemporaneous bureaucratic practice, in the active repression of her work to be published beyond the Department, and in the posthumous archiving of her research as a subcategory of the more prominent names of the Department. As a result, although the biographies and work of those with whom she shared both projects and workspace - of Walter Bor, Graham Shankland, and Percy Johnson Marshall - have since emerged, the location and demands of Willis' position, her means of operation, and the documentation she produced have remained masked by the Department's protocols. Through recourse to archival documentation, this paper demonstrates not only the role Willis played, but also the mechanisms of the bureaucratic environment through which such stories are lost. It asserts the value that such resources beyond that which we might ordinarily deem 'architectural' bestowed to employment within a bureaucratic environment, and confronts the challenges posed in redefining the boundaries of architectural histories to include such contributions.

The publication of the County of London Plan in 1943 set out the London County Council's aspirations for a better postwar society. Identifying the urban defects which blighted the County's development, the Council's architects were charged with translating abstract concepts of infrastructural, sociological and health improvements into spatial and architectural considerations. Converse to the expectations of Henry Russell Hitchcock, the bureaucratic structures they established empowered rather than constrained their capacity for innovative architecture. This paper investigates the means by which the Plan encapsulated the multi-faceted nature of practice within the LCC Architect's Department, and how the immaterial connections they established with financial, political, and material resources at their disposal sought to address the specific agency of the architects who worked there.

The aspirations set out in the publication of the County of London Plan in 1943 established the breath of the architectural challenges they aimed to address in building a new post-war society. The spatial and programmatic rationale underpinning the model communities proposed for the New Towns beyond the County boundaries to help alleviate the pressures of industry and residential congestion - and tested in the designated Redevelopment Areas such as Stepney and Poplar - aimed to produce "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride… [with] a spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship." In their intentions to build a "good citizen", they questioned how they could be good architects too. The ethos of building for the communal rather than the individual is apparent in both the dream and the delivery. Operating across scales and between disciplines, consideration was given for both the material (architectural and infrastructural) and the immaterial (economic and legislative) structures required to build a new form of society. The resulting specific agency with which the architects were imbued enabled them to implement aspirational strategies and develop experimental architecture beyond the capacity of private practice. This paper questions the extent to which the interpersonal and spatial relationships the architects of the LCC sought to construct through architectural means were paralleled by the architectural practices put in place to deliver them. Drawing upon oral histories, bureaucratic documentation and contemporary publications, it seeks to reveal the processes by which their architectural practice was built, in order to better understand the architecture built as a result.

The Lansbury Estate is often held up as a model estate owing to its associations with the 1951 Festival of Britain, and its historic status has framed the means by which it is portrayed and understood. Yet, the estate is not a museum piece or relic, but a real community which continues to change. The Lansbury Micro Museum explores the importance of the Lansbury Estate as a microcosm of planning ideas for London, revealing its aspirations and confronting its challenges. Amidst uncertainty over current proposals for the redevelopment and regeneration of Lansbury, the museum presents the original ambitions for the estate while considering how life there has changed over time, and how it might change again. What were the external influences that guided the estate's creation and growth, and will they remain or evolve in the future? By revealing new perspectives on the estate's history and development, it is hoped that the ideas presented will contribute to, as well as inform and provoke, contemporary debate. The museum will put forward a three-part exhibition about the local area: from the estate's conception as an ideal neighbourhood in the aftermath of the Second World War, through the impact of modernisation and industrial change, to the plans for population growth over the next decade. It will consider the many different and often hidden influences that have shaped the area as we know it today; influences that are also affecting many other communities in London and across the UK.

Gesellschaftliche, politische und wissenschaftliche Forderungen nach mehr Beteiligung, Zugang und Mitwirkung sind ebenso allgegenwärtig wie spannungsgeladen und durchzogen von Ambivalenzen. Mediale Teilhabe fragt nach den medialen Ermöglichungs- und Austauschprozessen, als deren Effekt Teilhabe/Nicht-Teilhabe entsteht. Entlang der Modalitäten Verschalten, Temporalisieren und Teilhabende Kritik entwickeln die Beiträge einen differenzierten Blick auf Teilhabe im Spannungsfeld von Anspruch und Inanspruchnahme.