ROBIN BOYD AND THE POST-WAR ‘JAPANIZATION OF WESTERN IDEAS’

The interest shown by Western architects in post-1945 Japanese architecture was a colonising act, one of authentic intent but more especially need, at a time when the fortunes of International Modernism were failing. Australian architect Robin Boyd was drawn into that process of appropriation and became part of the Western promulgation of contemporary Japanese architecture. This paper will describe Boyd's role in that process and the perpetuation of Western eyes, in search of a palliative, looking to the East for inspiration. It will also gauge the reverse, the ‘japanization of Western ideas’ and its subsequent and unpredictable effect on Boyd.     

The ‘Silent’ Closure of Urban Public Space in Cape Town: 1975 to 2004

This study seeks to show that the closure of urban public space by residents in a South African context is not a recent phenomenon and that successful citizen-driven urban public space closures have been a feature of the urban landscape before the rise of gated communities and monitored urban public space. The primary objective of the study was to analyse and investigate spatio-temporal tendencies relating to the citizen-driven privatisation of urban public space in Cape Town. This objective would be driven by the creation of a comprehensive database of provincially gazetted urban land closures dating from 7 February 1975 to 17 December 2004 within one of the six municipal substructure regions of Cape Town. The secondary objective, but by no means less important, is an identification and analysis of the reasons forwarded, practices employed and techniques utilised by individual citizen-driven applications in two distinctly diverse residential suburbs within the study area.

THE ‘WHOLLY OTHER’: On the Spatiality of the Holy in Islam

Most architects and planners are familiar with the failings of Modernist high rise housing constructed in die 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the most symbolic was die Pruitt Igoe housing development in St Louis which was demolished in 1973. It would come as a surprise to many, however, that in 1997 the NSW Department of Housing is planning complete demolition of a housing development known as die Villawood estate. More surprising would be die fact that Villawood is not a high rise development, but a medium density housing scheme completed as recently as 1981. Post-occupancy evaluations at Villawood have indicated that most residents have few complaints regarding the individual dwellings. One such study found that the internal dwelling design was actually ‘a redeeming feature’.¹ Instead, many of their problems stem from die spatial organisation of the dwellings, associated open space, pedestrian and vehicular circulation and community facilities. This article will examine the ideology which influenced the design of Villawood and explain why the spatial organisation has contributed to producing an unsatisfactory residential environment. Most importantly, it will demonstrate the importance of spatial organisation in Australian urban housing.     

DRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY: Blade Runner's Critique of the Intention of the ‘Primitive Hut’

This essay examines our struggle with the technology of architecture by considering the conceptions of the ‘primitive hut’ put forward by Vitruvius, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Gottfried Semper, and Joseph Rykwert. In claiming the ‘natural origins’ of architecture, the notion of the ‘primitive hut’ has paradoxically supported the intention of architecture to cut itself free of nature and the earth. Architecture has, in this way, held open the possibility that it might overcome the limitations that frustrate its attempts to accommodate. In the film Blade Runner, both the depiction of a futuristic urbanism in a state of decay and the expression of an ambiguous relation between the built and the natural provoke a reassessment of the architectural ‘blade’ that desires the separation between nature and technology. Both Rem Koolhaas' discussion of the skyscraper and Piranesi's etchings depicting classical scenes will be viewed as similar critiques of this dichotomy. By framing the examination within K. Michael Hays' critique of the extreme positions of determinism and autonomy in architectural theory, the paper concludes that criticism has a responsibility to mediate these extremes by expressing the nature of the technological/architectural struggle.     

RE-READING SINGAPORE’S “BLACK AND WHITE” ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE: THE AESTHETIC AFFECTS AND AFFECTATIONS OF ADAPTIVE REUSE

Colonial-period military estates in Singapore are being gentrified for adaptive reuse producing high-end hospitality and retail venues for expatriate and tourist consumption. These include the feted “Black and White” residential enclaves synonymous with Singapore’s tropical aesthetic. But underlying this reinvention is a disturbing history of wartime repurposing under the Japanese Imperial Army, which temporarily destabilised the meanings and representations of these buildings. The seemingly undisturbed architectural typologies of barracks, bungalows and timber huts were backdrops to war, military occupation and captivity. This paper explores how the aesthetic affects and affectations that accompany adaptive reuse may conceal or disclose unsettling histories. It contrasts contemporary celebration of these revitalised historical neighbourhoods with their very different representation by wartime captives.     

‘TO BEG A TREE AND TARRY HIS PLEASURE TO ASSIGN IT TO ME’ — THE ROLES OF LORDS,LANDLORDS AND TENANTS IN HOUSE BUILDING AND IMPROVEMENT

David Clark in Vernacular Architecture vol. 44 drew together thoughts from papers at the Vernacular Architecture Group Winter conference in January 2013 and suggested what might be the standard model of the medieval house, its use and meaning.¹ As a premise it was proposed that customary tenants, the successors of the unfree villeins of the earlier medieval period, holding a single virgate of land, usually built their own house, albeit with the lord possibly supplying materials. This paper examines whether there is evidence that this was usually the case, and considers the availability or otherwise of building materials and the complex relationship between landlords and their tenants, leasehold, as well as customary, when new building or repair was required.

This article should to be read alongside C. R. J. Currie, “Why Historians Believe that Customary Tenants Normally Paid for Their Own Buildings: A Reply to Pamela Slocombe,” Vernacular Architecture 49 (2018): 38–43.     

SOCIAL REFORM AND SEGREGATION: TENANT HOUSING IN THE ISLE OF LEWIS, 1795–1900

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, working-class dwellings in Britain became the focus of a series of reports which served to highlight poor living conditions in both town and countryside. Sub-standard housing was believed to be responsible for a variety of physical and social ills. Until the late nineteenth century, rural housing reforms were addressed by individual landowners who sought to provide or encourage improved tenant housing. An important aspect of housing reform involved the introduction of various types of physical segregation. These included the segregation of byre and dwelling, of working and domestic areas, of living and sleeping spaces, and of males and females. This paper examines the role of segregation in rural housing reform in the Isle of Lewis during the nineteenth century, and considers the reasons why attempts at housing reform during this period were generally unsuccessful.     

BELONGING AND TIME: Technology,Heidegger's ‘Events of Appropriation,’ and New Dutch Architecture

There are two trends in the way contemporary cities deal with technology. The first is a conceited mobilising of resistance to modernisation in the hope of arresting the consequences of technologisation such as rampant development, suburban sprawl, congestion, dominance of vehicular infrastructure and compromised amenities. Amsterdam. Copenhagen, outer Paris, London, Buenos Aires, and a host of American cities including Houston fall into this category. The second trend is a headlong plunge into technology in which cities like Beijing, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok multiply new urban accommodation with immense demographic and infrastructural acceleration. The use of technology is brazen, and the speed of construction elides any architectural pretensions. Densities achieved in these cities are far higher than in their Continental European counterparts, pointing to the obsolescence of Western town planning and urban design.     

THE ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE: On Michael Speaks' Ruminations on a ‘Big,Soft, Orange’

The Big, Soft, Orange exhibition on four Dutch architectural firms focuses on the (soft) processes these architects have evolved for dealing with the large scope(big) of contemporary architectural undertakings and the particular historical and geographical conditions these attempts address in the contemporary Netherlands (orange). Following the precedent of the curator. Michael Speaks' comments, the content of the exhibition will be seen to have broader relevance for Architecture. Speaks' own circumstance is considerably influenced by his relationship with, and critique of the work of, Frederic Jameson. By reading between Jameson and Speaks, this paper will use Speaks' exhibition to question the success of the architecture of postmodernity's preoccupation with overtuming the modern-modernism's Utopian assertions, its preoccupation with form, its totalising tendency, and the strictures of the ‘handed-down’ discipline of architecture with a telos in Building.From a Heideggerian perspective the paper will consider the architectural process as the concrete materialisation of the narrative of architectural production informs other than, but leading toward, the traditionally privileged architectural form: Building. Rather than the architectural approaches of postmodernity overturning modernism,it will be concluded that these approaches are merely innovative differentiation as they ‘flesh-out’ and articulate hitherto unformed narratives already extant within the reductive frames of modernity     

South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar,Ashkelon, 1949–1956

In 1949, in the newly founded state of Israel, South African architects Norman Hanson and Roy Kantorowich planned the city of Ashkelon and, within it, the exclusive neighbourhood unit Afridar. Managed by the South African Jewish Appeal, which initiated and funded the project, Afridar presented a radical exception to Israel’s centralized planning approach during that period. An early example of a semi-private settlement initiative for an ethnic and class-based enclave reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Jewish immigrants, it functioned as a ‘model town’ for the immigrant population from the Middle East and North Africa, which was housed by the government in the rest of the city of Ashkelon. Afridar’s enclave reproduced planning practices from South Africa, which had been coloured by race since the 1920s. Despite its exclusive image, it was modelled after progressive experiments in the design of Native Townships. Their main objective of such experiments was to improve the standards of housing of racially discriminated populations yet, in practice, they served as a tool to implement apartheid policies. This paper interrogates this ambivalence of social aspirations and complicity with state segregation practices through examining the translation of apartheid’s planning practices to the Israeli context, and the negotiations and conflicts this translation entailed.     

‘Unhealthy areas’: Town planning,eugenics and the slums, 1890–1945

The value of planning in remedying slum problems in Britain was widely recognized by the outbreak of the Second World War. Indeed, the identification of planning with social progress underpinned the post‐war consensus. This broad agreement, however, was achieved in the face of apparently distinct and opposing views. From 1890 onwards, the sufficiency of environmental reform in ‘Unhealthy Areas’ was challenged by radical socialists on the one hand, and by the ‘eugenists’ of the social hygiene movement on the other. No one view, however, succeeded in eliminating the others before 1945.

The issue at stake was whether differences in housing and health were the direct product of economic and environmental inequalities, or whether these differences resulted from a process of selective social mobility sorting out the ‘fit’ from the ‘unfit’. Much of the debate centred on overcrowding and its causes. Radical formulations of the slum problem, however, whether from the left or the right, offered no politically plausible solutions to government in Britain — politicians and civil servants sought other ways of typifying and delineating slums, manipulating their presentation of the problem until it appeared to be within their ability to solve.

The nature of the debate about slums, eugenics and planning is discussed in three sections relating to the 1890s, 1920s and 1930s. Finally, the problematic route by which all parties came to accept an environmental approach is explored.     

‘Build Your Own Home’: state-assisted self-help housing in Canada, 1942–75

Recently, aided self-help housing, whereby governments help families to build homes, has been implemented in the developing world but its potential elsewhere has been neglected. The best-known programme, run by the City of Stockholm (1927–90s), showed that almost any family could erect a decent dwelling, but was inflexible. Operating on municipally owned land, it relied on prefabrication. From 1942 to 1975, a Canadian ‘Build Your Own Home’ programme offered financial, legal and technical assistance to amateur builders. The scheme enabled families to build different types of dwellings, in different ways, on privately owned sites, in a variety of geographical settings. Unfortunately, it encouraged scattered development. A better-planned version could have been implemented in many countries, and might still be.     

‘Piazzadilly!’: the re‐imagining of Piccadilly Circus (1957–72)

Between 1957 and 1972, Piccadilly Circus was the object of a series of major plans and comprehensive redevelopment proposals that would have fundamentally transformed the character of this key central London site. The Piccadilly plans have conventionally been seen as part of an assault by modernist planners and property speculators on the established cityscape. Drawing upon recent perspectives that treat plans as both fantasies of metropolitan life and as complex events, this article argues that the unbuilt plans for Piccadilly were more complicated and contested responses to contemporary attitudes towards the city. The article also argues that these visions altered significantly between the late 1950s and the end of the 1960s, particularly in their responses to flows and movement in the city, and their accommodations of the new consumer cultures of the period.     

‘Uneasy bedfellows’ conceiving urban megastructures: precarious public–private partnerships in post-war British New Towns

ABSTRACT

From its inception, the European welfare state was a contract between the state, civic society, and the private sector. And yet, studies on the architecture and urbanism of the European welfare state frequently overlook the role played by the private sector, as the emphasis is commonly placed on governmental action. However, apart from governments also private actors played an important role in shaping the post-war welfare state. New towns in particular were sites of experiment. Here, public–private partnerships forged novel collective spaces, which challenged and redefined what constituted the civic realm. This paper focuses on one such novel type of collective space: the megastructural ‘heart’ of second-wave British New Towns. Combining mass consumption with administrative and civic functions, thereby blending the concepts of ‘shopping centre’ and ‘city centre’, these structures embodied the welfare state’s belief that capitalism could neither live with nor without the existence of a pervasive welfare system (and vice versa). Through the analysis of three megastructures, this paper highlights the important role that private actors played in the formation of the post-war British welfare state; it explicates the lofty societal ambitions that these New Town schemes expressed; and it pinpoints the precariousness of public–private partnerships in the development of urban megastructures.     

‘Order out of chaos’: the London Society and the planning of London 1912–1920

The history of civic consciousness in the late nineteenth century has focused on philanthropic housing reform and the provision of civic amenities such as public parks and libraries. Histories of the growth of the town planning movement in the same period likewise have been dominated by housing, with an emphasis on the garden suburb and the activities of the Garden City Association (founded 1899). At the same time, and partly due to the popularity of research on Ruskin, Morris and their followers, the history of popular movements emerging at the end of the last century has concentrated on conservation groups like the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded 1877) and the National Trust (founded 1895). An analysis is presented here of an emerging voluntary civic and planning movement and its contribution to urban and planning history. It examines the growth of modern civic consciousness from 1890 to 1920, when citizens began to exercise their right to participate in the planning and design of the urban environment. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the town planning movement, local government and a voluntary planning and amenity group, the London Society, founded in 1912, to argue that civic consciousness shifted in the period from a nineteenth century philanthropic approach to urban reform, which centred on housing and amenity, to a more professional and democratic attempt to attend to the planning of the whole urban environment. The research identifies a moment of progressive optimism regarding urban civilization at the beginning of this century, and thus dispels the myth that the period was characterized by anti-urbanism.     

Macmillan’s martyr: the Pilgrim case,the ‘land grab’ and the Tory housing drive, 1951–9

The suicide of Edward Pilgrim in 1954 prompted a public furore over the easy terms on which public authorities could compulsorily purchase privately owned land for development. This article argues that Harold Macmillan, as Conservative Housing Minister after 1951, consciously prolonged the statist purchase provisions of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act even as a reviving market in development land in the early 1950s made them unrealistic and inequitable. The Tories’ twin aims of abolishing the 1947 development charge and making good the ambitious 1951 election pledge to build 300,000 houses per year created an immensely complex set of problems which Macmillan negotiated with much skill. The result, though, was that local authorities – mostly Labour ones – eager to build houses benefited and many individual small owners like Pilgrim suffered from this policy. The Tory pledge was therefore realised in part by means of a hidden subsidy to municipal socialism and at the expense of many natural Conservative supporters.     

The ‘Haussmannization’ of London?: the planning and construction of Kings way-Aldwych, 1889–1935

Modernist planning was at its zenith in Britain during the 1960s, after post-war austerity had passed and before disillusion and reaction set in towards the end of the decade and in the 1970s. It is a time often now associated with 'clean sweep' planning, where the only constraints on redevelopment were economic and conservation policy was restricted to the preservation of a limited number of major buildings and monuments. This article considers the re-planning of Newcastle city centre in the period when planning in the city was led by T. Dan Smith and Wilfred Burns, from Smith assuming political control in 1959 to Burns leaving in 1968. It demonstrates that, though modernist rationalism was the driving force in the city's re-planning, it co-existed with a conscious policy of conservation, born out of a picturesque design tradition.     

The tribulations of Walter Burley Griffin’s final Australian plan: Milleara as ‘the garden city of the future’ 1925–1965

ABSTRACT

The Chicago architect/planner Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937) is known world-wide for his plan for Canberra, Australia’s national capital. Working with his life and professional partner Marion Mahony, he was also responsible for a series of suburban and smaller town schemes in the US and Australia from 1913 until the late 1920s. Most of his Australian designs were embedded in larger processes of speculative land development. The Milleara Estate, commissioned by the little-known developer Henry Scott in 1925, was laid out and available for sale across what are now known as the Melbourne suburbs of Keilor East and Avondale Heights in early 1927 well in advance of the true wave of development of that suburban region. This paper traces the initial impetus for the estate as a ‘garden city’ and its execution and sale with use of the Griffin name and ethos. While Griffin’s association faded during a period of stagnation, it was evoked nearly thirty years later to contest a government plan to completely re-design the estate.     

‘A Laboratory of Heating and Ventilation’: the Johns Hopkins Hospital as experimental architecture, 1870–90

This article offers a fresh look at the origins and environmental design of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, between c. 1875 and 1890. It augments existing histories through close reference to the hospital archives and by contextualising the building within the career and interests of John Shaw Billings, a doctor who was retained by the Hospital Trustees as an expert adviser on hospital design and management. The episode is presented as one of architectural ‘experiment’, in which an hypothesis was formulated, constructed and monitored in use. Architecture emerges from this analysis as an act of exploration and position-taking, with the hospital conceived as a ‘tool’ for didactic demonstration in an on-going multi-disciplinary, international discourse concerning the ventilation of non-domestic buildings.     

‘The Houses Have Been Constructed Everywhere’: The Country Programme of the Housing Commission of Victoria 1945–1960

Abstract

The shortage of housing in Victoria at the end of the Second World War was acute. Families throughout country Victoria were forced to shelter in dwellings that were either ramshackle or overcrowded. From 1945, the Housing Commission of Victoria expended all available resources on the construction of housing units and by 1960 in excess of 47,000 houses and flats had been constructed. Of this total just over 18,000 were built in 120 towns and cities in country Victoria. At all times, the Commission's major criterion for the allocation and siting of these units and the selection of tenants was need. As well, houses were constructed specifically to aid decentralized industry and for numerous government authorities.