History Today

This picture is taken from The Ladybird Story of Houses and Homes. It was a book I had as a child. Despite being a children’s book though it is a document of impressive ideological purity.

The picture above is accompanied by some forceful modernist rhetoric. “New materials have made possible a new kind of building”, it states. It goes on in suitably robust form, like a junior version of Towards A New Architecture: “As the steelwork carries all the weight all rooms, windows and doors can be placed in the best positions for convenience, sunlight and fresh air”. The picture itself is charming, heroic and reassuring in the same measure. A pipe smoking chap and his wife stroll the verdant parkland created between the modernist point blocks whilst new towers march onwards towards the future.

The final image in the book is of a ‘modern country house’. It is accompanied by some more heartfelt polemic; “Architects are constantly trying to design with modern materials and building methods, houses as perfect, in the modern way as the houses of the great periods of British Architecture”. The house depicted has been designed in a sort of 1960's 'secondary school moderne'.

Running up to this flag waiving finale is a brief history of housing through the ages starting with some amusing looking cavemen. The story only really comes alive though with the Victorians who, as was the case during the period when the book was published (1963), really get it in the neck. “We have seen”, it says; “how the Industrial Revolution made some people very rich so that they could build themselves lavish, but usually ugly houses”.

Describing the interior of a ‘typical’ Victorian house the writers add; “ The room is crowded with chairs, little tables, cabinets and shelves. All available space is filled with artificial flowers, stuffed birds and useless things of all kinds” (My italics). Compared with the overbearing father and his consumptive child depicted here, the healthy looking couple engaged in outdoor pursuits of the modern country house illustrate the restorative powers of modern architecture.

None of the other houses, from the funny looking caveman's cave to the semi-detached 'homes for heroes' are treated with quite the same scorn. Which makes this book an interesting document of its time, a period when the certainties of architecture permeated down to children's history books.

No! Not the Passion Quilt!

Owen has asked me to do this. I’m not sure why because I've never done anything to harm him, but here goes….

The rules are as follows: Post a picture of what you are most passionate about as a teacher (I'm not a proper teacher but this doesn't seem to matter). Title your post either 'Meme:Passion Quilt (No!) - or similar. Link to this post and force (sorry, ask) five other like minded brethren to do the same.

I’ve ‘tagged’ (said in the slightly withering tone of an elderly high court judge coming across the term for the first time) Steve, because he is, I believe, an ‘educator’ and also because he once tagged me - although it was slightly before I started reading his excellent site - so I feel I have some kind of excuse, Sir Norman Blogster because he has strong views on education, Annie because although she has absolutely no idea who I am she might say something funny, Jon because he will hate doing it and Anne because I like I like.

I’ve chosen this because it’s my favourite building (ahhh!) and because as a friend of mine once said; “The whole of architecture is in this room”. It is a picture of the interior of the Muller House by Adolf Loos. The first time I saw it I was perplexed by what the fuss was all about. Now I think it brilliant.

It’s spatially inventive, materially rich, socially provocative and psychologically complex. It’s both beautiful and strange. It collapses any number of oppositions: tradition and modernity, opulence and austerity, comfort and risk and leaves them all up in the air, in a state of perpetual motion. As an architect you couldn’t do any better.

It also reminds me of two key moments in my own education. One was reading the brilliant essay by Beatriz Colominia about this house which opened my eyes to a whole way of looking at and experiencing architecture, and the other was a lecture by Robin Evans on the social and psychological development of domestic architecture, the relationship between the forms, shapes and organisations of architecture and the social organisation of the family. Both of them suggested that architecture, uniquely perhaps, has a constructive role in the way we organise ourselves as bodies in space. Not as an excursion or a comment in the way that a play or an art installation might, but there, right in the centre, all the time, everywhere.

Shameless Plug

I recommend anyone who finds themselves near Hastings over the next month to pop in here to see John Holland’s (absolutely no relation, no way, honest) latest exhibition called Food Production. It’s really very good. From 23rd May till 20th June.

Here’s a quote from the press release:

John Holland’s work takes the form of environments – installations of objects and constructions which contain great variations of scale and detail. They are fictive spaces, often based on remembered liminal spaces like feral gardens or woodland at the edges of surburbia. They are an attempt to form a response to, or even just a definition of, nature hence they tend to be confused, romantic, toxic, cynical, hopeful, a bit rubbish, and ultimately doomed.