Architectural History

In the final episode of our miniseries on Architecture & Media we discussed architectural criticism in the age of the internet, the shifting landscape of architectural discourse, and the new ways of thinking about the built environment that it has brought.

Support the SAHGB by becoming a member: ⁠https://www.sahgb.org.uk/support-us⁠.

Kate Wagner is the architecture critic at The Nation and the creator of McMansion Hell. She is currently writing a book about how an ugly world makes ugly buildings. 

Teshome Douglas-Campbell is a London-based visual artist, architectural designer, journalist and alumni of the New Architectural Writers programme. Often working collaboratively with communities his practice explores diasporic experiences and deep time as crucial drivers for making and holding space in the urban environment.

In this episode we talk about architecture on television in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Contributors:

Gillian Darley is an architectural historian, author and broadcaster, whose books include Excellent Essex and biographies of Sir John Soane, John Evelyn and Octavia Hill. Gillian has written extensively about Ian Nairn, including the 2013 book Ian Nairn: Words in Place with David McKie.

Tom Dyckhoff is a historian, writer, teacher and broadcaster about architecture, geographies, design and cities. Tom has written and presented lots of series and documentaries for television. He teaches the history and theory of cities & architecture at University College London and Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London. Tom’s phd research explores how television constructs a “public sphere” in which ideas about architecture, space and the city are constructed, contested and “made public”.

Clips:

Ian Nairn, Football Towns: Bolton and Preston, BBC, 1975 (1.38 on Preston Bus Garage)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k67CS9fQra4

Ian Nairn, Football Towns: Bolton and Preston, BBC, 1975 (8.44 on St Saviours, Bolton)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hLb4bjd6_4

Ian Nairn No Two the Same (Pacemakers), (featuring Churchill Gardens and Lillington Gardens), BBC, 1970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZxhOSDvj4E

Ian Nairn, Nairn Across Britain: from London to Lancashire, BBC, 1972 (featuring Northampton market hall)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8eyMqJkwY

Ian Nairn, The More We Are Together: Eric Lyons the architect of suburbia, BBC, 1969

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01rwl9f/omnibus-the-more-we-are-together

Ian Nairn, Football Towns: Huddersfield and Halifax, BBC, 1975

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQfgA_6HLT0

Stuart Hall on The Late Show, BBC, 1989

https://youtu.be/J2EFuf3yhaE?si=RTmKKXEfdld8n9h6

John Berger, Ways of Seeing: episode one, BBC, 1972

https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk?si=clZObw7skqoFTq8-

Patrick Keiller, London, BBC, 1994

https://youtu.be/nkfhFRiRmIw?si=Dfa7rBg8mhTec6k4

In this episode we talk about architectural and aurality, asking what impact radio had on architecture, architects and public audiences.

Support the SAHGB by becoming a member: ⁠https://www.sahgb.org.uk/support-us⁠.

Our Contributors:

Olga Touloumi is Associate Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Her research concerns questions of globalization and media in twentieth architecture. Her first book Assembly by Design situates mid-20th century architectural constructions of global governance within debates on media democracies and liberal internationalism. Touloumi has co-edited Sound Modernities, a volume on how acoustics and sound technologies transformed modern architectural culture during the twentieth century; and with Theodora Vardouli Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, a volume about the exchanges between designers and computational technologists in Europe and North America.

Shundana Yusaf is Associate Professor of History and Theory at the School of Architecture, University of Utah. Her scholarship juxtaposes colonial/ postcolonial history with sound studies in architecture. Her first book is Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless, 1927-1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). Her current book is called Resonant Tombs: A Feminist History of Sufi Shrines in Pakistan. As its starting point, it takes sound as an architectural material of construction and women as secondary architects, collectively nestling ephemeral auditory monuments with their bodily resources within material monuments built by heroic men with material resources. 

Details of audio clips:

Movietone News newsreel of First United Nations General Assembly at Westminster Hall 1946 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3em8Yvf13y4

British Pathe newsreel U.N. Hears President - Kennedy Asks Joint US - Soviet Moon Trip, 1963 https://youtu.be/iBcfSqwvVlg?si=iS7nJ0aIRIjbMFzp

Charlie Chaplin - Adenoid Hynkel Speech - The Great Dictator (1940)

https://youtu.be/isLNLpxpndA?si=iWZNmbzMehKQwT9y

The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain brings together all those with an interest in the history of the built environment – academics, architects, heritage experts and the wider public. As the leading body in the field, we believe that appreciation of architectural history plays a vital role in understanding our culture, past and present. With the help of our members, we publish new research, organise a broad range of events, provide educational opportunities and advance the understanding of the built histories of all periods and places, in Britain and beyond.

Membership https://www.sahgb.org.uk/

In this episode we discuss the press, periodicals and magazines in architectural history from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Support the SAHGB by becoming a member: ⁠https://www.sahgb.org.uk/support-us⁠.

Our contributors are: 

Dr Anne Hultzsch is an architectural historian and leads the ERC-funded group ‘Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900’ (WoWA) at ETH Zurich. With a PhD from the Bartlett, University College London, and a postdoc at AHO Oslo, she works on intersectionality in architectural history between ca. 1650 and 1930, exploring the histories of gender, print, perception, and travel. She is author of Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950 (2014) and has edited The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (with Mari Hvattum, 2018) and The Origins of the Architectural Magazine in Nineteenth-Century Europe (The Journal of Architecture, 2020). 

Dr Lieske Huits, is a decorative arts historian and university lecturer at University of Leiden. Lieske’s PhD, titled A New Visual Narrative of Nineteenth-Century Historicism, explored historicism and revival styles in the decorative arts and architecture of the nineteenth century, and the display of historicist objects in international expositions and museums of decorative arts. 

For more information about the SAHGB, their programme of events, publications and grants and to join the society, see their website at https://www.sahgb.org.uk/

In this episode we introduce the theme of our miniseries, architecture and media. We talk about our own research interests and what the study of media, in all its various forms, has to offer architectural history. 

Jessica Kelly’s book about modern architecture and the media is called No More Giants: J.M. Richards, The Architectural Review and modernism and is published by Manchester University Press (2022), find out more about Jessica’s research here: https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/profiles/staff/jessica-kelly/

Matthew Lloyd Roberts is a PhD student working on the cultural reception of architecture in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, details here: ⁠https://csca.aha.cam.ac.uk/roberts-phd/⁠

Matthew writes about architecture for a variety of publications and produces the podcast About Buildings and Cities.

For more information about the SAHGB, their programme of events, publications and grants and to join the society, see their website at https://www.sahgb.org.uk/