Anticipations of Utopia: discovering an architecture for post-war Britain
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Date
04/07/2017Item status
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Latusek, Matthew Alexander
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Abstract
This thesis responds to a growing appreciation for the richness and ambiguity of mid-century
architectural culture in Britain. Initially focussing on the enthusiasm for a
science-based approach among architects and town planners, the thesis identifies – in
the diverse debates of the Second World War and immediate post-war years – an
architecture that achieves significantly more than an abstract, inhuman, or totalising
utopianism. Instead, it will expose affinities between the enthusiastic pursuit of
objective solutions in architecture and planning and the drastically compromised
realities, both of the historic city in ruins, and of certain episodes in the history of
architecture that enjoyed popularity after the war. The first chapter introduces the
problem of utopianism, a concept that has often accompanied critical studies of
modern architecture. An appraisal of the utopian tradition highlights the frequent
vagueness and ahistoricism of the term, leaving room for an appreciation of utopian
speculation as dynamically historical, with the potential to decisively enact change.
The second chapter identifies these characteristics in the mid-century enthusiasm for
scientific planning, an approach that used quantifiable methods of research in order
to legitimise an emerging town planning profession, which had gained added impetus
from the transformative social impact of the Second World War. Underpinned by the
civic and regional survey, this approach advanced the potential of technocratic
management to ‘solve’ the problems of social organisation and physical planning.
However, an analysis of specific attempts to speculatively develop the necessary
planning machinery indicates a far richer range of concerns. The third chapter shows
that the experience of wartime bombing dramatically changed the aspect of Britain’s
towns and cities, with the resulting ruins presenting a visceral challenge to the
idealising promise of science. But this seeming conflict obscures the relationship
between ruination and reconstruction. For the anxiety and exhilaration of destruction
was, in fact, embedded in the practice of rebuilding, both in the memories of the
builders and of the public at large. Furthermore, an examination of contemporary
architectural writing on the subject of wartime ruins displays an attempt to
aestheticise and appropriate the ruin’s effects, while simultaneously maintaining an
outward attitude of detachment. The final chapter develops this discussion, moving
from the ruins of the historic city to investigate the mid-century adoption of
architectural history as a justification for design. It will show that while scientific
research seemed to promise objective solutions, the study of history received a
similar authority after the war. Consequently, the historian could assume a status
analogous to that of the planning expert: a fact evidenced by the activities of Rudolf
Wittkower and Nikolaus Pevsner. Just as the utopian potential of science was
conditioned by its contingency, this chapter will demonstrate that the appeal to
history would also inevitably be limited to partial solutions.