Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect

this is the sun yeah um so hi everyone uh my name is Manisha bogey so I'm the head of public engagement here at the AAA and I'm really delighted to welcome you all to today's Symposium part of a city the work of Neve Brown architect um the Symposium celebrates the publication of a new book which I'm just gonna grab so you can see it um here by canalside press and um it's the it's really celebrating the work of new Brown who is not only a very celebrated architect as you all probably know but also an a alumnus um and the book brings together his writing and design projects including his celebrated large-scale Urban housing work for Camden Council and the later projects undertaken in private practice with David Porter all credits to canalside press ahead of us um and uh the title of the book the book and today's discussions is taken from Brown's gold medal acceptance speech where he observed that we weren't making housing we were making part of a city the book is really a portrait of a period of optimism in modern architectural culture it reveals the profound intellectual and artistic ideas that inspired this communal social effort and is also a portrait of a gifted and unusually articulate architect who as evidenced by the many people who are already packed into this room so early in the afternoon is someone who is still continues to inspire people till today and it's great to see a mixture of people who knew Neve Brown and worked with him as well as students so we look forward to a lively discussion to follow this afternoon across the afternoon we're going to hear from contributors to the book and we encourage you all to be part of the conversation I'm now going to hand over to Patrick Lynch who that is the founder of Lynch Architects and the publishing editor of canalside press who'll tell us more about this beautiful book which is on sale throughout the day across the hallway in the a Bookshop and also later today in the South jewelry room which is just when you enter the lecture hall in the book launch that will follow this symposium um so I guess without further Ado I look forward to a really enjoyable afternoon um to celebrate Neve Brown and his continued Legacy in architectural education and practice over to you Patrick thank you very much manager um wow leave Brown is popular isn't he um the the book um uh is uh is very much a labor of love um I'm going to pass one around because I think um you should touch it and smell it um um it's a very rookie book uh so so if I pass this around uh uh nobody will know if you nick it other than Neve in heaven but um I've got lots of people to thank um I'm going to try not to do a Gwyneth Paltrow and uh person to tears um uh Lexi and her staff upstairs in the library were invaluable for um David and I in um giving us access to uh the the writing about Neve um I'd like to thank also Celia Scott um the Widow of uh Robert Maxwell um Christoph Gaff uh the Wither of um Christopher Woodward R.I.P um at Jones and all the contributors for helping us put this book together and especially Janet Richards um I believe um that um neeve's children Zoe and Aaron are here is that true yeah and um and especially um Emma kalkovan um the designer of the book and designer of all canalside presses uh documents um if I if I click on this manager is that the the yeah I'm I'm very very PC illiterate and Mac um oh there we go he says I'm not sure if I'm gonna do any better that's what happens when too many Mac users yes right yeah there's a great essay but I'm better working without this brilliant um so so the the plan for today is um here we go uh is that um I'm going to talk about the structure and content of the book physically and intellectually uh and subar um uh who um his Director of Photography at the AAA uh is going to talk about the photographs that she made for the book yeah I don't know you keep talking and um and then David Porter um our co-editor is going to um talk about his contribution to the book which is a kind of Memoir of working with with Neve at Camden Council and then in private practice and then Johnson suggested another contributor to the book is um going to uh to talk about I suppose the state of housing is a kind of loose um operating title what what um the thing that I'm going to kind of try to describe to you is how how does a practicing architect end up running a publishing house and uh and producing things um uh and and in fact the the I think that the thing that I want to emphasize is that whilst I have a an M Phil and a PhD and I teach a bit um this book comes out of an architectural practice it's a book about an architect for architects um obviously it's also for the general public and um and hopefully it will inspire future Scholars but it's very much like the the general of Civic architecture that we publish uh part of a growing field of I suppose practice-based research um so far we've produced a number of books um and a series which I'm calling modern architecture and reflection so there's a book about John munier uh the architect of the bowel collection with Brett Anderson and uh Barry gassen Robin Walker was part of Scott Tannen Walker and uh and and niece Brown and and to some degree they were all um teacher architects um and I guess one thing I think that we might talk about today uh is the fact that they all kind of self-identify as not being theorists but I believe are more important as critics and theorists of architecture than most of the theorists of architecture that um we've been misled by since the 1970s and that's because I believe that Architects books are the primary source of knowledge for Architects not art historians books not scientist books um now I realize that that's probably you know controversial and obviously exposed as my bias but there we are um the the thing about the book that I think is hopefully immediately apparent and noteworthy uh is that um it's it it's a lot cheaper than most academic books and it's in full color and um there is a combination of archival Photography and new photography so so for example uh Rory Gaylor who's an architect photographer um and uh Hans kalkovan who is the uncle of Emma calcobin who's an architect and a teacher in Holland uh Laura Pietra who's an architectural photographer that Emma found on the internet who lives in Bergamo and photograph The Motto project and uh uh I can't read his name Hugo Thomason um who took some beautiful photographs of the Medina project um the book is um structured like the other books in the modern architecture reflection series uh in Parts um in that there's almost always a contributing editor alongside myself um and in this case David and I have written in introductory pieces um David's is a personal biographical insightful reflective piece about working with me even knowing Neve um and mine I guess because I didn't know Niche Brown I never met him um but I think one there was one useful thing about having a PhD is that it allows you to kind of mine data and information and to Corral it and order it I hope in a way that is communicative and fair um and then a collection of needs writings um uh he was a brilliant writer as I'm sure some of you know very insightful uh he wrote very well without I think overly rhetorical emphasis on the sound of his own voice but he did have a particular voice and a voice full of doubt and also certainty and then a collection of um projects with original text contemporary texts by Ed Jones Chris Woodward as I mentioned um Anthony McIntyre who had not been able to track down and Tony fretton who wrote about the Medina project when it was published for 80 and then and then uh another part of the book is really contemporary Reflections so so I thought it was very important to approach Architects working in housing today to reflect upon the lessons of leaf brown um when we kind of when we started this this process of making books um we recently won a commission from Hackney Council to do a social housing project and so as part of our due diligence we began to you know look very closely at what works and what doesn't work and Claudia um and my business partner and wife said um you know what we need to do is we need to make sure we don't make the same mistakes again uh we need to learn and so um hopefully this document is a primary source of research not only about need brown but about the state of British architecture today about what what people are doing and what the struggles that we're facing actually a lot of these problems don't go away they're political economic bureaucratic issues they're also typological spatial territorial pure architectural issues about the world of the ground plane the issues of program ground issues of cars issues of Technology issues of proximity issues of human nature um so I'm just going to show you what the book looks like um and this is these are Neves the text that we we chose um I I I think that when Neve is writing these pieces as well as there being a degree of um kind of critical inquiry and self-exploration I I think he was very very aware that he was leaving a legacy um I don't think that was done in a hubristic or arrogant sense I just think it was actually taking very very seriously the profession of architecture as a public discourse in itself um so the book has a series of um historical examples things that he's reacting against um this is obviously winscombe street with kind of you know empty London in the 70s 60s and 70s you know old cars and things that he's learning from deliberately using writing as a critical tool to develop his practice I'm going to read you something uh in a in a while which which touches on these and explains them in a bit more detail these are back in Howard's wonderful drawings of uh hodgkinson's uh Family Hospital project the Brunswick Center um makes you a wonderful archival photography and and new photography surprisingly there's only six projects six bangers absolutely world-class projects um there seemed to be an architectural culture alive then where people who are fellow practitioners were writing about each other's work in a generous but critical fashion a sense of a shared project of the modern movement as a social intellectual artistic exercise practical exercise of Learning To Get Better by looking at each other's work so Chris Woodward uh essays is in the book um some texts by Ed Jones a contemporary [Music] not a competitor although I suppose competitive in the sense that we will will have intellectual see that's what I think we all are of in some degree but also can be generous rather than yeah I would listen to something really interesting the other day um Robert frit the you know kind of uh Magus of Queen Crimson was being interviewed and he said the difference between the music industry now or Society now and then in the 1960s and 70s is that we used to have a culture parts of which operated with regards to the market now we have a market that marketizes culture and he says for example when the a r man from Atlantic Records came over from New York to see them do a gig at Shepherd's bush if he'd said to them our new primary merrily interested in making money he wouldn't have got signed whereas now if he was in the office of a music producer at Universal records and they said uh what are you primarily interested in if you said making great and beautiful music that moves the soul and the body there's no way he would get signed so I think that's the difference one could be competitive but but also involved in a cultural discourse called architecture um so hopefully what the book does is kind of give you some sense of the spirit of the tone of the times our beautiful new photography by super and by Roy Gala as I mentioned and and through the process of documenting it visually certain themes evolved which I'm going to kind of talk to you about um this is the Italian project and and of course now that we can see the vegetation in maturity some of the ideas are really obvious whilst the language is shifted perhaps towards a kind of Proto uh postmodern the kind of blue pipe work and Pitch roofs and pentiles the um it's still basically the same ideas of um in a verdant City architecture built-in Gardens both in Holland and in and in London um the drawings were amazing I mean he really was composing in terms of proportion and scale and volume but also looking at inhabitation and questions of the facade in the relationship to structure the plastic quality of architecture the light and Shadow depth privacy and this is the project that David and Neve worked on which they resigned from and actually it looks really pretty good I mean I think it looks really really good and it's built on a holder piece of made Earth in the in the North Sea um that's the view from the dunes and Paul karakusovich um who was taught by Neve um whilst being kind of ostracized from British Academia and British architectural culture you know any other country in the world knee Brown would have been a professor at polytechnica of Milan or eth it's only here in this country that similarly anybody can become a professor of architecture rather than an architect um he still taught a bit and he taught Paul at the RCA Small Small module and I think he's supposed to say set you want a career with an interest in in housing in the city and you interviewed him and very kindly you purchased his or took his photo archive which we've used in the book um what Maxwell's very very insightful text um and Rayna Bannon Bannerman um Maxwell were teaching at the road at UCL uh this is a a dissenting view um I'm going to talk about it in some detail in a minute but um we thought it was only fair as a historical archival document that we present to you both sides of the picture um Kenny Frampton was in uh knee Brown's year met him on the first day of term describes him turning up in his winter warm uniform this kind of strange American and American British officer um hodgkinson similarly I think 80 Gale a whole host of important figures working together Jonathan's essay Simon Henley who's just won the Neve Brown prize they want one beautiful thing as the result of Ben Derbyshire at our kind of you know when members present the IBA getting near the gold medal was this now the need of crown price Lee Brown and James Sterling I think they'd find that really funny wouldn't they Sterling obviously thinks his is more important I'm not sure if he's right uh David Evans who's a partner in our practice and where David is hey Dave who who we're kind of speculating about you know is David Porter were David and Lee write about resigning from and our conclusion is no but nonetheless even with the design build contract the the essential architectural strategies that so uh precise and embedded in the site and in use that the projects turned out really well nonetheless um John Zhang who teaches with with David at Westminster um and and Amy Young who's that just was a year-out student last summer who I've been corresponding with and she wanted to work with us we didn't have any work so we became friends instead uh correspondence and uh and she was just just walking around the estate Alexander Road and um made a joyous response to it um Peter Barbara of course Peter here who's involved with with Neves winning the gold medal as well and Claudia um who's um who's uh who was brought up in in Dresden in the DDR and uh has a very different take on housing in the English context and our political trials and tribulations and she uh she concludes um making reference to Iggy pops a famous song the passenger when he talks about walking around looking at the backsides of cities and yet all of it was made for you and me because it just belongs to you and me um this is my text now um what I'm going to do is kind of give you some sense of of this I'm not going to redo the whole thing but uh this is Linkin fields and uh Brunswick and uh Harvey court at Cambridge um so I'm going to read you uh for a while um part of my essay um and it's called situated practice prudence and the anonymity of beauty on tension and metaphor in the Civic art of Neve Brown and it starts with a quote from the dancing column by Jesse rickford who was one of my PhD supervisors the metaphor with which I have been concerned with is more extended a double one a body is like a building and the building in turn is like the world unusually articulate for an architect Neve Brown wrote well and convincingly about the Dilemma of making modern architecture in traditional City settings describing this as the apparent incompatibility of two systems each the product of values given priorities at different periods in the same culture and typified by the street and the facade and by the building in context teaching at Cornell and at Princeton alongside Colin Rowe Michael Graves Peter Eiserman and others Brown was exposed to his fair share of loud mouths and cranks claiming to have the last World yet he continually sought Avia Medea one which acknowledged the role of modern Construction in architectural design whilst maintaining that What mattered above all else was making part of a city in doing so unusually for a practicing architect Brown admitted to several doubts and dilemmas and even to unresolvable tensions in his work he didn't believe in an academic architecture that worked best on paper and instead he tried to intervene and to participate in situations in a state of change memorably described the primary Act of design talibur eventually who was one of my teachers often remarked upon the fact that whilst teaching the architectural Association in this building during the 1970s he often found himself literally and figuratively occupying a narrow and somewhat awkward position in between Leon career and Peter Cook defending a middle ground upon which to construe a situated modern architecture critical of both formalistic traditionalism on the one hand and Technical instrumentalism on the other Neve Brown was aware of and cautious of these extremists too and similarly critical of their absolutist fantasies just as brown wasn't looking to have the final word neither does this book instead we present you a range of views and a collection of primary sources for further scholarship and for Architects to reflect upon our hope is the recent renewal of interest in Brown's work and simultaneously in the buildings of George Finch and Kate McIntosh and others involved in the welfare state project of Britain might be a stirring again of a new old spirit in architecture one oriented towards a prudent desire for social justice founded in Practical ethics despite its later critical success and in contrast to the near adulation that Brown's work has recently received the initial view of Alexander Road was not uniliversity positive however and in fact quite negative Rayna Bannon was extremely critical if not hostile and mocking in his description of the project in new Society in 1978 claiming that the late William Howell had once declared when he was working in the old LCC Architects Department let's face it mate housing as a charity shat upon the working classes from a great height but I'm ridiculed the idea of an architect wishing to control an architectonic environment to the extent that the external planting is regulated by the council gardeners seeing this as painfully outdated and evenly even embarrassingly paternalistic in an otherwise snooty and somewhat catty article about Alexander Road he even recounts waspish cocktail party chat with brown Bannon concluded that the problem of Mass housing remains exactly where it was 10 years ago and will probably be still there in 10 years time when Neve Brown's early work will be due for his inevitable historical Revival as part of some British tradition of large-scale planning our hope is that this book along with its siblings might help us all to become better students of architecture John somersen's definition of modern architecture from his forward to Trevor dannett's modern architecture and Britain book of 1959 described it as agreement to be radical to be continuously critical of results and to go back again and again to the program till it yields an answer which has the stamp of reality this radicalism is the great thing in English architecture today once lose it and English modernism becomes just so much provincial backwash from the channel and the Atlantic success meant for brown in a review of the work of his former employers employers Lions Israel Ellison gray the manifestation of equality of architecture and culture which seemed at the time to have been within reach of all rational varied expressive capable of occupying both background and foreground by the same process the capacity to put both background and foreground is I suggest his own General working definition of good architecture generally and an achievement of English Urban architecture sometimes something that he acknowledges learning from his friend patrioticons and students work at the AAA concerned with Lincoln's in fields hodgkinson had identified in the lawyer's Quarters at the ends of Court an unusual degree of anonymity and complexity at Play something that he thought might act as a guide towards the better integration of urban scale modern developments into English cities in part of these lessons concerned specifically the sectional Arrangements of quite complex yet simple seeming buildings whereby multiple programs of use can be accommodated within single volumes because of the topographical and territorial nuances introduced by step sections layering functions within laconic and urban forms David Porter suggests that I think Patrick the other one hodgkinson and Neve saw a normative Urban architecture in the ends of court that could Encompass a range of uses within a restricted range of types that this was directly influential on their own designs the large amount of share office space at the ends of court in London is integrated into the city via a series of Courts and gateways that maintain both their autonomy as discrete parts of the city and assert their continuity with the patterns and scales of city life that surround them for hodgkinson this Paradox of being both part of the city and yet distinctly apart bore fruit and his project to replace a Georgian city block at Bloomsbury with the Brunswick Center a forerunner of what banham like to call Mega structures but which Brown and hodgkinson saw rather as good ordinary city-scale blocks orbit much smaller is Harvey Court built for gonville and keys College Cambridge in 1962 which holdskinson design working alongside Collins and John Wilson in the offices of Celeste Martin Theo Crosby in his editorial in the architecture review published in May 1969 declares despite some misgivings that the Brunswick Center at least proposes acidic that the Brunswick Center at least proposes a Civic image of grandeur without oppression it is tempting to imagine that hodgkinson and brown shared a common ambition in seeking to create what Cosby called a good bit of city and that this memorable phrase stuck and even inspired Brown's arabiego medal acceptance speech his review of the Brunswick Center Nate Brown concludes there remain large areas of our cities that can be regarded with two sentimental of you which do not and cannot actually provide a good environment for living and working noting that while there was money to be made in the uneasy Coalition of developer architect and Public Authority it looks as though it has a future as well as a past brownies however acutely aware of potential tensions in this uneasy Coalition declaring that socially successful development cannot be achieved from motives of mere private gain and that the exceptional success of the Brunswick Center lies in the absolute integration of Social and cultural values in the concept at its most General Brown was aware of and indeed fascinated by the tensions between ideas of individuality and the somewhat inherently systematic character of Mass housing based as it often is on a kind of low magic views from economic necessity and a degree of Suspicion and misanthropy somewhat at odds with a desire for anonymity and a degree of unforced sociability he returns to this problem as it as as if it is a light Motif running all of his through all of his social housing projects confronting inherent contradictions or conflicts between individualism which might be seen as expressive of the modernist architectural Cult of functionalism and Collective life or the Civic art of traditional javilitas the Holy Grail of post-modernist Architects attempts to elicit a kind of organic continuity between traditional and modern city architecture in an essay published in the Japanese Journal Toshi you could taku in 1980 entitled conflict of values within the change of times Brown acknowledged a dilemma which arises when an architect seeks to address and wants the internal claims for organization and external claims of the site the tense confrontations occur when questions of urban form and the character of architecture its local identity even collide with modernist design principles predicated primarily upon ergonomics technology and introverted space planning to some degree the inherent narcissism of wanting one's dwelling to be fundamentally specific and distinct whilst wishing simultaneously to remind part of a discrete larger Urban whole arose right at the start of Brown's built career and continued throughout as a psychological political and ontological form of agonism Brown had reconciled these contradictions at Winston Street in a canny Manor by producing detailed design layouts at each house supposedly attuned precisely to the Mounds of each family in fact each house is the same a Utopia of sorts is achieved through precise attention to the anonymity and economic reality of the lives of City dwellers at the front and through faith in the capacity of the children of five families to play together amicably and for their parents to to share in the tasks of gardening and communal social living albeit with a degree of privacy to retreat into if public life becomes too much um unlike most British architects who tend to study mathematics and art at a level often with another science subject Brown has studied English a level and to his father's bemusement and irritation he had in fact turned down a scholarship to read English at Oxford in favor of the architectural Association however whilst this partly explains his capacity to treat the polemical canonical texts a modernist Dogma with careful critical scrutiny and to some degree irreverence rather than the usual cultic devotional further of the recently initiated his cultural observations and insights are I would suggest profoundly psychological and anthropological rather than blindly accepting modernist Dogma Brown is gracious enough to acknowledge that whilst the actual achievements were real enough and still move us by their Authority unlike many modern architects who worshiped at the altar of technological process progress he also describes the gigantic horror of the Industrial Revolution as inspiration for the modern movement both in its everyday values and its Utopias in contrast the dogma of high-tech Architects and the polemics of archigram Brown is critical of the disastrous aspects of modern architecture and subtle enough to critically accept the cultural values of traditional architectural settings for their Urbane power and Civic Dimension which is why I believe that rather than thinking House of housing as a technical or sociological problem he conceived his task as an architect as the fabrication of part of a city in doing so he was able to acknowledge the older revalued culture represented by the continuing City even if and perhaps especially so this entailed recognizing that he contributed to this continuity with varying degrees of success doing so he concluded the Japanese essay required him as an architect and as a citizen to acknowledge a dilemma regarding internal conflicts for organization and external claims of the site which cannot always be resolved to which I ascribe a particular value a guardian knot that's not simply be cut I'm just going to conclude um such poignant intellectual and emotional honesty and maturity is unusual in anyone and particularly remarkable when someone confronted with such public attacks on their workers need brown injured I cannot think of another architect capable of such equilibrium or psychic poise a reason for Brown's capacity for Creative wisdom and situational balance lies perhaps in Kenneth Frampton's observation made in his essay published in the book that Neves Aunt Margaret's work as a psychoanalyst had a profound influence upon her young nephew enabling a young boy to move with relative ease between the identities of American and Britain and then Britain the U.S Brown was equipped by his aunt with an incredible situational cells of Salford Frampton implies it was this capacity to react to and integrate with his surroundings that is evident in his architectural work too I suggest what is required I believe in order to make a part of a city instead of the pose of irony is creative Praxis Praxis Aristotle observed in his Poetics is the imitation of Praxis architectural practice involves lateral thinking that goes beyond an egotistical denial of complexity or it's obverse the promotion of chaotic formlessness in favor of solutions that accept the inevitably entangled character of human relations as the Anthropologist Tim ingold suggests and the fundamental character of architectural design as spatial and formal order I'm just going to give you an example of this having accommodated car parking economically within the slope of the existing side site Brown was faced Alexander Road with the problems of exposing individual dwellings to the Civic life of the street in Georgian and Victorian terrorist housing this dilemma is resolved by the ambiguity of areas I.E bits of land often hemmed in by railings that sit in between the pavement and the front doors of residences Brown's solution is subtle yet clear a planted border maintained by the city a device which repeats above and establishes a series of ground conditions for inhabitants in this way each ground floor apartment possesses a Terrace and so it's just barely habitable and so it's not just barely habitable as in the case with a lot of 20th century Mass housing that places Flats at ground level but is also arguably as good as the units above better even if you suffer from agrophobia or are challenged with Mobility perhaps this landscape in miniature device operates as a concrete and vegetable threshold and as an edicular Motif at once fusing public and private territories and distinguishing them in an erudite solution to a typical Urban problem entangling individual and Collective life in an indestructible spatial Civic not I'm just going to conclude displaying both empathy and situational intelligence curiosity and courage and degree of patience hope and tenacity neat Brand's example of authentic Praxis is something that we have a lot to learn from today not only as designers and writers but also as Citizens architecture is particularly vulnerable to political and economic shocks obviously and buildings like the careers of Architects don't always stay the same the AAA where we are situated today and most of the buildings at Bedford Square for example were once dwellings are now in part offices partly schools and they could yet become something else again what this buildings undeniably are though Inseparable from the gardens within which they are placed and the Urban Design strategies which they form a part of is part of a city and over time the Georgian plan forms that somersen and Roe and brown and hodgkinson admired have evolved to accommodate the loose continuity of the living City that Maxwell saw as the inevitable and desirable next steps Alexander Road which was initially conceived of anyway in terms of an urban metabolism made up of a diverse range of uses almost there albeit situated within a relatively limited range of types diversity into some degree continuity existed right at the start of Alexandria Road not simply in terms of mass spoke and scale as the planners would say but also in the complexity of social functions that Sea Cadets left our children Etc the Evans and sheriff building I mean accommodated within a rigorously Civic architectural character this combination of programmatic complexity and architectonic rhythmic regularity is clearly indebted to the laconic good ordinary character of English Civic architecture which Brown and hodgkinson so admired at Lincoln's Inn it might look different to its surroundings in terms of style but in contrast the tower blocks nearby as Alexander Road is unusually abained and integrated into the metabolism and fabric of Camden the overriding impression of it one gains now which we hope this book conveys and which Sue and Rory's photographs reveal to us is of a series of smaller Gardens situated in larger Gardens almost exactly like vast waves of 19th century London so at the same scale I don't know why you can't quite bugger um so Alexander Road you can see is running uh East-West um or um Southwest Northeast um next to the railway lines and is surrounded by similar long streets of Victorian housing with Gardens and at the bottom of the page you can't quite see this I don't know why um maybe if I do that is where we are um you see the railway lines coming out of of Houston and King's cross towards the top the AAA is just at the bottom of the picture with the Georgian squares that form uh University of London um now this is the last bit right this is something a kind of offering up as a personal observation um I don't I didn't know Neve so perhaps you can enlighten me if I'm getting this wrong um I can't help thinking when I encounter Brown's exemplary character in his writing and architecture of the French philosopher and theologian Simone Vise characterization in a book published in English in 1952 as gravity and Grace of the anonymity of beauty anonymity describes perfectly not only his architecture I believe and brown uses this term himself in fact but also the coexistence of ethics and Aesthetics in Brown's practice an anonymous Beauty emerging from prudent practice situated in and oriented towards Civic life enabling the creation of architecture that works at the scale of individual bodies and massive bodies and as part of the Living World now Sue's going to talk to us about the photos that hopefully illustrate what I've described [Applause] uh hi everybody um my name's Sue bar I'm head of Photography here at the AAA and um canalside asked me to shoot through three Neath Brown projects for the book and so I thought I would just introduce them to you and so you can see what I did so this is Alexander Road obviously when I first started making photographs like some 20 odd years ago properly making photographs I was shooting on large format film and one of the first projects I went to shoot sort of out of my own interest and love of concrete was Alexandra road so it was kind of quite strange in a way to go back and shoot a project that I'd looked at a long long time ago and so I'm just putting a few of the pictures together because I think it's kind of quite interesting the dodgy iPhone scans I've sort of not being very professional shooting old transparencies with my iPhone but anyway there you go um so when I was kind of shooting 20 odd years ago I was kind of just out of art school and so my interest in kind of Photography and photography of architecture and the Aesthetics was much more kind of to do with a sort of Germanic desaturization which I'm really not interested in in the same way now so in this project when I was going back to reshoot these faces it was really interested in kind of the lushness and the greenery and the Landscaping which Patrick was talking about earlier and so those are the things I was trying to find in the photographs I was making I was really interested in how the building kind of sits within the landscape rather than kind of just making a kind of portrait photograph of the architecture and these uh some of the pictures that I took so I got very interested by this because I'd been there before and just when David and I were wandering around we had an extraordinarily hot day it was like a heatwave day I think so it was um it was quite a crazy day to be shooting in but and there was actually too much light which is sort of a strange thing to say in Britain that there's too much light but um so I was interested as well in these kind of incidental spaces around the site I mean I think it's quite tricky shooting a project like Alexander Road that's so iconic and so familiar and um I think there's a lot to say about kind of photographing that sort of architecture that's so so known to people that um I was trying to find these kind of other spaces in the site that I hadn't actually encountered in the first in my first visit all those years ago um as I say yeah I was kind of really interested in this sort of weathering and how things have changed and how things have kind of grown over time and you know that's I think is really really important rather than making this kind of super perfect um actually I'm gonna go on a big rant about commercial architectural photography is not really um the right thing I should be doing so um yeah David and I were wandering around and I was personally as a photographer really interested in these kind of sites and spaces on the edge of the site actually where you've got the kind of the landscaping and these kind of kind of quiet moments in a way within the site that I wasn't familiar with but anyone who's a sort of Resident would know these kind of cut throughs and sort of quite mysterious but quite intimate kind of spaces within this kind of landscape um and we kind of found this quite strange space which sort of was full of people with Labradors it was kind of like a sort of strange dog club happening but um there's a sort of for me I think there's a kind of formal informality about this this area which was really wonderful anyway it reminds me a bit like a stage set and um yeah it was yeah it was really glorious to photograph actually um yeah and this is a couple more of these kind of areas that we're kind of interested in I kind of like the way in these images that the architecture actually disappears um which is sort of opposite really of what maybe you should be doing but you know just sort of I think this gives you an idea of the experience and the feeling of actually being there on site and kind of how Lush and green and rather wonderful it is sort of to return to the housing era in a bit um you know as I said it's actually quite tricky to shoot a building that's so familiar so I think some of these pictures I mean this isn't everything within the book this is just a selection but some of these pictures in a way become a bit more like portraits I think rather than a kind of um like a landscape which is sort of the original intention showing the the building as a landscape um there's this uh quite iconic end elevation which was sort of again I think an example of sort of the portrait of the architecture um which is a sort of much more sort of cropped much more closer way of looking at the at the site and it's a kind of has a completely different feeling I think to some of the other pictures that I shot um and then you know with a project like this which is so enormous you know you could spend months shooting there but it was also kind of an approach where you look at details and weathering which was something I was interested in so you know you get this idea of the the smaller amount of texture and what you're showing actually shows the greater sort of feeling of the project and the space and the weathering on the concrete shutter the shutter marks is rather wonderful um the next project I shot was when comes Street which obviously is a much smaller site and actually was quite I think quite a difficult project to shoot really um I think I made a mistake I should have shot it from the end of the street which I realized now which was um I guess you shouldn't admit that mistake but it was a shot that was kind of missing from what I made just so then you could understand kind of how it sat within the kind of the space it was in um within this project I felt that it was kind of more necessary in a way because it was so much more closed and so much tightest kind of shoot these kind of Junctions and conjunct uh sort of yeah points where things were were meeting and kind of materiality um and also kind of gaps between things which I think is rather fantastic this gap between the kind of stair case and then you could sort of see through these kind of glimpses which is really wonderful within um within this project oh the light was completely gray and flat on this day it's much kind of heavier in a sense I think because of the lack of greenery and there's green on the floor um what was so magical about shooting though was these Gardens at the back this kind of hidden communal space that Patrick talked about earlier it's just a really incredible Lush kind of space in a way to shoot and the pictures I was making I wanted to sort of you know by cropping into the architecture a bit to sort of show this kind of you know the greenery the feeling of the greenery was kind of really overwhelming in a sense that sort of the building has been sort of suffocated in a in a good way suffocated by the vegetation the last one for that um the third project I shot was about dunboyne Road or Fleet Road which is also called again this this is a sort of different feeling you know this sort of the internal nature of it the way everything was kind of more in the center to look at when I went through my archives again I found a photograph I'd made 20 odd years ago which is super brutal and this was at the beginning of my interest or Scion about this with car Parks it was sort of obsession with them so I think then and now there's quite a kind of difference in my approach to kind of how I read architecture and shoot things but um yeah I think they have developed the practices developed so I was kind of interested in this kind of again the softness and the lushness it's a shame about the Union Jacks in the picture but you know just having the kind of greenery is is something that I really wanted to show this again this sort of experience of how it would be to to be living there um I was also really interested just from research I've done before in my own practice of kind of topography and I thought that was something really extraordinary about this site just the kind of layers and links again and the sort of the underneath and that was something that I really wanted to show within this um within these pictures I think within this project the sort of key images that you shoot you know which looks a bit it's a bit funny shape yeah and there's sort of certain views or certain ways of reading the site which are kind of like images that kind of call out to be uh to be made and to be photographed in a way um this being one and these kind of passageways as well this was my favorite one slightly obtuse choice but um I like this other side to the project which I hadn't really looked at before and just the kind of the ramps and again the topography and um and the slopes of that um Patrick asked me to just I realize I've taught really quickly um Patrick asked me to show a few pictures of some work I've been doing in Stuttgart which is kind of similar ideas and similar themes it's a project called monsters um and just looking at kind of housing some massive kind of housing projects and and church projects around Stuttgart area which are kind of actually not that really not that well known um and built Often by the professors at the Academy there this is one of them top extra so it's slightly pre-dating what we've been looking at but um the ideas of kind of methodologies of shooting and kind of light conditions are similar this is assembled which is um actually quite similar to the Barbican in a weird way just ideas of kind of use and program within the site but it's three massive slab blocks um and but same ideas of kind of foliage and kind of showing lushness of things again um and these are a church Bonhoeffer which is quite an extraordinary kind of I mean these are quite tight images in a sense you know they're a bit more to do with the portrait kind of idea but uh the sort of the weathering and the sort of lushness of the images is what I was really interested in them so it was a kind of continuation from kind of what I was shooting at Neves of Neve's projects but yeah that's it I talked really fast sorry fatty okay [Applause] my contribution would be more personal because I knew I knew him I I really did know him uh oh he's gone yeah sorry you come back he's not gone forever okay if you see the gold medal speech you can see behind him there are cylinders of oxygen so he knew the situation when he got the gold medal and briefly he was at the AAA here in 1950 to 56. Lions Israel Ellis 1957-59 and then he worked for Middlesex County Council I didn't know that until with Mark swinerton I went to the rib archive which is where all his drawings are and started sorting them um but one thing I would say is that neither lion to Joe Ellis nor at middle States County council did he touch housing it was it was Laboratories and it was schools not housing so he comes to housing a little later I put mine down I went to work for him in 1972 and stayed at Camp until 77 when Camden was it's like the lights were going out I'll tell you a bit more but I mean it was that period after Camden lost faith and the work stopped and later this is my career with Neve Neve started teaching here with with the great David Gray the longest serving teacher I think the AA has ever had and so for a couple of years I taught with David and Neve here uh and then even I went into partnership 86 to 92. now the mysteries of going forward just like okay slide it down two fingers just jumping like bird okay well do I mean you've already seen Alexander and I just want to make a very simple point which is that uh when he's working for Camden they did not ask him to do what he did in a sense they asked him to provide 500 homes some Landscaping some ancillary buildings what he gave not to Camden but to London I think was a new Street and a new park the park is now listed along with the buildings a new Street and a new park on the back I mean this is an extraordinary achievement I think uh and is it the most photographed Street in London now it must be one of the most photographed streets in London so I'll start with that okay so this is quick survey of the work you've seen it already winscombe Street and at the time he's writing he's designing windscreen winscombe Street he's underway with his writing career Ken Frampton who was in the same year as Neve and John is 80 here he might be he is good to see you lady the same year at the AAA and Ken Franklin Ken became the technical editor of architectural design magazine which was the magazine and so Neve is starting to write for Ken on architectural design at the time that his designing winscombe Street which is his first housing he writes a critique of James gowan's Schreiber house which was up in Hampstead so it was within Camden but it's a very different proposition the winscombe street to put it mildly I won't illustrate it but the critique is pretty tough in a period when you could do pretty tough formal analysis of architecture now it's journalism it's not critique partly I think the power of a very substantial lawyers working for very substantial architectures but he's very critical of the I think the formalism the obsessive formalism of James Gowen and he knew James gown from Alliance israelitis so he starts his career as a writer and writes the form of housing at the time that he comes to Camden to work for Sydney Hill and his first commission there is Fleet Road and Fleet Road is is the first and then I'll go through it a little bit more but this is this is the first period of his work can do what I have to do two fingers now we have jumped to Holland because this is the this is we I've seen you see Alexander Road you've seen whiskey you've seen Fleet Road but in 1986 Neva and I had been teaching together here which meant we ended up going back to Winston Street where Neve was living and Neve loved to talk about architecture he loved to talk about architecture and so there would be long discussions I won't use the phrase with red wine too often because it makes him sound like an alcoholic but my God we got through a lot of red wine and a lot of words talking about architecture and what was happening is that uh Dutch Dutch Architects were coming to London to look at Alexander Road and Fleet Road you know big guys with Burberry raincoats and Nikon cameras dozens of them um and there was a hint that there might be some work there and that hint slowly turned into a reality and and so we linked up together and we were offered this project outside the Hague called the zulsa Stroud and the at the top is a photograph of it is there a point I can I can walk up and down a point I've got quite long arms if that works but below on the left hand side yes for me as is view of death towards the edge of the city if you like and we were making a city Edge to shravengan which is where the Hague meets the sea it's a tourist Resort and in the middle at the bottom you can see Fleet Road and the reason that's there is this that we were entertaining Dutchmen some of whom were working for a building contractor who was to become our client and we walked down that alley um and one of them asked what is that and what he was asking about is that what is that what is that for and we said something along the lines well is to protect the wall from you know if there's a pram or something like that and luckily we stopped there but we didn't even then we'd gone too far because what we heard is the words waste waste and it's Calvinism with something in essential was there what we didn't say the reason it was there is for tactile reasons so you could touch it and also it's a proportional division of that space likely we didn't say that otherwise we'd have never got the job however this this all came later but this is This Is Us in Holland um and so I go back to the stuff you know better in a minute now if I can do the magic trick and the bottom right hand corner at the end Eve writes I know he says looking back I think some of my work was quite archaic and that's his overview of this project which parts at the top disappear going out into the North Sea and on the right hand side the sand dunes which protects the Holland from the North Sea and we were building an edge for the city small two three story houses and then sand dunes right let's see if we can go a bit further and along the top you can see an elevation of it right hand side there's some Towers they are existing Towers that's hotels by the seaside but scan left is quite low and then suddenly four or five Towers 10 stories and then um it gets higher it gets her to 12 13 stories so we could not do high-rise we presented this at the riba and someone with a voice uncannily like Ed Jones hackled from the back traitors I think traitors maybe it was an imitator but actually we could not produce the density they wanted of us within low-rise parameters okay oh okay and what we designed for them was an internal uh public realm to try and unite together the different parts of the building I won't go it would take much too long to go through but underneath this building is a five or six stories of car park we were to provide 2 000 parking spaces because this is by the seaside and tourists would come in the summer including many Germans slipping across the border and parking everyone's street so we we build this huge it was the largest underground car park in the Netherlands it's like having an oil tanker underneath the building and they built this and put the slab on the top and then we were still designing and they did and they were selling off bits of the top slab as if that was a polar to develop on and what's interesting about this is what slowly emerged was that our vision for the public realm which they all loved the politicians love the local residents really liked they were hoping to pay for that through trickle down from the profits from the other buildings and I put this up partly to raise this issue because it isn't that light now here and the the tricky thing we were having is how to reconcile these high buildings which we had to have with a groundscape now I'm not going to go into detail but Simon Henley's just here who got the Nev Brown award and one of the reasons was he produced a tower that had a way of integrating itself into the city at ground level right and that's an even I when we work together there we go and the little we did this annoying thing that I think the Dutch hated of showing paintings of Vermeer and takuch and I think they and we were joking you say we're the man be pamby humanists because this is at the moment the Remco house has gone back from London to Rotterdam and the Dutch are inventing the super Dutch REM cool house has just done a competition entry for the town hall of the Hague which is a mini Manhattan you know and we have these sentimental views of of Holland so we move on this is this is this is the first of the Italian projects and when evil and I set up there seemed to be a stream of these coming Nev had made friends with an Italian architect Amanda malvestiti and they teamed up and Amanda's I think it was his father-in-law was a contractor developer just outside Bergamo and there seemed to be a stream of projects and one was built and in the RMA archive they're about four or five developed to a certain stage which weren't built but I think suddenly the prospect a billion in Italy I mean the the home of European architecture and urban culture was a wonderful wonderful generator of spirit after the Camden days and this is the first one and there was a moment in the office when a phone call came through from Amando in Bergamo saying we've got a problem because Within These blocks they're a spiral stairs and he rang to say we're having problem with the spiral stairs which were in reinforced concrete the building inspectors are very worried about them because we'll need calculations but would it be all right if we built them out of white mobs and after short pause I think that's okay you know and but what was interesting is this was happening at the same time as Holland and the waste waste and the Italian Builders would read the drawings like a classical musician would read a score they will absorb it they would interpret it and then you know the level of craft was was very very high and I should say that what is underestimated in the Camden work is the degree to which is hand crafted virtually none of it is made off-site it's almost all hand crafted and the drawings my God were handcrafted they are and somehow the Dutch when they went around and saw all this they must have noticed for God's sake but some mother didn't want to see it I think they thought we'll sort that out when we get there clear enough so this is this is happening in the beginning of the partnership and then afterwards when we when we resigned the salsa strap project uh I went up to the Macintosh school and Eve Neve ended up getting another project in Holland but in Eindhoven and I had a desk based in my wife's office in short ditch and said this man of a slightly different generation with a drawing board with ink and and uh tracing paper and for the results of Stratton even I were drawing A1 drawings in ink on tracing sending them to Udo the drawing office getting them printed on a A1 comeback Guillotine put them onto A4 and this new technology called fax machine we feed them through the fax machine a join a to B and so on and then piece them together with sticky tape and then redraft them with CAD but they designed Hoven the last the last project so that's the span of work jumping around so here we are so here's the part of the class of 1950. I've edited this down John ladies so I'm sorry you're you're not featuring but uh Denise left Patrick hoskinson you know to his right and then to his left Ken Frampton I put those two because uh the development of low rise I think is is a sort of debatable Territory between Nev and Patrick and Ken's there because he was commissioning leave to right and then Israel lines and Alice was I think is big an influence on him as was the AAA and it was an extraordinary generation that went through I mean Alan Cahoon and and you were there John uh but uh James Gowen James Sterling Richard McCormack Eldred Evans it kind of goes on I mean it was the cream of British Architects we're going through the office and Neve talked about it as being his apprenticeship and I think it was and in Camden we became an apprentice's office rather like is we had to learn to draw and a number of times he said David Gray told taught me how to do this is how to do the lettering but we all did the drawings and Mark Twins and I have been were trawling through the riba archive and there they are thousands of them and meticulously drawn and suddenly going to the group at the AAA um uh the the phrase it describes it loving look obesier's buildings and hating his urbanism um and so there's corbs suddenly light is shed on the problem the problem of three-dimensional planning the end of the corridor Street in Praise of the home Etc the destruction of the street and certainly with Neve and we're Patrick they carry this forward into their work uh with Patrick of course it's a love affair particularly with Alvarado and so there's this these dual father figures hovering over them this is well I I just carry on this is very tricky um this this is a slide I put in for students so forgive me for that but it's it was they were looking this is the class of 1950 at Patton's Urban puns within London and I think according to Neve Patrick was the one who really wised up about the ends of Court which are not very far away as being a pattern which is very coherent very cohesive architecturally built roughly under the same materials and so on as a sort of model for development but also an interest in in the street patterns and the street architecture of London and bath and so on and of course with that is is the elaboration of the front door and just like there is here at Bedford Square you come up a few steps into the front door or you go down a few steps into what is now I think the fabrication laboratory but used to be the Bookshop but this split level that takes you up and takes you down and that this becomes uh part of a rethinking of what you can do oh jump jump yeah so they're the ends of call and that as you will recognize is Alvarado and Neve and Patrick [Music] okay but it it it starts a conversation that develops into Earth hey why didn't you come here which one was it show me again that one and that one okay we're on um and again a bit a bit of History really of this of this period I've used this to illustrate it top left is Alison and Peter Smithson uh and Eduardo Palazzi and on the right Nigel Henderson sitting in the streets of Bethel green I think the the smithson's actually lived in Chelsea but it's Nigel Henderson who lived in the East End and his wife was I think a social Anthropologist and he starts photographing the East End I mean on the right of the famous photographs at the Smithson juice great deal about street life but there's there's the realization that there is um a background life there which is beyond issues of Sanitation and that that which had been called slums was not as simple a question as that there were social issues right yeah that's that's okay and this is a period at which can is asked Neve I think originally to edit an issue of architectural design called the housing primer he's just gone to work for Camden someone may have better gossip than mine but I think Neve and this would not be untypical he gets caught up designing Fleet Road and doesn't deliver the uh the essay which is the form of housing is the classic xsa I think it was meant to be the introduction in the end it's the end piece of this edition of the housing primer that's why I went to work for Nev because I read that and I thought this makes sense this makes sense and then there's Ronan point and the collapse of Ronan point and certainly Neve's view of uh system building was that it was a deliberate attempt to destroy the craft base of the British building industry that had existed and it was there to be got rid of and Eve had a sense of craft and I think he had a sense of craft in the way he thought the way he structured his thinking there was craft in that he would put a proposition together piece by piece with all the bits fitting anyway there's the housing primer that's what drew me to go to Camden and I've put this in for future discussion it was full of interesting projects by interesting Architects most of whom now forgotten but this is by a group who are not forgotten it was called team four but the names are Richard Rogers Norman Foster and Wendy Foster and they're doing a high-density low-rise project I think for weights in Croydon and I've put this in because I suddenly thought what happened if they'd gone ahead with this what happened if they'd got another project there was a very interesting moment at Camden which is when it closed down those of us were working there thinking where do we go now starting practices was virtually impossible then and suddenly there's the pompidou suddenly there's this other architecture appearing from always almost nowhere which I mean was to us was somewhat alien so I put this up as a rather personal thing but what would have happened if they built that and this is back to Patrick and Neve and I haven't got an illustration of Neve's fourth year housing project but he said it was a slab it was a slab rather elegantly composed slab but Patrick by this stage had gone off to work for algor alto in Helsinki and he also has been to Marseille which I think everyone had seen as a project but no one had really only beginning to see it as a building and he goes and is incredibly impressed by the building and then I think he scratches his head and thinks but we're going to pull down Marseille and replace it with this and he begins to have profound doubts about whether this is the way he thought but what he does is very candy he takes the scissor section at the top his look up his head's drawing of how you'd Slide the these apartments into this Frame like bottles into a bottle rack and Pantry just takes the three stories he adds a bit above and a bit below but he creates a project and there it is which is a low-rise high density housing project now according to Neve when this arrived at the AAA posted from Helsinki apparently everyone was gobsmacked I think all the other students and apparently the other staff thought wow this was a big step so that's there that's the and a quick you know all this stuff alternates this is the slab was accepted in London as being the way to deliver what the government wanted and the government wanted housing starts and what they would do is just dictate the numbers and pass the problem down to the local authorities they had to deliver now my guess this is I'm speculating my guess is that most architecture schools apart from this one were not having their students design housing at all it was mainly The Yacht Club so Architects offices suddenly had to produce these these buildings and that's what they were being subsidized to do and what happens well what happens is mcalpines and wimps and so on start going around the local authorities saying well we can deliver it for you and suddenly we get into this cycle which I think in a funny way we're still in now where it's actually the builders and uh property owners who are controlling what and we are we are the kind of face for stuff we don't control so I put this up partly for the discussion later I should also say that in the last days of our work in Holland we we first of all we resigned from designing the flats so they could get on and then we resigned from designing the buildings but we were holders of the public Realm and when they say well we couldn't really do anything you really want to do but maybe you could do something like a street in the sky and afterwards and I I'd regret I never did ask Nev his interpretation of that and I've always thought that delft is really the Homeland for the Smithson Flame your delft has more people who know about the smithsons than anywhere else and it was almost like they say well well if it's all right with the smithsons surely it's all right with you guys and the answer was in the polite is possible way no and I put this up because there it is so there's golden Lane with Marine Monroe going toward the front door of her Council house and all this and this has become hugely influential and apparently somewhere here is Mahatma Gandhi on the lower drawing that you collage but actually Robinhood Gardens while we were working on the salsa Strat everyone was opposing its demolition and I think we we didn't actually sign the petition and to be frank we were not surprised when it was pulled down um because it wasn't a street in the sky a street goes from somewhere to somewhere doesn't it it goes from Swiss Cottage to John's wood for example not from elevator to elevator anyway let's carry on so this is some quotes from Dave this is 1967. the public outcry was for new housing and the response being the response to the Architects was new form instead of a Visionary Wonderland the forms are only too often an outraged neighborhood alien physically in every way an identifiable as something quite different from their surrounding environment the council estate ouch and there there is Alexander Road as I think this is a fabricated photograph I don't think ever has that many people in it but there it is a street and this is a bit more from from the same text um and worse the forms are socially alienated from every traditional pattern of life that's given our City's continuity and culture and provided a familiar context in which a life of richness and contact could be lived in discarding the street for the Tower and the slab we threw away the whole pattern of life with a quite inadequate understanding of its complexity and value and I think so and then the bottom is one of Neve's drawings and we put some of his drawings in in the book and uh I don't think Graham Frost is here Graham was one of the job Architects on Alexander Road and I think it was Graham who started going life drawing on either Tuesday or Thursday Neve quickly quickly joined and every week would go over life drawing and these are his life drawings and what I've put up is a quote from Neve when he's describing Alexandra Road after it's finished I have to say when he describes it before it started he emphasizes how traditional it is he plays down its modernism and later on you can see why but it worked at the time but this is him talking about Alexander Road and I think this this is a description of what we were trying to do in Holland um an effort to restore to Urban Development the common and traditional devices of formal control that permit an ordered and systematic environment to be created using its most commonplace elements housing streets Open Spaces Etc none of these devices imply stylistic elements and I've put below and I don't think you can see it we always used to took the knuckles I mean these these connecting devices they're Knuckles it's the sinews in the neck it's the ankles and there's this Obsession in all these drawings with these bits that connect and connect connect the whole body to what he would call the physique as in the physique of the building and so I'm just putting this back in a commonplace elements there it is the street and the Common Place elements of the front steps okay they are extended and down below the front door all of these all of these things we know and in terms of the phrase patterns of Association I think people could associate what was built despite its so to speak modernism they could look at it and think that has familiarity and these are the Open Spaces and there's Neve looking out over Fleet Road over I was the job architect so my job was to design the planting Bays that go on there and he said think of it as if you're designing a part hair so I said what's that Neve and I'm sure you all know but it's a classical term classical landscape you're you're in your your Palazzo you're looking out over your your garden and there's a formal geometrical Garden in front of you that you can walk through but it's designed to look down on and look down on and look over and so I put that in because certainly when we were back in Italy with matzo the architect that was most interesting was vignola we spent ages and you've had a book with photographs of vignola's gardens the fanasi palace and we were we've spent hours looking at all this stuff um and there we are I'm going to go final piece really this is the section Alexander what a beautiful section and it's absolutely fascinating and it's kind of fixation whether it's an icon I don't know it's a very diff but somehow that section is fascinating and to some degree this is Nave but actually I don't think it is I've got another reading which is but that's the front cover of my addition of the radiant City Sun space Greenery and this is this is Marseille the person who gave us Sun space and Greenery is Mr Brown but he to do it he had to discard look abusia's uh geometry he had to dump the slab in the tower to create what local buses said he was looking to do okay I think oh there he is there he is with with people at Alexander Road and one of the interesting things I think about Alexandra is that um you can stand there and you can talk about it and you could say things as Preposterous as think of this as being a little bit like the Nash Terraces overlooking Regents part now these people are architects who are listening but they know where Regents Park is because it's about 25 minutes walk so actually there were associations that can be meaningful and are not entirely abstract and finally this is this is something he wrote about Fleet Road he called it an experiment it's doubtful that a prison anyone knows enough to be dogmatic about housing fair enough but it's an experiment that tries to recognize needs beyond the house itself that housing is a compound of many complex imponderable and subtle things its success will depend on the degree of willing participation it can excite from its new residence and this is Fleet Road lived in now those that know the family will recognize the brown cat I mean it's not a color brown that I don't know if this is most of the cats or dogs that they had got called motzo so whether this is maltso the fifth here but this is the brown flat and one of the things that's interesting is when they bought the flat there they didn't if you like reconstructed as it had been because of course we had the drawings the walls have been plastered which they weren't originally and there are a couple of sliding screens easily to take the plaster that'd be terrible to put those Timber screens he could have done it it didn't they they moved in and lived there and so it's not a monument and finally these are couple of photographs I took in 1977. I'm about to leave Camden Fleet Road that I'd been the job architect for was completing and I did the six-month defects check and it was quite interesting because people they were everyone's kind of fine about it because Cameron had been going on these are going to be unlitable and I'd go around and people would do things like saying couldn't the counselor fall plaster knocking the the block work but I actually would were just kind of living there and it settled in and this video there's a young mother with a pram and someone on the right there are two boys kneeling and they're posing um because I said is it all right to take a photograph of you and in in 1977 you you posed like a footballer but the reason I wanted to photograph them but I didn't catch them doing it is they were watering the public Greenery on a hot day so they were going backwards and force into the end flat into the kitchen getting saucepans filling them with water and and I don't think their parents had asked them they were doing it as a kind of game and I thought that was really amazing and but the its success will depend on the degree of willing participation it can cite insight for its new residents I was back during Kobe to see Janet and it was amazing during covert because all these outside spaces were being inhabited by people um and I went into the flat that the boy had come out of and there was this Sikh family and it I couldn't say look were you the were you the little boy with the pots and pans he'd know where he'd remember but they'd been there from the beginning and his name is Raj so this family and most of Fleet Road and most of Alexandra it is still Council housing and is predominantly people who've been there from the beginning and I think having talked a lot about architecture it's important to say that and I'm going to go back and I'm really glad you showed this Photograph Sue because this is the labrador Corner Alexander and Wilson was taking the photographs I went and talked to the couple the man with a hat yeah and um they're Irish and they'd moved to London about four or five years ago their son had come much earlier and made a life for himself in London so they'd retired and moved to London to be close to this so uh and they'd got a flat one of the smaller Flats in Alexandra and I did joke about this rather a big dog for a small flat so but I had quite a long chat with them they were saying it's so peaceful piece you know and and um and it's friendly so they didn't have to say anything they could have just grunted and so on but actually this thing of people buying into the spirit of it and there was another guy we met who's one of the original uh residents who says like if that leave Brown were here he would sort out the council and I have a feeling he did quite a lot of that on behalf of residents I think he's a complete thorn in Camden's side but it's and he told us a story about how there used to be a river running down Alexander Road well I think I know where that story is but it's developed to sort of layers of Mythology as a place which I think is very interesting anyway I think that's about enough for me Isn't it okay oh there he is okay there's the glass of red wine [Applause] uh Jonathan station is going to talk um to us um Jonathan's um one of the contributors to the book and um is an alumnus of the AAA uh and as some of you may notice a very fine architect um initially specializing in housing I think you said but actually um much broader output than that now he's also uh unusually for British architecture professor of architecture but obviously not in this country um somewhere civilized at mandricio um uh Sophia Singler um uh who um is a young scholar at um Cambridge she just completed a PhD on the the religious buildings of Alvarado um sadly can't be with us today her grandmother is um I think um really quite terminally ill she's had to fly back to Finland uh but um she's uh written a commentary and some questions on the book um having having read it over the past few weeks um which I think is interesting because she's gone off she's offering kind of a Finnish perspective on um on on Bush architecture which obviously is a kind of two-way dialogue as um as David revealed obviously um about Claudia who's German is going to um uh uh act as an interlocutor um and and so hopefully what what what getting a sense of is as well as the kind of englishness of um the architectural reference that um Nev and Patrick hodgkinson were drawing on that David and I spoke about uh there's a much bigger International reputation that Neil Neath Brown possesses and a much bigger conversation which is spinning out from the themes in his work um and as I said I'm very keen to emphasize that we're making books about architecture for Architects and and so the second half of the book includes commentary by practice practitioners and so in order to try and open that conversation up a bit further Jonathan's going to talk not just about niece Brown's work but about his inspiration for projects today um so with no further Ado Jonathan please uh I'm very sorry about technical problems earlier I I remember in our studio there was a moment where we bought a bema and I'm not very good with it and Mark Tuff who I know David knows rather well showed me how to set up the Beamer and I was then sent to North Wales to give a lecture and I I set it up as Mark instructed and someone gave a very generous introduction and then I pressed the control to go forward and nothing happened and then I was thrown and um eventually after asking the audience if anyone knew how to solve this problem and no one offered any help at all I went to my address book and and I couldn't help but notice that the low Mark Tufts phone number was our family doctor and then a rabbi and I was going to call them in that order but unfortunately Mark got took the call so as Patrick has already said and thank you for those words of of introduction um from my point of view I'm just very happy to be in what was the school I studied in the school I I taught in for a number of years but this book is really a wonderful achievement and I really congratulate Claudia Patrick and David for the great effort of bringing this work together in a manner that can be really reaching a wider and necessary audience foreign do feel slightly set up because um I can't claim that I'm in any way as authoritative as as certainly David and to some extent Patrick um in in relation to the work of of Neve Brown um my contribution um in the book is in relation to what has already been drawn upon certainly by David Porter this issue of low rise high density housing and interest an interest that is present in the projects that he built on his own and with David Porter and the position that he argued for but it is also a position that has a a wider Fascination I mean I think more generally the members of of Team 10 uh the Swiss office of Atelier five come to mind and others who found it really necessary to to challenge modernists fascination with the high rise Tower as a solution to the most effective way of creating High identity in cities so much has already been said about this project but um what I feel is necessary to to say is that I feel like I as a young architect benefited from a meeting that I had with Neve and David it when I was in my early twenties for me it was a memorable encounter what left strong impression was that theirs was a position an architecture that sought a form of responsibility that architecture should strive to serve the needs of the users of buildings and Society more widely and that this could be done by taking care with what is built and the sum of the decisions that a project needed to take and so from my side I will not expand any further on Alexandra Road or the Fleet Road estate in terms of presenting them as projects I think that's absolutely been done but the other thing that I find myself reflecting on is that they are projects over time I mean there is a fascination with modernism and certainly by contemporary terms the fascination with precast concrete construction and the relatively low energy standards reminds us that they were it is a work from the 60s and the 70s and a lot has of course changed then the oil crisis and the pressure that contemporary architecture needs to take care of in Terms of the impact that our work has on the environment and I don't think anyone in this room needs reminding that building contributes something like 40 percent of a CO2 impact on on the environment it's not insignificant Mark swenerton's wonderful book on Cooks Camden reminds me that there was this moment of great optimism and now inconceivable building program that gave opportunity to rather young and ambitious architects and I lived with this work in North London in the London London borough of Camden for 24 years most of my working life and while it is necessary to lament the loss of a national and local government housing building program this was of course so efficiently dismantled by the government led by Margaret Thatcher the need to offer good housing in the UK and at affordable rents has not been solved in the years that have followed if anything this problem is more pronounced and this is a bit where I feel I've been set up because I'm going to talk about my work but I'm going to talk about it in the context of a Fascination that I have with the European city and perhaps this is also a brexit statement in my work as an architect and as a teacher the role that housing plays in shaping the character of a European city is really a key interest this aligns with the title of a book that we're here to celebrate part of the city the sense in which it is housing that creates the most tangible representation of any City because it covers the larger surface and represents the greatest built volume the two cities I know the best are London and Zurich and they both offer lessons on how and how not to organize a city our life as Architects working more widely in Continental Europe exposes me and us to the Myriad lessons that cities that had been built within what is a relatively small land surface when seen in relation to the rest of the world and I'm going to go through these references really rather quickly but this amazing example of a housing which was to do with the rebuilding of the Liz of Lisbon following an earthquake and tsunami or the example that is offered from the city of Berlin the emphasis that was placed on this City with a program that gave priority to the building of perimeter blocks within a courtyard what's in German is called mitzkissen and moments of wonderful dignity that can be found not far from where we are now and another city that we find ourselves working in Paris which is the densest European city of any significant scale and um if you haven't clocked this already what I'm giving emphasis to is within this catalog of let's say references to remind us that the European city has traditionally given emphasis to low rise Solutions that when we talk about this theme particularly say in relation to Neve Brown's work it is drawing Upon A Certain tradition that can be strongly seen and attributed to the European city more widely although this isn't a European city hopefully everyone's favorite is in there somewhere as to rather idealistic architects setting the foundation for practice in the early 1990s we were determined to give energy to a public form of architecture that we were interested in the possibility of working in the area of affordable housing and I remember Tony frecking and telling me quite clearly that this was very very difficult but um at that moment in time really public housing was really a form of expertise that a very few practices claimed to have the necessary competence to manage in fact our reading of the situation was that those offices had more or less a monopoly over this area of work in 1997 we entered a competition [Music] who were still occasionally competitions in this country which was uh organized by the William Sutton Trust it was set up as a way of celebrating the 100th birthday of this charitable house Builder and we really devoted ourselves to this task we were lucky enough to win the competition which sought to realize to two homes and a revision to a very familiar um housing typology the double house the cemetery detached House of which many millions were built in the UK in the 20s and 30s it is par Excellence for the Suburban typology of the UK is very close to where we are now but there was also um perhaps influenced by my time here as a student but also where I was living at the time a growing fascination with the London terraced house as another typology I think arguably is one of the great contributions to English architecture and I think this point is certainly not missed on on Neve Brown um we won a competition for the new Islington Housing Association on this uh the street shepherd s walk in the London borough of Islington and it oh competition winning entry sought to address our own fascination with the idea and the image of the London terraced house the buildings that it sits alongside a rather typical row of terraces although in fact built in the Victorian rather than the Georgian period we sought ways of addressing what we find are very rich and and helpful lessons from this older solution and certainly the point that was made earlier about by Patrick the manner in which the terraced house has been capable of being reprogrammed and reorganized from its original purpose with this experience and I must say we immersed ourselves in the study of a wider conditions of housing that we we could begin to understand that this moment of time every piece of legislation every document we poured over as a way of trying to understand what it might mean to make a more contemporary housing and one example was this very low-cost project that we made in in Essex in Tilbury which was partly built by the now residents of this building uh this is not affordable housing but this was a project that continued our fascination with the terraced house and possible revisions to it a project in um in Hackney a rather heterogeneous Street and a project that we completed in 2004 where in the first instance we were invited to add to this industrial building from the 1930s and later developed a project for a short six-story Tower and in in this these early projects of our studio the means by which we're building the possibilities of repurposing buildings these are all concerns that um were with us at the time and seem ever more relevant today we also won this competition by the way it doesn't always look like that in Finsbury Park for a cluster of three three social housing projects uh houses of varying sizes but with similar details and really a reoccurring interest in our work in terms of the space between and when we were building this project complex rather fraught experience we also won this competition in Geneva which we realized with the Geneva architecture and this is a competition organized by the city of Geneva unusually for a Swiss competition it didn't give a very precise brief in terms of the number of apartments that we needed to fulfill and I remember Mark and Stephen and I thinking wonderful this is a moment where we're free of the incredibly dense tight space standards that we are so familiar with our work at that point in in London and the city architect told us later after we won the competition that one of the reasons we won was because we proposed twice as many apartments as all our Swiss colleagues so there is a lesson here which is I think if you come from a tough place it sort of it makes you robust um this is affordable housing Swiss Style another competition in Continental Europe that we won um in 2006 was to make one building as a cluster of three Urban Villas in Vienna an area that was undergoing a large program of rebuilding and expansion and with the Zurich office of fambamos Kruger and Vernon North we collaborated on this competition and proposed that rather than the familiar polite distances between buildings that we saw or all around this site we were interested in a form of proximity of closeness for us this was the possibility of um a kind of uh social exchange communality in our work more recently in Flanders we've undertaken a number of projects that deal with Society at the end of their lives the making of elderly housing projects and in our recently completed project in Hampstead a project that is also serving the need of elderly residents uh a bit of a bigger budget this project explore I can't believe this plan is really built actually I mean it's a a project that draws upon the long-standing fascination with North Italian architecture in the 60s and 70s the possibility of making a deep plan organized as a constellation of rooms that interconnect a sort of fanatical avoidance of the corridor as a device and a rather imposing expression and it took forever to realize this building for reasons that were complicated and um sort of slightly annoying and at the same time we started working on this project we won a competition in Zurich to build what could be understood as two Urban Villas and um there's a lesson about construction costs maybe we could talk about later and there's also a lesson about the building industry where in Switzerland the architect has still a great responsibility that you organize the costs of a project and you organize the management of projects on site and when they look at the London example that I've just shown and the project as I'm just showing now which is for two clients but it's affordable housing the Swiss example is considerably cheaper and I feel like I need to undertake a piece of research to get to the bottom of this because I'm not talking about land costs I'm talking about building costs that are too high in this city and the quality is too poor and in Switzerland the standards of workmanship are remarkable and the costs are manageable uh these are recent photographs that I took which show now the completed project and not these ones but um these ones that were taken a few days ago for this talk and almost finally two very recent examples this um neighbor to your Towers Tony um the this uh part of a a new Urban Block in in Antwerp on the other side of the water there are two towers by Dina and Dino chipperfield and Tony fretton who I think made the best so here working again collaboratively we're exploring a different Urban type here of the perimeter block of which we made a small part and very finally not very dense but certainly compact this project in Clapham that the studio the London Studio recently finished works as a collection of shared spaces and then private Courtyards in this infill site in Clapham so Neve Brown thank you for low-rise high density as a lesson and I wish I could get hold of that book now thanks [Applause] um so what what what what um we're going to do now um is some of the contributors from the book Simon Tony Claudia David Paul Jonathan and I are going to sit at the front and slightly what's the word fabricated situation because Sophia can't be here but um Her Imagination is here a suit too so I didn't see at the front there um please join in um and and other members of the contributors Amy David um I can't see everybody coming eyesight's completely useless uh uh we want to involve you in a a back and forth and and then open it up to the floor um I think I think it's really important that when we enter into this we enter into this in a spirit of dialogue um the book's not perfect and we've made some mistakes like I we didn't credit the photo talk or I thought of Neve Brown I'm so appalled I missed I missed it I'm really sorry she sat there in a wonderful photographer whose name I don't know um I I think it's also worth saying in our defense we're doing this with absolutely no institutional support Financial cultural spiritual emotional political and it's just the beginning of something it's not the final word I know uh if anything we probably wouldn't have done it if Marcus Winterton hadn't done his magisterial research and study and I'm hoping that he'll do more and it seems like you and David have got more more in the tank guys to this is this is a only only scratching the surface of something um anyway so if we if we gather together and uh Claudia is going to read out the um the observations from from Sofia and hopefully we will uh we'll get through to maybe we'll talk for half an hour and then involve you guys and then at six o'clock finally it's red wine o'clock basically capitalism pays for us to do social housing projects and to produce things like this but it would be really great if we could spread the gospel and just an example of the ongoing project this is the most recent copy of the Journal of Civic architecture which comes out every twice a year and it has uh Alexander wrote on the cover and what I I didn't mention and I should have done but little space for it in a 45 minute presentation is that J L Gibbons have recently worked with Janet Jack to renovate the landscape the park at Alexander Road and have written about it in in the last issue of the Joker um uh yeah so if you want to buy the album and a 12 inch single uh they're available next door um so I'm reading it as if I was Sophia the first observation concerns the common idea of being in between is architecture or modern architecture always about an in-between Space by definition and if so how is Neve growings in between different from those of his peers to cynic would say in between is just a simple or poetic way of discussing a mostly promatic Balancing Act perhaps another observation Sofia was really taken aback by Neve Brown's Creed or cradle uh once housing is seen as a compound for many functions the analogy can be drawn to the planning of any good building with a complex program the nature and interdependent interdependence of the elements is defined what a simple mathematically Simple Solution like a Venn diagram of different sets one must understand housing is like a house in that both come with their own compound elements only in the latter it might be the Parlor backyard a garage reading Nook bath tap Vista outside bay window and in the former those same transposed our streets balconies roofs they are pluralized and bigger and scale but with similar relationships to one another so these are the two main themes here the in between space and the character of Housing and the house so I think whoever wants to pick up and start saying something please do so I mean I was always fascinated by the way that Neve's projects connected with the city so rather than being an isolated modernist Villa or Pavilion they were always stitched into the streets and the fabric of the of the wider City and I was there's such an amazing wealth of knowledge in the room today I was wanted to just think about the connections with Colin rose urban research and Analysis and and see where the sort of missing links were to to Neve's work and and just what those influences um could have been because certainly when I was a student it wasn't discussed uh really really at all so um I think when we interviewed Neve as part of the book he spoke a lot about continuity Street walls holding holding spaces and um yeah really um I always thought that was a really important aspect and something we've obviously uh is trying to be good urbanists always try and uh follow us in the office as well um I'm not John I'm going to pass microphone on okay I need to get into the swing of things what do you always say well Neve was um and that period of architecture and it wasn't just me but the whole period but that I was was occurring when I was studying was a phenomenal and there of people a widespread group of people including people like Netherland and English or or Dixon Jones in Milton Keynes and that was what architecture was doing when I was studying but when by the time I stopped studying it didn't exist or I didn't see it existed I worked a little bit in social housing for better than English but it had been so desiccated and then the road that emerged certainly for in my area of work was very different and it was architecture of commentary you might say and so that's why I'm interested in Simon's ability to work with to produce social housing in the current situation and to actually commit to working in it I mean one thing that was said I can't remember by human was that um I think it was bio Jonathan that there was a monopoly on social housing but that's not a monopoly it was those people who'd spent a lot of time learning how the client thought how budgets worked and how you could avoid the worst things happening and that's why we as a practice haven't done social housing because we haven't been able to make that commitment and someone might Simon and I'm saying that because he's here my respect his work has done that or um Stephen Taylor you know that the um absorbed the I think very punishing conditions of social housing with local authorities having to work proudly as developers and things like that and that's where I mean without being facetious I'd like to hand it back to you if you can if you no no no but it's as a genuine adrenaline thoughts I'm not I don't have any ability to talk about social housing because I haven't done it but you have committed to it and and not the work that you do is extremely good as architecture and you know you know I admire work so I think to have achieved that in the limited conditions of that is requires something to be said um as um let me go back to Neve I mean I think leaves seem to be completely out of um in a way out of our minds when we're being educated it was a blind spot to the subject of housing there was a blind spot to a confident uh contemporary uh well it was an architecture I suppose by the late 80s it was an architecture of the high tech and it was a maybe very shortly after that an architecture of deconstruction and it was an architecture which was largely avoiding the question um maybe not so fair on high tech but certainly on some of the other things that followed on so one of the things which I find incredibly uh powerful about Lee's work is and I think I'm gonna get this phrase right but so the direct action that the address is the exact question of of living living and building for living and one of the things when you go to uh down to robe is so powerful is the absence of the facade it's it's uh it's living laid bare and one of the things I write about is in this kind of I make reference to uh Peron and virilio's obsession with the oblique which in in their hands is kind of um choose but in in needs hands turns into something which is topographical um but but it's it's I think he talks about the the facade as you know not being symbolic but being literal and and uh in Alexander Road you see it absolutely it's it's as if the facade has been laid down to make a Terrace and the and the possessions that the inhabitants leave out on their terrors are characteristics of the people who live there so when you visit you you sort of meet and get to know you get some sense let's say of all the people who live there so that's something it was a it's a revolution to manage to pull off the art of removing the facade but leaving enough of structure and um familiarity as it were not formality to to to make a piece of City but also to make homes um by comparison to that we we fall short um you know I I think um where I do absolutely uh share or at least I see in what he did perhaps something that we're doing which is giving equal parity uh to outside space I mean uh just in pure kind of um codification and the regulation of housing means that in a way it should be fairly straightforward to make a good home these days in in London I I setting aside all the things that Jonathan says which are absolutely right because these buildings are incredibly expensive and very poorly built but um but that kind of capacity to I mean we I'm concerned by the way we make walls and the way we make facades and maybe that they're not compositions but they're things to inhabit their thresholds and and therefore that leads you to the interior is really just a receptacle for the exterior you know it's it's what we see it's what we breathe it's what we smell um and it's also what we immediately inhabit in that threshold so that becomes more often not our focus in the making of housing it's that direct connection and that immediate space outside I'm curious also curious to to involve that now um in this because Tony obviously made a reference to what you were doing at Milton Keynes do you think you could say a few words through words about your experiences doing if I passed the mic to you is that okay foreign make a comment but I'm touched by the image we have a balance of God Street um in the when you look at that you're in no doubt where you're public and where you're not going to be public and I think the three projects that we've been looking at apropos needs London work I I'm David not so familiar with with with the European work but I but I was a resident of Winston Street for 10 for 10 years and enjoyed it hugely as a as a as a young parent with with Annoying children and so on so they could paint Garden it all worked terribly well excellent place you were in no doubt where you were public and with Alexander Road you're in no doubt where you're public as you David correctly describe it it's a street with with these centipede arms going off it and you know that's where you're still public until you get to a front door as you are in gastric you're no doubt where you're publicly to get your front door um Fleet Road is the one that I I think is the is the Oddball which I think I refer to in that very ancient critique I wrote 50 years ago in A.D um where as a visitor you feel your trespassing and if you're resident you feel you're invaded and and that's a sort of solemn and difficult aspect for me of Fleet roads that really needs a concierge it needs as French would call them a Swiss person at the door giving you giving you a bad time if you're not resident and David I put that question to you as a as a resident of Fleet Road are you do you have a sense of invasion no I mean as as a as a designer with me I I understand your your reservations and criticism I think there is considerable ambiguity in it and what interests me is I've just been going back recently 30 years on 40 years on and I I do think for me I talked about the the Sikh boy who's now grown up and living there his father run a photography show so I did I just have a am I going to do it go back and talk to these people and find out because I I your criticism is absolutely fair and then we have to match up the criticism say well I actually is that the case what do we observe on the ground so I think it's a bigger project we haven't squeezed enough yet out of me Brown I think and question I have is David if I got the energy to do more squeezing but I think there's more stuff there um I I haven't I had a definite sense when I visited him that I was trespassing yeah um yeah and and I don't have that feeling in George and London I don't have that feeling in Winston Street or Alexander Road but definitely there yes and that is where it seems to be the low-rise high density idea needs managing yeah and that project requires Management in the way if you get a Unity you come in through the ground floor there's a person there who says what do you want or you know there's a kind of policing of of of the access up to the streets in the air as has been mentioned a bit earlier they don't go from A to B but they're they're horizontal things that the smithson's put in the golden name but there's always in those high-rise jobs there's always a concierge and and Fleet Road does not have it and I think it makes it a mildly Troublesome project I mean I put that Just For Old Times Sake I do would like to have a punch up with Neve about that because we we that's exactly what yeah too late we were close friends and and uh lived next door for decades yeah I could I could have the Pancho but Edward can I say something that what strikes me is that Neves generation and your generation your colleagues in um my God and crisscross that Neve certainly um had an ideological position which came from modernism but which he he said explicitly he thought it was the duty of his uh generation to continue it but also I think implicitly to to develop it and criticize it and then your generation in Milton Keynes produced housing which had a very different although a modernist ideology you were looking at other areas of modernism and that's gone you know that that ability to have an open um socio-political position as an architect all gone in fact you could say that clients have been or the clientele arrangement after 30 years of neuroliberalism of have drained all that out and that made architecture very very difficult and you end up with New London vernacular you end up with a with architecture endlessly searching for some let's say Motif that would draw people together it can't because it's purely style so that's for me that's one of the tragedies of looking back at Neve and your Generations are working social housing and this is what he deals with extremely well and Tim I went with brim out we visited his work that Brendan worked on in West London and then we got in the motor car and went up the M1 to Milton Keynes to look at netherfield and was surprised that the local residents there when they heard it was going to be demolished came out in revoked and said we're very happy here because there are streets there's landscape it's matured and it's a decent place to live so we were rather harmed by that reaction Milton Keynes had a was a properly planned place in the sense of recognizing how traffic and cars were part of society um and Derek Walker and those people well in fact I can't remember the name of the urban theorist but there were substantial and thoughts given to as a city and it of course has become a sort of Cipher for suburbanji but it's it's not you know and there are many aspects of it that were sorry my point is that without um you can you can master plan but if you master plan with some social project it's better and if we look at Master planning now if we look at King's cross Granary Square it's all it's just about consumption such social activity is encouraged is about um buying things and it's not about the things that Neve or other people of this generation wanted which was simple social contact and that's a huge loss right now yeah one thing's I I mean I it's interesting what you're saying Ed about Fleet Road because I I didn't get into it I haven't got into it but I have stood outside it and and felt some skepticism some doubt and I think um I mean I can't really say much more than that I feel there's a problem um but I can but perhaps I am perhaps I have a sense of why there might be a problem which is that it seems to me that Neve's homes are designed from the experience that you have from living in the home so he starts from the inside out as if it's almost so spiraling away from this kind of Nexus of maybe it's the you know at least from the one home I've been in in Alexander Road the staircase is this kind of very compact as are the kind of um service spaces that then freeze the home to be a a fairly complex and Incredibly rewarding delightful um you know connected to the city uh connected to the Natural World working in many many ways um obviously he was working within constraints we're not this generation's not familiar with those constraints but it would be too easy for me to say they didn't have the same constraints we have we certainly have constraints they're different I'm not sure whether they're more more kind of onerous but that certainly is a there's a creativity and an intuition and uh again directness to to make and remake the home and and to work within I guess the medium of uh you know low rise and identity but to not as it renew not to repeat the terrorist house and it's in its uh kind of uh as we as we now know and kind of love it and he was actually uh and um justifiably more critical of it for uh both technological reasons and cultural symbolic reasons to do with kind of um you know messages in terms of democracy and equality and things like that but I think that my sense is that perhaps where Fleet Road might be weaker um is that it might work from the inside out but it can't quite make the connection to the city exactly yeah so it works from the end once you're in you probably know how to get out but about how to get in things but maybe that means it's not really part of the city fleet road I was shocked when I arrived and I saw a fence around it and I assume it was built without defense is that right David I don't know when it came but it must must have yeah it came quite quickly I think really and it certainly I arrived up yeah it was it was so sad and shocking so I just I trespassed I just followed someone um uh um you know the kind of copyist in Philip Johnson who built his own thesis project um and um he invited me spender tells this story because he had it for Frank Lloyd Wright he invited Frank Lloyd Wright around to to look at the glass house and of course he was going to dress like Sherlock Holmes a kind of dear stalker and a funny jacket and kind of very politely kind of that's what Johnson was you know bullshitting his way through that and the other and he didn't say anything and after about 25 minutes Phil Johnson said um what do you think and apparently Frank Lloyd Wright said I'm just trying to work out at which point I take my hat off which I think is your point about not knowing if you've arrived um yeah yeah but I've I think compared to Alexandra Road there is in Alexander Road there is a hierarchy of publicness and privateness so you know there is the park you can go through and there's the street but the architecture helps you to understand that the staircase is going up although there's no gate or anything that would stop you you know not to go up there unless you're an architect obviously you want to take your photos but that is kind of missing in Fleet Road because there is no public way through and that's what I meant maybe it could have been better integrated in the city because it's I mean it's a bit like a gated gated um community and then it ended up and so the problem of in-between or ambiguity keeps dogging us and we can try to deal with it with cross programming we can talk about it as deterritorialization as the most recent avoidance strategy of parametricism did but actually I think it's about questions of form and type Eric to an identity the cities we coming up with whether it's recorded yeah the arcade is very clear you're publicly might might one say that one of the things that kind of evolves uh beyond the third generation of modernists as the smithsons say is this question of type as opposed to function then that Thai business is a is a city image it has a it has a very mysterious relationship with function Matthew talks about but but but the introverted nature of functionless town planning you know look obesity a great architect with awful urbanism is this kind of ongoing problem that we keep stumbling across because then we now have Architects whose work is entirely designed for Instagram and design who seem to pay no heed to the spatial qualities or territory or qualities of architecture so we can oscillating back and forth between designing from the inside outwards or the outside inwards but of course that's the in between that's the knot that is where really good architecture lies it's just bizarrely hardly ever spoken about because yeah we keep getting like parametric system arguably it's just a kind of evolved version of introverted functionalism existence minimum everything's a bloody roof or everything's a park and then Neo brick a large post-modernism is everything's got to have a around window and be painted pink and green and and yet actually the questions of identity type scale human inhabitation the the the the body in the world remains at play um I I think we should maybe move on to another question from Sophia okay the audience would you would you mind can you wait in one sec so what I'm gonna do is honor Sophia's effort and presence and then we get Sofia back in the room as it were and then and then we'll join you and Kenny is that okay foreign it's like a door was opened on my understanding of Neve Brown's work you know for me what's fascinating is this manipulation of the section is so kind of when you see the sections they're so pragmatic and smart and and it's wonderful David that you showed the section through the making of the Georgian street because it's the same pragmatism I find but but your comments about the absence of a facade you know that's the one that really registers because you know for me the making of the facade is like the the most wonderful part of a housing architecture because it's a mediator between the private and the public and you know to imagine working on a housing project where that that task is somehow managed in another way I I find that very very interesting it's not the absence of a facade as such I mean it's the absence of a literal facade it's the absence of a it's the absence of a composition per se and in in place of that is um is space so the the thing that would be um you know symbolic or formal is replaced by something which is useful tangible um and and kind of has the traces of life and and has depth and also interestingly I suppose when you're on when you are on the street at Alexandra Road one of the things is you see the buildings from an acute angle or in perspective and and so actually the kind of um foreshortening of all the party walls does give you the semblance of a solid there's a solidity at that moment so your brain is absorbing that kind of mass which is something which is not mimicking but I guess rewarding a desire to see something like a facade but then it continues to reveal itself again and again as home after home after home could I I'd like to talk about the way that Neve um Works in sections which has been raised and in Fleet Road what strikes me is and in the building in Holland the last one he made which I wrote about um is that public roots footpaths are integrated in some Curious way with residential it either goes underneath it or on top of it and even it's a sort of Marvel but even the car parking which you see through a hole in the middle of the scheme everything that's there is not concealed everything is seen as a total entity now having twice looked at buildings by Neve to buy or live in I've always been repelled by the fact that that sectional manipulation leaves so little space for personal interpretation you know that and so I looked at one of the houses in Winston Street to buy it and I thought I can't you know it's too it's it's the idea is too pressing and that is one aspect of needs work that sadly I have to criticize because but on the on the other hand let's say the sensibility that all parts of the building were a part of a shared ownership that that is a rather wonderful idea but can we shall we take that person's question do you want to do that maybe you can continue with Sophia's notes and then have more questions at the end you know we've done one page we only have three more [Music] you actually knows this about um his design methods or his design and design methods something this book really highlighted to me and you in the manner of confirming a suspicion or rather making known something that was previously only blurry acknowledged was the world of planting vegetation Greenery and also Landscapes not just external but also internal we've all but forgotten about Landscaping today either disregarding it as Architects or being content to coordinate off to colleagues in the landscape design put in Nev's brown but in leaf Neve Brown's work the relationship is intimate relevant direct so perhaps there's more to say about that I wonder can he is that tangential to what you were going to ask but can we ask you to join in now um I think can I pass it thank you so people can hear no I just maybe it's coming up in Sophia's notes but it's just um the elephant in the room is that we love this kind of dramatic section but we we're not talking about climate change nobody's mentioning it and the New London vernacular tackles that in that it's it is actually a compact form and we need to live more densely and live on one planet and all that kind of stuff and the other thing I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable about is I I'm I don't recognize this idea that you know in the good old days it was social so we're building social shared spaces and now it's all ruined with consumption for me like Alexander Road would be so much more fun if there were a few shops down those you know slip throughs because I love mix City and I just wonder if I could throw that in your mix I think your point about um nlv being appropriate to um to energy conservation that's a really thank you for that I already said it did you guys hear it didn't it doesn't because I come in here because Neve spent the last I think five years of his career in my office and I worked very very closely with him after he split up with David and David went off to Glasgow and China and God knows what on his uh teaching I was sitting working on a day-to-day basis with Neve Neve moved in and he bought his Birch face ply and his exposed end grain and set up his office and um worked away at producing the drawings mainly for the Medina which has not been sufficiently publicized I think Tony you wrote an article about that but the rest of Neve's work is very very profoundly publicized and we used to have conversations and he used to say Ellie you know I'd never get any more work in England Ellie I couldn't do what you do I've been in housing 50 years I started off in the GLC um Dave I used to get on my bike and cycle up to Camden and pick up David and chat with Neve and what he is was doing cannot be achieved now all sorts of things like the level access that's an absolute classic you have to come in there are so many regulations to get around in housing and we are very lucky that we live through Nev's period where he produced his inspired architecture and quite frankly those of us who are working in housing at the moment as I am it is a struggle it is a struggle to make something beautiful you've managed it congratulations we're still struggling can I just tell another little anecdote while he was in the office which has nothing to do with this he moved from his drawing with point one repeater graphs into loose and looser pencil drawing live drawing and then charcoal and everything else and he used to hang up his life drawings all his nudes which were about seven foot tall on the walls of our office and I came in one morning and I had a meeting at 9 00 a.m in the morning with the imans from a mosque that where um I was there were clients and I was having this meeting at 9am and the walls aligned with full size naked women and I thought she got there about 10 minutes before they did rushed around tied them all up but it was an interesting period And as I say it isn't a period which I think probably wasn't sufficiently well cataloged the production of Medina and I wish more people would do that I'd like to respond Kenny I think you're right I I agree with you um and I think if you read the book you'll see that um uh Bob Maxwell did as well he he uh emphasizes um the um uh it's not sort of children's home is it it's a uh looked after children's building the Evans and shallow built and he makes a plea for uh loosening of the urban fabric um I I I I'm not sure Simon that it's true that he was just designing from the inside out I don't think that's true I think it's really clear that uh fleetboard is a kind of type a new type it's an extruded party wall type um Caesar was doing something similar the the um uh Salvatore housing this kind of maisonet stacked city um and in both cases the problem of the ground occurs and that that keeps happening and I've been trying to conceptualize this as a problem of Civic ground we've been working with with muff a lot and J L Gibbons on projects and they talk about what they call the thick and five meter plane a ground plane which is the kind of root ball of a tree and the problem of what a program at ground floor and and this is kind of it keeps evolving as you know with clients like Hackney because the the pressure on the economics is it's very difficult to to get community rooms and and yet the London plan pushes back with the demand for play space and so you get other figures involved now in the design process who are better at staff than than Architects are perhaps I mean muff obviously brilliant Architects were also really really good at working with with festival and play and figuration and so my my solution is just to work with other artists and other people involved and maybe that's one of the problems of the kabuzier situation is that you know he does the mill Owners Association and suddenly he's a textile artist he does one shop and suddenly he's a stained glass artist and that kind of type of ego of a kind of heroic figure is I think problematic but one thing that I'd like to just touch on which has I mean for me they're working with Sue on the production with Emma and the protection the book what is really clear is the tree pits that are put in he knew it was going to take 40 50 years for those trees to mature and that level of projecting imagination is incredible um I I think it's really only now that we're starting to understand that period of architecture I think it was dismissed because it suited certain people's careers to do so to Charles Jenks at Al to pretend that that generation that modern Architects were anti-intellectual the absolute opposite is true it wasn't just the smithson's and other members of Team 10 and CM there was a whole debate about problems of modernity and problems of the city and problems of the ground plane that um that I think we're all focused on as designers and that the publishing project is an attempt to try to bring to the surface so and also I think he was getting better I think Medina's really really really really really really good it's evolving clients revolving are thinking about the city are thinking of the problems of cars and I think therefore it's possible not to you know to say not to make a hagiography not to say everything that knee Brown did was absolutely as brilliant as everything else but that's part of the kind of cultic nature of of architectural culture that we've got used to thinking that everything somebody did was Bloody brilliant and therefore you get you know Leon career saying we we must not build because the European city is sacrosanct and everything modernist is terrible and Peter cooked you know doing you know cities that walk and that kind of extremism actually avoids the naughty Gordy and not problem of being a designer who doesn't have all the answers is part of a much bigger team including Landscape Architects who are much better than us that kind of thing and clients that we can learn from I'm yeah I I I'm not sure it's not possible to make world-class architecture in the UK I just think that one problem is a lack of an architectural culture you know housing exists in this place but it exists as a separate Masters course this morning example I went to Leon in my fourth year on an exchange to De Leon and every fourth year in France does a project in the second semester called urbanism illusional urbanism and housing that housing is understood as an urban problem and urbanism is understood as a housing project every single student in the entire country is trained to do that and when I returned I pinned the work up head of schools going what what what did you learn then I'm like actually you know how to speak French and how to drink wine but that's by Dubai and I said why don't we do housing projects and you know what he said he said we leave that to the Boys At The Polytechnic you know there's a kind of class issue about you know kind of monumental staff art galleries that as opposed to the quotidian proletarian as arawasi would say architecture of the city and there's the kind of problem ontologically I think for Architects about what is the status of creativity what is the status of our agency as design team leaders but not sole authors and that that's not that I for me is what I learned from reading these groundwork he was very aware of that problem of the individual the genius the sole Creator and the City I'm telling you what he wanted to say well I'd like to continue that um is it Connie Ash that is a question okay um to contradict or rather develop what I said earlier about the period in which we're discussing having a socio-political basis what I've neglected to say and what you pointed out with the compactness of New London is that there are practices who against the odds and with the kind of energy that social housing actors have had like Mikhail Richards who've produced passive housing on mass and of course that addresses the most important social issue of our times so thank you for that question I I also want to respond to this um comment about climate change and because with Neve Brown that wasn't a conscious problem at the time obviously but if if you look at um the majority of the houses on Alexandra Road I think they perform very well because they are self-facing they're very close to the north they are almost set up like a passive house situation and by um providing these Terraces with places for plants he creates cooling cooling effect and and just a space that's much better for General well-being and I wonder whether that was in sort of architectural intuition that led him to do that um which was just the right thing to do and now is is the right thing to do in terms of you know how we respond to the climate situation yeah I mean I completely agree that when I go and visit Alexandra Road what I think of is Mesa Verde and better talking I think of the Midwest America and the Anastasia Indians and their incredible knowledge of climate and their realization that a cliff dwelling a perfect place to set up home for the way that The Rock radiates heat in Winter and protects you from the high angle and very very strong sun in summer and whilst Alexander Road is not doing exactly that it is very definitely alerting you to the world to the seasons to Nature the the South you know the north side is doing as Katya says but and so the south side is also tipped back to let more sunlight in over the top of itself it works brilliantly and and with the um by laying out these Terraces it also invites every person who lives there to be able to create their own shade to grow things and and so on so I actually I mean I yeah desperately nostalgic for something whether it's literally like that but that um open-mindedness uh to really treat a building as part of the landscape um it's very powerful who could maybe talk about the environmental conditions inside your apartment uh Ken Frampton recently um to talk about his contribution he told me about a book I think published in 1970 by a South American architect called Thomas Maldonado which was very influenced from influential on his formulation of critical regionalism I the essay which is I think Five Points towards an architecture of resistance to global wind International capitalism who design nature and Revolution towards a critical ecology and I think there was a moment where this was burgeoning in the 1970s when we knew about from the American writer um Clancy about her writing about the effect of species death caused by fossil fuel pollution it's just really odd that for some reason it just kind of you know when I was teaching here like you were you know like you stopped teaching here so they gave us the unit because they wanted there to be one unit doing architecture you know people were still cutting up bits of Shakespeare and sticking them on the Woolworth's drawings there was a lot of what firstly called avoidance strategy and arguably that that continues sorry do you want to ask you um yes um in answer to your question Simon um I also like to visit Alexandra every day because I live there um it does naturally catch the heat in a fabulous way it's actually beautifully hot and and often too hot but um we can speak well we can't speak to max volume anymore um but you know what I mean but what it does have it has dual aspects so you can open both sides of the house and it cools down pretty much within five minutes um however probably because of the times there is literally zero insulation and it's quite problematic to reverse that now and to keep the house dry it needs to be overheated there you go um I just wanted to talk about Neve Brown's art because I started with him sitting Guild's art school like well I I used to work alongside him in the print room quite a lot and um at that time he was doing very abstract work um it's kind of like um I would call it as sort of like organic abstract field art or something um and he did these etchings which quite large etchings done with soft ground and he would um go over and over and over them in many sort of different um times of putting it in the acid and build up this kind of surface which would eventually look a bit like the bark of a tree or something which these kind of forms would start to emerge out of the surface but I think that that work is something that maybe needs more attention because he was so committed to being an artist towards the end of his life and and the life drawings are one thing that show he could draw and he understood the structure of their body and everything but I think the abstract work is is and more interesting in a way and it and it also relates to how his his buildings were misunderstood at the beginning to be concrete white elephants but actually what's been revealed over time is that they're much more about landscape and nature and living in that context do you think this is because um you know you told me the anecdote that he was talking to James Sterling at some point and Jim just said the careers over me you know they're not going to let you build anything here anymore because I mean he that apparently there was a there was a firm of barristers in London who specialized in James Sterling clients projects um and uh and Jim kind of had a job at Yale and uh and had a different type of ego or energy perhaps do you think that that they've became an artist because of Margaret Thatcher or Margaret Thatcher or Ken Livingston we haven't spoken about Owen Hatha Lee's new book red Metropolis is very explicit about the the problem with the new left in London not coming from London and and hating uh the modernist project seeing it as a top-down in position and so the new left in the 1970s according to Owen were influenced by Jane Jacobs attempts to protect New York and Brooklyn in particular from uh the kind of Road engineering uh but um then London was was full of squats it's mostly empty and so he certainly the Kennedy Stone didn't see the party wall type didn't see the vegetation didn't understand the public space he was the housing officer at Camden but he's suing his own Architects department for negligence made-up nonsense didn't win but when he became the mayor of London didn't build any housing because he thought it was impossible to do in a socialist manner and um but it but I think it's a I just wonder because because it's interesting that he became an artist but also poignant and was he always going to become an artist or was he always an artist well he drew but then he became an artist in a different way I mean the way he talked about is I stopped being an architect and I became an artist he's my guess is it's more complicated than that of course but I think it was a deliberate you know good reorientation of someone with you know he was very driven he was very very I mean and I think with the drawings he was immensely productive he would draw and draw and draw this is before he became an artist but I think in the garage that Janet has got up for he wrote where things are stood the sheaves and sheaves and sheaves and sheaves of these drawings and so I think it was it was I mean if you say it's a displacement activity that's awful but to some degree Camden in the end was heartbreaking and uh hi I used to present the idea that that Neath need Was An Architect and he stopped and became an artist I think that's a crappy thing to say no no well he he had a wonderful comment he said architecture am paint PM I his his life was driven by the idea of Art in the architecture and in life itself and I think that's very very important about me because I think that applied to him although Tony as you say he he said I'm stopping this now I'm doing something else no he's had all sorts of things remember who I was which was all right he used to cheat at tennis too he said he said two things he was going past um somebody else's building he said that's a coffee of mine then he said I'm not an architect anymore I became an artist so he did say it but there was actually you know when he was in the office he was still doing architecture also doing his drawing exactly exactly and there was to a degree of a graduation but I think he knew I mean that after Medina there wouldn't be anything else that was it and you know that was what was interesting also about his drawings is from working with point one repeater graphs with great Precision he as I say started off with pencil drawings he then went into charcoal um and then he went into this very very abstract paint oil painting very very powerful black red slashed and you know I I have no idea how that Evolution from the point one repeater graph to the red dark black red paintings occurred maybe someone else can no no I I think this is not changed to say to Patrick you're amazing to run a publishing house and a practice both of which involve a lot of self self-harm and I I no I'm I'm impressed by that and one person we've not raised in the conversation is Douglas Stephen who who was an amazing uh chap who allowed Frampton to run the magazine as well as well as build housing Bob Maxwell to teach at the Bartlett and the AAA as well as doing the housing in Highgate so that that understanding that your your day involves both things I think once you're in the local Authority you you could be said to be locked in and Neve was locked in because I think he wrote as you said Pat Patrick very thoughtfully and well and I I think he had another thing in his day personally yeah I I think I think it's really significant that um uh Neil McLaughlin yeah is a professor I think I think it happened by chance I think he he got a 0.4 I mean the battle that's one of the few Russell group universities that gives fractional appointments and and so just like you know in the Army eventually become a major if they don't kick you out he kind of became a professor but I saw um Neil gave a talk um in Eric Perry's office the other day about um some of his religious buildings and it was incredibly well researched and thought about and um you know it's the thinking of an architect and and I I suspect that we have a problem I don't I don't know if it's an English problem I don't know there's the English have an insult you know jack of all trades master of none and and just and I think there's a there's a there's actually good Architects are pretty good at quite a lot of things they're not as good as they think they are and if they can learn they can get a lot better but I I think there's a perhaps a when it was a Puritan strain in English culture that wants you to declare something that you have to suffer so you want to become a professor you have to suffer you have to stop producing buildings uh you want to become an architect you have to resign your academic position I did that um I think Jonathan you and I were saying we're talking about this and you said that you thought that you felt that if you didn't leave and go to take up a teaching position in a civilized country you were going to feel really really unfulfilled and if not unhappy as a person whether you could talk about architectural culture and a place where being a lover of art being an artist being a writer being a teacher being a practicing architect of father and a lover are seen as in a much more obviously the Swiss are very efficient but they seem to be also much more generous about the role of the architect in society but you're sharing publicly but um for me teaching and practice seem like the most fulfilling way of being an architect and I've taught for longer than I've been in practice and at a certain point for the kind of way I wanted to teach I couldn't find a home here so I had to leave and you know I think in in this school which has given space over time to a lot of brilliant teachers I would also observe that there is there is something structurally that I've come to realize is problematic that often very very young people are given a teaching position and all they can do with their experience is rely on what they've learned rather in a short space of time and I like Tony have found a home as a teacher in Continental Europe and I feel that if I could speak about the Swiss context it's like most things rather pragmatic that as a professor I'm supported by assistance and the responsibility I feel to my assistance is to help them learn to teach and when I was very very young Mika Bandini when she was the head of North London invited me to teach with her on the promise that she wouldn't pay me but she would teach me how to teach and I I mean and she was drawing upon a European understanding of teaching so you know for me I my position as a teacher in Switzerland is not an apology um that uh someone who teaches is not seen as a bad practitioner that in fact my legitimacy as a teacher is in relation to a belief that is held by what I'm doing as a as an architect and that's really different and I I think in the Anglo-Saxon World there is there is a misconception I think about how teaching could be organized and I could complain about it or I could do something about it and I chose to do something about it by finding a more rewarding place to combine these two Passions but for me the bridge is also between practice and teaching writing and writing is difficult and Neve Brown could write I feel that that's also important to underline and also we haven't really talked a lot about his teaching Jonathan that's a very spirited rebuke to a hideous englishism which which goes along the lines of those that can build and those who can't teach foreign college right this is the time of who was head of school and who was around maybe you could put it into context and not not quite um uh one of the David and Neve's colleagues Tom K was the technical tutor at the RCA when I was there in the early 90s I think was just after John Miller and uh timid departed and it was in the between that era and Nigel Coates so two very very different eras and I was there right in the middle and it was a really interesting moment in that there was Diana Castle was head of school a lot of the old tutors had left um apart from Tom and Tom used to try and teach us about housing and obviously the work of the Camden departments and Neve would come in and chat and it was it was it was only 12 people on the course at the time at the RCA and only about four people interested in housing so we'd have a little huddle in the corner with Neve and it was you know sort of I'm thinking about my Manchester days I think first year history of architecture lecture the black and white sectional photo and and diagram of um Alexandra Rowe and then five years later the RCA the person who created that powerful section and Powerful piece of Architecture is sitting in a corner and it's it's brilliant now when when um you know we we chat to Young students who come to the office or visitors or small talks you know we'll talk to anyone you know if Neve Brown could talk to four you know slightly hungover students in the RCA and go on walking tours with us with Tom with you know three or four people in the rain we can talk about housing and how we can try and improve that so it's absolutely inspirational for me uh having Neve and and Tom Tom was a genius as well I think we've actually covered Sophia's points which was about ethos pedagogy and today but I just want to open up the conversation a bit to you guys there's anything off peace you want to you want to bring out um shall I pass you the the mic no it's okay or or semaphore maybe you could pass it around if anybody thanks um yeah I wanted to go to the the quotation that David said which was a good housing it's success will depend on the amount of willing participation it can excite from its residents so my understanding is that Neve lived in winscombe street but towards the end of his life he moved to Fleet Road I think it's interesting the conversation earlier about the kind of public privacy is there a kind of flaw to the design in Fleet Road and winners come straight I think it's very clearly a strong example of a dichotomy between privacy and public between how how you maintain public life and life with your neighbors but despite that and despite living with people he knew and were friends with him and I don't mean this to be aggressive to anyone he left that for the messiness of Fleet Road is that because the idea of willing participation that you get with social housing was more powerful than the the neatness of privacy that he got in private housing thanks uh well the reason he moved from Winston Street was that he and Janet who will be here shortly uh were getting older and decided living on a three-story in a three-story house wasn't that sensible long term and also it was too big and they discussed where they might move to and Janet said that of his two other projects Fleet Road was was the one that she liked the best and so they started looking there and they found the house and and that was that so I think that was the sort of you know biographical answer but now I've been past the mic I might just comment on a couple of points that have been made which with which I think one has to take issue uh the first is to do with this suggestion that there isn't uh an elevational composition at Alexander Road which I think is totally incorrect uh there is a not a flat facade but there is extraordinarily uh amount of care given to the composition of that as an elevation and now you've talked about it most fully in that evening that we did at the Hackney Empire after he got the gold medal in the first bit of his talk he talked about Mega things about housing and what's wrong with housing and particularly how maintenance isn't included properly in the budget and that is fundamental to our problems so it was sort of the big open topic but then in the second presentation he did that evening he talked about the composition of the elevation at Alexander Road and anyone who is interested in how we make beautiful buildings is recommended to look at that and that is on the web that's still on the website it was the architecture Foundation that organized it the other thing that I do take issue with is um the characterization of Fleet Road as in some way spatially unsuccessful uh Edward always has taken a particular view of Fleet Road which I certainly don't share if we go to Fleet road now we we go to what is a gated community you can't get in you know unless somebody will press the buzzer and let you in and you have to remove that from your mind when you think about how it was designed and how it was originally and in Fleet roads there are Pub big public routes running west east across the bottom and across the top so those are public space par excellence and the one at the top was going to link to the bridge that never got built over Southampton Road and link up with the big housing project the Camden housing project on the on the east side so those are the public routes and opening off those at right angles to them are the alleys and you've called them allies and that's how he envisaged them and he had a very clear classification of space uh public semi-public semi-private and private and those alleys are semi-public you are meant to feel like an intruder when you're in there unless you're going to visit somebody so it's a deliberate decision to put the front door not on the public route of this of this these these Westies routes which are public routes but are kind of transitional Roots the whole time but to put the front doors on the semi-public space of the alleys and once you're in one of those alleys you know you go from one front door to the next it is it is analogous to being in a terrorist Street you just get one and then one and then one and then one um so I think uh to to it would be a pity for the audience tonight here to go away thinking oh Fleet Road uh you know it was not successful uh the difference with Alexander Road obviously is that Alexandra Road the big move is a full is is the street which is fully public and all the semi-public spaces are then accessed from that so so that is different it's different from Fleet Road um but it wasn't I think the notion that Fleet Road is in some way confused or uh not fully thought out is it's not really sustainable and while I'm being grumpy in the corner the other thing I'd just be grumpy about is please don't pay any attention to Owen what Owen Hathaway has to say about this subject uh he's he's unreliable at the best of times and that book that you refer to Patrick he clearly wrote during lockdown when he couldn't get into any libraries to check any of his information and it is fundamentally misleading about the relationship between Neve and Ken Livingston in the late 1970s and the creation of the public inquiry into Alexandra road which did destroy Neve's reputation there's no doubt about it once they've been a two and a half year public inquiry into a single project by an architect there was no way that architect was going to get work again and that was the point that Jim Sterling made to him thanks yeah the thing um I'd like to involve too because um I think that the the um well I think one of the um methodological uh processes that um I've got involved in as a as a scholar is um which which I think is kind of a burgeoning field in in um in Europe is Architects doing research through drawing and collaborating with photographers whereby the difference or the gap between the rhetoric of the architect and the built reality of something which isn't maintained and you know isn't understood um but Sue mentioned um that and I want this is kind of ongoing I think because it followed on from the work you were doing in Stuttgart um that this is really beautifully captured quality of spaces in between which are this this hierarchy that you're describing Mark between private semi-private public semi public um which is a kind of uh I I I it's very difficult to draw those sorts of spatial relationships as a designer it's very difficult to um to comment on directly and to persuade people whereas photography it seems is a very powerful tool of revealing the life of buildings in time and that that seems to be your theme I guess and this kind of looking at technology in the 20th century and then where we are now via the camera uh it's not really a question that's no I don't know quite what to say um I guess I would respond to that by saying I think photography is a really powerful way of looking at buildings and looking at architecture and wider landscape because of the idea of Framing and viewing and the idea of the sort of democracy of the image and how things are framed and and how you decide how to look at something through a photograph in a way that when you look at a space or you look at a building your eye is wandering you're seeing things differently but those kind of complicated spaces that you're talking about these kind of transitory spaces the kind of cuts in especially in Alexander Road the sort of semi-private public spaces I think maybe photography is really useful in a way of kind of revealing those in a slightly different means I mean the formality of a photograph you know fixing the silver onto a onto a surface but you know also just making you look at it in a particular way there's this thing isn't there I mean I'm not sure I subscribe to the decisive moment actually but just the idea of this is an image this is a photograph this is a space to look at that has been defined through the four corners of the frame particularly with a large format camera you have the convenience of being able to read the architecture in a completely different way because everything is upside down and back to front and actually that's an amazing way of looking at what is in front of you because you completely see it differently and you have this kind of long look which um anyone who's in my class will know that I hate people looking on the end of their arm on a screen because you don't think but when you have to look for a really long time whether you're making a drawing or making a photograph you read space perspective connection between things so well so I don't know if that answers but anyway it really does because I think um this is going to sound a bit corny but I think projects take a long time to develop and there's a kind of Clairvoyance of a designer which is coming both from a lot of knowledge and also the kind of muscle memory of Designing making things which relates I think to the craft and care of construction that you're touching on David that there's a kind of conscience at Play uh which Aquinas cause a special habit which which I'm writing trying to write something about in relationship to skill and craft which is to do with the the groundedness of the imagination as practical wisdom that's just Aquinas translates that from Aristotle's ethics as prudence um hence the title of my essay um and that therefore I'm not actually sure that Architects always know what they're doing and there's a there's a lot of rhetoric and there's a lot of intentionality and then there's things which the animal mind or the body is doing through the act of drawing which takes a long time for us to realize and that therefore the participation of um uh the phrase that you use David of clients willing to engage is is the fourth wall as it were to use a theatrical and IG or this kind of other two architecture um I'm going to pass the pass the phone over the mic over to Jonathan I think the booze is coming in a minute and then there's books the books books to buy in a drink and maybe we should move to a more informal mode after after you'll give you the last chance to or did I say David do you want to go next slide you're next and then pass it we pass it along any last comments please chapson look a couple of things one is that uh Neve is a teacher when he and I went into partnership we agreed there would be a culture of drawing and we would both be free to teach and that was the basis and what I should say is I said in my peace that he undertook his apprenticeship really I think uh Lions Israel and letters but looking back at Camden there we all were the group had another 12 13 people working mainly on Alexander Road and then there was me when I went to work for Neve I didn't show him any drawings and I think he would he want what he did is he taught we he we talked and because I think he thought will he fit and can he enter the conversation because I'll teach him the rest and that applied to I think all of us because of this group there was the two or three Brits and then there was an Iraqi and Iranian there were two Israelis who disappeared to fight was it the Six Day War and then came back with their photographs of what they'd done and we got some more drawings done but there was this group and I think he his basis was he would run it and he had you know this vision of how things should be done he'd sit down with you and you'd be talking about what what could have led to dress over a cell and how the end grain would be and so somehow it would get condensed down to this level of craft and I think the sense of craft and skill was very very strong and his great quotation from the form of housing is continuity is the essential characteristic of Housing and I just ought to say because he was not a member of the aval god and continuity meant you know the continuity of the project of modern artists and and of the social life of people and and so it was within this broad cultural View and I think this is very interesting little talk earlier on when even I broke up I went up to the Macintosh school because they taught housing like a proper Scottish School a proper European school we did housing and so that to me was very significant of keeping something going because I think earlier on we were talking right at the beginning this is this long thing from me where he he poses the question about whether housing is really another form of architecture because in the sense you've got complexity and a brief and so on and I think that's a very interesting question um but actually I think really there's a body of architectural culture that he wanted to continue and that's why I think it's very good that we're doing this now not not to say Neve got it all right but actually it was that determination to keep an architectural culture alive and I think he played a big role in that another thing is is we talked a little bit about him becoming an artist he had several careers one you talked about him you talked about him uh producing the drawings of Alexander Road I think the B Block while he's teaching at Cornell so Neve being half American he's going backwards and forwards produce with Sydney Cook's approval producing the drawings of Alexandra Road the other side of the Atlantic and teaching and this was a I think very very important but he had another career which is an exhibition designer and I touched on that but he designed about six or seven exhibitions at a very high level and another conversation I've had with Mark is that Paul Williams Alan Stanton's partner Stanton Williams are a firm about this but Paul studied to be an exhibition designer and he said yeah leave for someone he really writes as a professional exhibition designer so there are these other aspects and finally on sustainability with the Camden work we were working with in the building regulations as they stood I mean it's shocking to think that we could build single glazed buildings that was what the score was and so on but towards the end of the time I was with Neve we were invited to submit a it was an competition a selective competition a sustainable School in a suburb of Hamburg and we we built a monitor but the relationship with Max Fordham was long-standing and deep and Max would come and his office was down the road she'd come in at lunch time but he would skive off from his office and we'd sit and go through strategies for reducing energy for this building that sits in the landscape it's on all of this is in the archive in Fulham for the Roba and so on but there it's not that he wasn't interested it's just in a sense history history moves and that's about all I've got to say what I was going to say feels historical now but um maybe two things uh Sue I was re I found what you just said about the discipline of Photography so wonderful um and it reminded me of that moment when you're working on a plan where sometimes it's really good to turn it round the other way even if it's the wrong way around because you see the mistakes and I was really struck by that sense of seeing a world in a way that's sort of distorted but it makes you sharper um of course I think to a lot of the audience drawing by hand and trying to work out a plan on a table was maybe archaic but and David I'm really glad you mentioned exhibition design because I remember when I met you for the first time you were working on the Corb exhibition and at the Haywood gallery and that was that was a substantial exhibition and it felt it would be remiss of this occasion not to mention it because I think it was a profound fascination with corpse work as well I mean it's sort of obvious isn't it so I just I I just like to thank David for inviting us to work with you on this um it's it's obviously a a much bigger topic than we've uncovered and it sounds as if um knee Brown was many people and live many lives and um we we I think we we have to raise a glass to him when we when we get together in a minute to thank him for sharing that vulnerability and tenacity and drive and modesty with us it's a it's an example for all of us I wonder if we should have a round of applause for Neve Brown [Applause]

Channel: AA School of Architecture

Views: 1,892

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Id: AlvUm01oVR0

Length: 203min 52sec (12232 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023