Dundee 2022/23 UTAS Studio A Brief

STUDIO A: LONDON [Andy Stoane]

ESTATE

Collective Productions in the Age of the Individual.

Space is “socially produced” argued Henri Lefebvre. The key social field of our era, within which these productions currently precipitate, is the city.

When Manfredo Tafuri famously discussed the “social machine of the city,” he referred to the inability of modern architecture to escape the logics of industrial capitalism that had gradually subsumed sociourban processes since the eighteenth-century. Yet within twentieth-century modernism there existed a brief socially reformist mission, connected deeply to ideas of the Keynesian social state, where housing provision (and welfare generally) were part of an understanding of collective responsibility. It lasted only a few decades, before postmodernism, and its engagement with the unstoppable atomising forces of society, destroyed it forever, turning its central tropes toward the idea that vitality resided only in the individual. Tafuri observed how architecture of this era “renounces its propelling role in regard to the city and structures of production and hides behind a rediscovered disciplinary autonomy, or behind neurotic attitudes of self-destruction.” A set of “projects” ensued, naturalising individualism and entrenching it into values now so hegemonic that, to paraphrase Frederic Jameson. ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than any alternative.’ In this era, most of modernism’s socio-urban product has been able to be destroyed or captured and sold as commodity. Yet there remains one stubborn urban production that is continually problematic – the estate

A clear counter-proposition to the surrounding city, the estate is an enclave of collectivity – a register of a ‘people’ in an urban field of individuals; a non-propertarian logic in a world of ownership; a dinosaur of the social age. It entirely disrupts the socio-geographic stratification of wealth that defines the neoliberal city. The constant attempts to destroy, gentrify and/or socially cleanse it are difficult. People, after all, do still retain one or two “rights.”

We will go to London and visit numerous exemplars of this social form. Your operational field will be in East London, on a site adjacent to London City airport. We will propose morphological alternatives that lean on the estate and push against the market, with a view to challenging the housing inequalities sitting within the social injustices that so define London and that are spreading around world cities like a rhizome.

A few of the estates you will visit in London.

Theory (non-exhaustively)

Tafuri: The Social Machine of the City. Keynesianism and the Social State. Postmodern tropes of individualism: Jacobs, Venturi, Rowe/Koetter, Newman/Coleman. De-industrialisation and the squadering of waterfronts. Processes of gentrification and socio-geographic disparity.

Brenner: City as Economic Growth machine.

Lefebvre: The Right to the City.

Lefebvre: The Production of Space.

Analysis

You will visit numerous London estates brought into being through the mechanics of the Keynesian social state and will consider the trajectory of housing in London since. You will analyse how the crisis of affordability in London’s housing has occured. You will examine and analyse case-studies of gentrification and social displacement. On a site adjacent to London City Airport, you will analyse and critique the objectives of redevelopment in its current form.

Strategy

You will make strategic propositions for the dock to the north of London City Airport, currently occupied by University of East London. The proposition will include a compact housing landscape with associated programmes. It will use (and add to) the existing infrastructures, including the road network, the Docklands Light Railway, London City Airport and the Thames Clippers. You will recognise the importance of key related morphological features such as The City of London, Canary Wharf, Thamesmead, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Crucially, your strategy will use intelligence gleaned from the studies of public architecture of the twentieth-century (the estates) to make suggestions for new social and spatial forms for the twenty-first century - forms resistant to current forces of “development” and prioritising ideas of publicness.

The operational site adjacent to London City Airport.

LAND, AND IT IS AVAILABLE ACCESSIBLE

PROPERTY, HAS THE HEGEMONIC ACCESS IN OUR

Raquel Rolnik

THE WAY AVAILABLE AND AS PRIVATE HAS BECOME HEGEMONIC TYPE OF OUR SOCIETY.”

THEORY

Historiography

1903: The “Alienating” Metropolis of Simmel

In Georg Simmel ‘s seminal 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, the city is understood as a system whose incessant stimuli are reflected in its inhabitants’ alienation and individuation. Referring to the shift from the feudal and religious structures of the country to the modern metropolis, “money economy and the domination of the intellect,” Simmel argues, started to form their closest relationship. Reactions ranged from a rapid proliferation of suburbs - as a form of bucolic escape - to new experiments in dense, urban living that promoted new forms of collective life.

1920s: Housing at its Most Socially Efficacious (Revolutionary Housing).

Soviet revolutionaries sought the discovery of new forms of collectivity to replace the individualism that permeated bourgeois society. Projects for Constructivist “commune houses” such as Stroyykom RSFSR. M.O. Barshch and V.N. Vinogrado used technological and spatial innovation attempting to bring about a new revolutionary social consciousness, through the activities of the home. For the Bolshoviks, such “social condensers” were designed “[i]n order to facilitate a rapid and painless transition to higher social forms of housekeeping . . .” Although rare, a few constructed examples of “social condensers” exist, notably Narkomfin (the people’s Commissariat for Finance), construced in Moscow in 1928-30 by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis.

1930s: Council Housing.

Early forms of public housing began to appear in the late nineteenthcentury, notably Boundary Estate (Arnold Circus) in London’s Bethnal Green. These ideas were eventually absorbed into government policy in the early twentieth-century. The Housing Act of 1930 required councils to prepare slum clearance plans for the first time, resulting in pioneering social advances in housing such as Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate in Clenkenwell, London, conceived in the late 1930s and built between 1946 and 1949.

1933: Housing as Bourgeois Revolution.

Designed after the 1929 crash, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse with its verdant public grounds and continuities of public programmes running through raised linear dwellings was an attempt to elevate architecture above basic Fordist principles of efficiency. As Deborah Gans puts it, this concluded “. . . his search for a political mechanism to bring his larger project – nothing less than the mythic-economic recalibration of man’s relation to material through architecture – into the world.”. In Manfredo Tafuri’s words “even today, the most advanced and formally elevated hypotheses of bourgeois culture in the field of architectural design and urbanism.”

1956-1982: A “Public City.” (Keynesian Architecture).

Prefigured by Keynesian economic principles, London’s Barbican is a hybrid public arts-orientated “artificial” podium containing more than twenty different public programmes, two large residential squares and a car free site. With a residential population of up to 6,000 people in three forty-storey towers and a series of seven-storey slab blocks, it was designed as a drive to increase the residential population of the inner city in a time of urban retrenchment after WWII. Homes were rented from, and the entire complex was managed by, the Corporation of London. Note the complexity of the section.

1980 onward: The City as Capital Accumulation. The rise of neoliberalism, privitisation and “the right to buy” subsumed the city, and the residential lives of its citizens, deeper into imperatives of capital accumulation. Modernism’s social project was dismantled along with the social-state. Gentrification - defined by Neil Smith as “… the process by which working class residential neighbourhoods are rehabilitated by middle class homebuyers, land-lords and professional developers” – became the de facto modus operandi of urban “development.”

1924: Architecture

Axonometric Barshch and innovation the activities designed “ of housekeeping

1930: Architecture

Designed after grounds and unities.” was Tafuri’s words bourgeois culture

1956-1982: A Prefigured by hybrid public public programs, population of storey slab blocks, the inner city entire complex

1980 onward:

The rise of the the residential Gentrification residential neighbourhoods and professional “development.” processes, has shop and stall

Protests are rarely original communities development government often accept lucrative

1SOCIAL TO PROPRIETARIAN

The studio will first focus on the period covered by the historiography opposite - “the social age” of architecture. This was an age before architecture was fully annexed to capital, where you might well find the best, most-talented architects working for local councils on public housing projects. In the words of Mark Swenarton (Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing), through their inventiveness and creativity, [these] architects have made a fundamental difference to the form of housing and thereby to the lives of the mass of the population.”

Those early architects of mass housing - at the beginning of the twentieth-century - grasped the Fordist order of western capitalism, turning it on its head politically, into a mission for egalitarian reform. Industrial production, they thought, could be used to create a fairer society, its structures playing out in a differently organised city, liberating the working class from labour and providing good, affordable housing. As Deborah Gans puts it in her essay “Big Work: Le Corbusier and capitalism,” the objective of most avantgarde movements of this period was “the reduction of work in hand towards the elimination of a permanent working class.”

In 1930s Britain, there was a plan for social regeneration through a programme of modernist architecture, most of which would be realised after the World War II. The Housing Act of 1930 required councils to prepare slum clearance plans for the first time, resulting in pioneering projects such as Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate in Clenkenwell, London, conceived in the late 1930s and built between 1946 and 1949. Modernist housing was formally, spatially and symbolically able to instantiate new ideas for collective spaces, shared facilities and suitable densities. But despite the newly elected Labour government in 1945 introducing acts to broaden this form of “council housing” for “general needs” rather than for the working class only, the programme as a mechanism to transform a broader attitude toward “the welfare state” was short lived, successive governments adopting a much more conciliatory approach to “housing provision.” The programme peaked around 1968, before being dismantled altogether by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. While such socially reformist ideas in the UK at their peak led to around thirty percent of all housing and around fifty percent of rental housing being “council housing,” the use of modernist architecture for urban social regeneration existed as a fifty year reformist experiment, with arguably only a couple of decades focussed on the creation of a true “welfare state,” where housing provision, and welfare generally, were part of an understanding of collective responsibility rather than a safety net for poverty.

Postmodern anxieties – not least the Vietnam War, the Cold War, civil unrest and arguably most importantly, peak-oil predictions - led to uncertainties that struggled to maintain any foundational stabilities upon which the “machine-age” optimism of modernism was predicated. In 1966, architect Robert Venturi launched an attack on modernist housing. “. . . I am for messy vitality over obvious unity . . .” he said in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. What became a central trope of postmodernism - “the everyday is vital, the totalising force of unity in design is an imposition from above” - served as an admonishment of the early twentieth century avant-garde and their ideas of continuity and collectivity. Vitality, once again, resided in the individual. Modernist mass-housing quickly came to be considered as a form of hubris in an age where the promotion of the individual over the collective, and ideals of individual economic emancipation through entrepreneurship were having a corrosive effect, not only on statism, but on the social fabric of the western world. Without the mechanism of the state, architecture uncoupled itself from politics, abandoning its now impossible social mission. In line with the prevailing mood of the nascent neoliberal economy, a generation of postmodern architects turned against that social mission that they themselves were part of, with what the prophetic critic and historian Manfredo Tafuri described as “neurotic attitudes of self-destruction.”

In this new pluralistic landscape with its “multiplicity of issues vying for attention” (as Kate Nesbitt refers to it in her book Theorizsng a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995), architecture fragmented into multiple factions, competing over just what its new position within capitalism could and should be. Commenting on architecture’s de-politicisation Tafuri notes that architecture is no longer capable of “ . . . analyzing the real causes of the crisis of design,” meaning instead “contemporary criticism concentrates all its attention on the internal problems of design itself.” It had lost its “ideological prefiguration”– and had retreated into its own internal questions, allowing it to be co-opted into the political agenda of late twentieth-century neoliberalism, while indulging in its own “ideological contortions.”

2IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA

The studio will look to a discipline reconnected with the economic, social and political fields that surround it, eschewing the idea of architecture as a self-organising (autonomous) discipline. We will reclaim its ideological obligations to communities, and ultimately to the possibility of utopia as a stimulus for societal transformations. As Lefebvre reminds us, space is “socially produced,” and thus “…new social relationships call for a new space, and vice-versa.”1 He discuses the necessity for a “unitary theory of space,” with an equal weight to the globalised forces of capital which continually reproduces uneven spatial development across the planet.

The ability of modernism to transcend external competing ideologies - to use space in various social constructions – is dealt with by Florian Urban in his book Tower and Slab, where radically different histories of mass housing projects are explored in different global locations. Urban raises the question, “[h]ow was a building type that on the surface appears so similar able to generate so much difference?” Urban notes how the design of modernist serial housing blocks “tended to adapt to societal conditions rather than shaping them, but at the same time showed a certain degree of resistance.” He makes the point that “[m]odern architecture and planning was formulated as an explicit counterproposal to the existing city.” Such a counterproposal might well explain the central value-system of the modernist housing project. It is flexible, adaptable, but universal. It presents not the manifestation of a set of determinate social conditions, but a universal frame into which different social conditions adapt to fit, but equally, they must be reflexive to it. Its efficiency may have originated in capitalism, but capitalism does not own it. We will ask if such a universal condition might be adapted to operate in a contemporary landscape, offering a neutral field within which a resistance to the uneven housing landscape might reside.

3BEYOND THE FIGURE GROUND

Much of the dock landscape around the ste is “constructed” Much of it is infrastructural (DLR, roads, railways, air travel). The studio will examine this idea of a “constructed ground” as an opportunity. Today’s city has seamlessely slipped into past imaginations, daily metropolitan life continually utilising both subterranean spaces and artificial grounds, which now connect together in multiple infrastructures and programmes. London’s Crossrail project, for example, massively expands the city’s ageing tube system into a spatialised underground world. Even new buildings begin to respond to extreme land costs and height restrictions by burying as much accommodation as possible into the ground. In Hong Kong, one can navigate much of the city through a series of seemingly endless subterranean spaces which include malls, cinemas, transport interchanges, hospitality and leisure facilities, even ice rinks. Elevated grounds have also for a century or so formed part of speculations on future cities. Notable early examples are the Vesnins’ Narkomtiazhprom and El Lissitzky’s horizontal skycrapers of the 1920s and Yona Friedman’s Spatial City (1964). Today, as the mapping of Hong Kong below illustrates, reliance on urban artificial grounds in the contemporary compact city is commonplace, pedways, bridges and entangled towers now forming a crutial part of the navigational systems of our cities.

Above: Cover from Popular Science, August 1925.

Below: The Vesnins’ Narkomtiazhprom. circa 1920s.

Right: Mapping of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, from Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong. The book presents mappings of non-groundbased, publicly accessible areas of Hong Kong, which the authors consider as “a template for public space within future cities undergoing intense densification (and subject to changing weather).”

Left: The Complexity of the urban section, illustrated through an image of London Liverpool Street from Crossrail. The 3D model shows structure and space above and below the datum we conventionally recognise as “ground.” You will engage with the full scope of this section.

ARRIVED AT AN UNDENIABLE IMPASSE, ARCHITECTURAL

IDEOLOGY RENOUNCES ITS PROPELLING ROLE IN REGARD TO THE CITY AND STRUCTURES OF PRODUCTION AND HIDES BEHIND A REDISCOVERED

DISCIPLINARY AUTONOMY, OR BEHIND NEUROTIC ATTITUDES OF SELF-DESTRUCTION.

Manfredo Tafuri

Infrastructures

You will analyse the existing infrastructures, including the road network, the Docklands Light Railway, London City Airport and the Thames Clippers.

Morphological Features

You will analyse the importance of key existing morphological features such as The City of London, Canary Wharf, Docklands, Thamesmead, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and the new Canning Town developments.

History

You will discover and analyse the historic morphological and social histories of the site.

Daily Life and Temporal Structures

You will observe the populations that use the site, and analyse the patterns and cycles of the lifes that plays out on it.

ANALYSIS

Isle of Dogs

Greenwich Peninsula / O2

Greenwich

Canning Town

Canary Wharf

Olympic Park

Existing Policy and Development Plan

Architecture very often became servant to processes that placethe operations of the city in the hands of the few through its subsummation into imperatives of capital accumulation. Government policy now tends to serve this end and the idea of using housing as a key determinant in the formation of new societal ideas has been reduced to managerialist strategy. Recognising what capitalist “development” had taken away from architecture and the city as a means of collective integration, Tafuri was to note that a public, once represented in the image of the city through the residential cell, was no longer “critically participant in the act of creation.” In this regard, in the space of forty years, the architecture of housing has shifted from being part of a mission for social reform to being part of a political philosophy that recognises only the laws and logics of markets and individual propertyproprietarianism. The architect’s primary role is the creation of a commodity-form. You will discover and analyse the existing development plan for the site and the various policies and pronciples supporting it. Your eventualy proposition will push against this plan, but in order to do this, you should have a thorough critical understanding of it.

imap

Thamesmead

Fine Grain Analysis

You will make a finer grain field analysis of the area identified below, to the north of London City Airport, part of which is currently occupied by the University of East London.

Gentrification

You will make an analysis of the process of gentrification by using the cast-study of London’s nowdemolished Heygate Estate at Elephant and Castle.

The area has seen years of protest, particularly from residents of the estate and the largely Latin American shop and stall owners. Such protests are rarely successful. As capital investment floods in and the city changes, original communities are displaced through the increase in property prices. A series of development tactics are often used to minimise commitments to local people, with local government often either complicit in the process or powerless through pressures to accept lucrative inward investment.

HEYGATE ESTATE - 1974 - 3000 PEOPLE

ELEPHANT & CASTLE SHOPPING CENTRE - 1962 - 100 SHOPS

- 450 TREES - PUBLICALLY OWNED - DEMOLISHED

- PUBLIC PLAZA - INTEGRATED TUBE AND RAIL - DEMOLISHED

As long ago as 1979, Neil Smith, then a doctoral student working under the supervision of David Harvey, was writing about the “back to the city movement,” using the early gentrification project of Philadelphia’s Society Hill as a case study. Through analysis of property prices, Smith demonstrated that the return to the city was the return of an affluent class only. He quotes the novelist Nathaniel Burt, who observed that “[r]emodeling old houses is, after all, one of Old Philadelphia’s favorite indoor sports, and to be able to remodel and consciously serve the cause of civic revival all at once has gone to the heads of the upper classes like champagne.” However, despite the gentrification project being underway, the suburb would continue to rise as the dominant typology for nonaffluent classes. In the UK, the owner-occupier suburb followed America’s lead and the UK housing market is still principally suburban. “Not only do 80% of households live in suburbs but also suburban housing is more likely to be owner-occupied.” In the processes behind the “return to the city,” we can see what were once classdivisions re-forming as what the political theorist Brian Elliott has described as “determinate shared identity” – the now so familiar pattern of urbs as a territory for a single, affluent group, the sub-urbs for others. The city core is becomming the domain of the wealthy.

In an attempt to subvert this process - to avoid horizontal spread and to build a dense, compact, pluralistic fieldwe will need to devise appropriate, new spatial forms. Small-scale, low, traditionally configured neighbourhoods will not suffice. As Lefebvre reminds us, “. . . new social relationships call for new space, and vice-versa.” We will address realistically the staggering scalar change in cities, and the changing social behaviours of its populations. David Harvey has criticised current “New Urbanist” preoccupations for presuming “a fixed, nostalgic view of the wants and needs” of urban citizens, and something that “embed[s] its projects in a restrictive set of social processes.” This we will avoid.

The new urbanism connects to a facile contemporary attempt to transform large and teeming cities, so seemingly out of control, into an interlinked series of ‘urban villages’ where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil and urbane fashion to everyone else.

You will make strategic propositions for the dock to the north of London City Airport, currently occupied by University of East London. The proposition will include a compact housing landscape with associated programmes. Crucially, your strategy will use intelligence gleaned from the studies of public architecture of the twentieth-century (the estates) to make suggestions for new social and spatial forms for the twenty-first century - forms resistant to current forces of “development” and prioritising ideas of publicness.

To do this, you must understand what the forces of development are, what they represent, and how new sociospatial forms might subvert them. The strategic ideas will consider architecture and the city as heteronomous - as deeply connected with its social, political and economic contexts, and committed to the community it defines, and which will, in return, define it in the future.

The work will be presented as large scale drawings which explore attitudes developed from your theoretical and analytical work, brought to bear on the site and which form a proposition devised to challenge the statu-quo of housing development.

STRATEGY

Transects and linear studies:

Above: Dundee Shanghai Studio 2019/20.

Below left:: Nolli v Piranese, Bryan Maddock. https://thecitythecitythecity. tumblr.com/post/67554157062/nolli-vs-piranesi-bryan-maddock; and from Venturi and Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas.

Below right: ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models. Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. Tutors: Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie.

Below far right: ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models. Para-Situation [Calcutta / Kolkata]. Tutor: Dorian Wiszniewski.

Strategic Presentation:

Left below: Hypothesising on an urban future of uncontrolled growth of cities: Mélun Senart New Town Competition, OMA, 1987. A series of carefully orchestrated voids, from which the “average-contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-American-Japanese architecture” is banished, ‘irrigate the city with potentials’ to stimulate different programmes and patterns of growth.

See: Surrender, Ville Nouvelle Mélun-Senart, France, 1987 – in R. Koolhaas and B. Mau, SMLXL, Rotterdam, 010, Publishers, 1995, p972.

Right below:

Urban strategy for Jamsil Olympic site, Seoul, Korea, Andrew Stoane Architects, 2012. A mat-plan challenged the scenographic view of the city, promoting a full homology between inside and outside with no residual. New programmes connect to the existing stadia, physically and economically, filling the temporal voids left by the low frequency cycles of the sports events.

London’s pre-eminence during the industrial revolution and the zenith of the British empire, led to population growth of 1 million to 7 million between 1800 and 1900. The ramifications of such unprecedented growth on metrololitan life shed new light on the need for architecture to adopt a reformist position on housing provision through the twentieth century – with solutions as far reaching as the first example of council housing at Arnold Circus / Boundary Estate (1890), the garden city movement (1898), and innovations in low-rise, high density schemes such as Alexandra Road (1968-78) conceived as part of a new egalitarian societal vision. In the UK, such experiments have been long-forgotten – architecture’s sociopolitical mission abandoned in favour of a market-driven conciliation in housing provision. The ensuing crisis of unaffordability now threatens both the social and economic fabric of the country. In the UK Government’s 2005 Review of Housing Supply, conducted by economist Kate Barker, we were warned of “. . . increasing problems of homelessness, affordability and social division, decline in standards of public service delivery and increase in the costs of doing business in the UK - hampering our economic success.”1 Our inability to provide housing is cited by Barker as “the UK’s biggest policy failure”, with resulting “indefensible economic distortions”2 leading potentially to complete social failure.

London will be used as a field city to discover, view and analyse now historic seminal examples of housing typology which responded to the demands of an age which recognised good housing as part of a mechanism for social change.

Much of the housing of that era was provided by the state, known in the UK as “Council Housing.” Private acquisition of this housing now means houses constructed in the post-WW2 years for lower-income families sells for millions of pounds on the open market. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’3 programme from the 1980s (which incentivised private home ownership as part of a political manifesto) meant public housing assets transferred to the market without replacement, representing a continual escalation of the importance of housing to economic growth.

Private accumulation of housing stock has entirely conflated ideas of home and asset - in a society of ever-rising demand for houses and ever-diminishing availability of land. This has delivered asset structures in which the housing market plays a central macroeconomic role. Its performance imperatives serve to escalate continual under-supply, bringing about ever increasing cost.

In such a system there is little space for contributions to discourse on new forms of social organisation. What is the role of the discipline of architecture in this crisis? Must it be one of capitulation to the market or can it have a critical view? Might there be alternate modes of engagement, where new solutions, market-led and otherwise, can promote ideas for collective life - for housing all of our population and for helping avoid both social failure and economic distortion?

Alongside illuminating socio-political ideas, the study of London’s seminal twentieth century housing projects aims to develop your understanding of essential parameters in the design of apartment buildings, particularly scale, spatial organisation, access arrangements, relationship between apartments and their common areas, and morphological relationships with the surrounding city. Within these parameters, the key studio themes are embedded. The spatial articulation of a dwelling connects its inhabitants with each other and with their neighbours. The building envelope expands that interaction into the full public realm of the city. It is there that architectural design has the capacity for social transformation.

The housing projects are mainly from an age where public housing provision was an important part of our political and economic landscape and where experimentation in housing typology was seen as a vehicle through which a political commitment to provide low and mid-income families with high quality environments could be instantiated. Many are around Camden, whose council had an extraordinarily ambitious and prolific housing programme between the mid 1960s and late 1970s.

1 The Barker Review of Housing Supply. (2006) HMSO.

2 Barker, Kate. (2014) Housing: Where’s the Plan?, London Publishing Partnership.

3 Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced a scheme in 1980 called “right to buy”, under the Housing Act 1980, which offered council tenants the opportunity to purchase their homes at discounted prices, thus transferring housing stock from public to private ownership.

High rise / high density list:

Golden Lane Estate, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, 1952-62

Keeling House, Bethnel Green, Denys Lasdun, 1957

Highcliffe Drive blocks in the Alton West estate, Roehampton, LCC, 1959

Hallfield Estate, Bayswater, Berthold Lubetkin, Denys Lasdun and Lindsay Drake, 1951-58

Trellick Tower, Erno Goldfinger, 1966-72

Low rise / high density list:

Izokon Building, Lawn Road, Wells Coates, 1934

Willow Road, Erno Goldfinger, 1939 Winscombe Street, Neave Brown, 1963-66

Alexandra Road, Neave Brown, 1968-78

Fleet Road / Dunboyne Road Estate, Neave Brown, 1971-75

Brunswick Centre, Patrick Hodgkinson, 1967-7

Robin Hood Gardens, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1970 (now demolished)

Raydon Street, Peter Tabori, Camden Borough Council, 1978

Maiden Lane Estate, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, 1979

Lamble Street, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, 1978-80

Branch Hill Estate, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, Hampstead, 1978

TASKS

SPACE CRUMBLES, IS EXCHANGED (SOLD) IN BITS AND PIECES, INVESTIGATED

PIECEMEAL BY THE FRAGMENTED SCIENCES, WHEREAS IT IS FORMED AS A WORLDWIDE AND, EVEN,

INTERPLANETARY TOTALITY.”

Henri Lefebvre

READING

Swenarton, Mark. Cook’s Campden. London: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2017.

Minton, Anna. Big Capital: Who is London For? London: Penguin, 2017.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976.

Levine, Donald L. (ed). Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971.(Specifically, The metropolis and mental Life).

Ginzburg, Moisei. Dwelling: Five Years’ Work on the Problem of the Habitation, London, Ginzburg Design with Fontanka; 01 Edition (23 Nov. 2017)

Gans, Deborah. “Big Work: Le Corbusier and Capitalism,” in Peggy Deamer, Architrecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, Routledge, Abingdon, 2014.

Coleman, Nathaniel, Lefebvre for Architects, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015.

Kaminer, Tahl. The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017.

Brenner, Neil, Marcuse, Peter, Mayer, Margrit. (eds). Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011.

Cairns, Graham. Reflections on Architecture, Society and Politics. Abbingdon: Routledge, 2017.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

Le Corbusier, The Radiant City. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1964.

Smith, Neil. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 45:4, (1979): 538-548.

Urban, Florian. Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing. Abingdon, Routledge, 2012.

Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005.

Elliott, Brian. Constructing Community: Configurations ofthe Social in Contemporary Philosophy and Urbanism, Lanham, Lexington, 2010.

‘CHANGE LIFE!’

‘CHANGE SOCIETY!’ THESE PRECEPTS MEAN NOTHING

WITHOUT THE PRODUCTION OF AN APPROPRIATE SPACE . . . TO CHANGE LIFE, WE MUST FIRST CHANGE SPACE.

Henri Lefebvre

. . . THE POINT OF THE PROPOSITION THAT THINGS BE OTHERWISE.

Neil Brenner

STARTING DESIGN IS PROPOSITION THINGS COULD OTHERWISE.