Jonathan Charley

This is the title of a special issue of the The Journal of Architecture (RIBA, Volume 22, Number 3) edited by Michal Murawski and Jane Rendell that is dedicated to what I have always argued was one oft the most important architectural concepts of the twentieth century. Inside there is a collection of diverse essays from the likes of Owen Hatherley, Victor Buchli and my own contribution "Molodoi Chelovek, my origins lie in the past, but I am from the future.'

For many years I have been writing a city in which all of the contradictions of capitalist society and urban development are condensed and exaggerated with brutal clarity. Every aspect of daily life from education, to body parts, and views of trees, has been commodified in a manner that even the pessimists of former times could barely have imagined. It is a city that sprawls to the horizon in all directions and sits on the brink of ecological catastrophe. As is usual in such tales, the dark cunning of the human imagination works hard on ways to categorise and control human behaviour. However, like all dystopian narratives, it is a vision of the future that is rooted in the present, a story that simply stretches and distorts the social and material reality of everyday life. For example, to speculate on the collapse of urban civilisation and of the metamorphosis of education into a grotesque parody of a retail outlet, is only possible, because the forces that could make it happen have already been unleashed. What follows is a fragment from the testament of the City’s last librarian.

Downloads: HAPPYTHINK Inc

The Russian translation of my essay 'The (Dis) Integrating Cit: on the Russian architectural and literary avant-garde" in an important volume of essays commemorating the life and work of the great historian of the Soviet Avant-Garde, Selim Khan Magomedov the author of "Pioneers of Soviet Architecture

"Apart from his investigations into fixed capital, rent theory and the urban transformation of 19th century Paris, Marx wrote very little directly about architecture and the built environment. His collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote considerably more. But even when taken together they didn’t write a lot. So it is ironic and telling, that their writings have proved to be such an inspiration to some of the twentieth century's most profound thinkers on urban matters who collectively changed the way we think about the city. What follows are five short journeys in the company of Marx into a fictitious city, City X…."

Published in Borden,I, Fraser,M, and Penner, B, (eds), Forty Ways To Think About Architecture, (Wiley: Chichester, 2014)

This is a short essay written for the magazine of SEDA, The Scottish Ecological Design Association in response to the question; “Are expanding cities the future?” The essay answers this through a reading of Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy of novels and draws a parallel between the legitimate hopes of the Green movement and the fate of Utopian Socialism.

Memories of Cities is a collection of essays that explore different ways
of writing about the political and economic history of the built environment. 
Drawing upon fiction and non-fiction, and illustrated by original photographs, the essays employ a variety of narrative forms including memoirs, letters, and diary entries. They take the reader on a journey to cities such as Glasgow, Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Marseille, laying bare the contradictions of capitalist architectural and urban development, whilst simultaneously revealing alternative visions of how buildings and cities might be produced and organised. Containing new essays and reworked versions of older essays it represnts the culmination of eight years work.

By turns magisterial and single-minded, political and personal, analytic and argumentative, and sobering and inspiring, Charley’s wonderfully engaging essays offer a unique and indispensable insight into modern cities and architecture. Memories of Cities is a must read.
Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, UK

Downloads: Memories of Cities Flyer

“I had been following in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin, rambling through the arcades from the proletarian haberdashery of the rue St Denis to the consumption theme park of the Passage de Panorama. Exiting into the brittle February morning, I retreated across the road into a small bistro, the Café Le Croissant. It was here in 1914 that Jean Jaurès, philosopher, socialist and founder of L’Humanité, had stopped to gather his thoughts before heading for a meeting of the Worker’s Internationale. He never made it, and a plaque outside commemorates his death at the hands of an appropriately-named assassin, Villain. As the sleet smeared the windows, it seemed the perfect place to sit for an afternoon and ponder the spatial tactics of urban revolution, in particular that of the Paris Commune, which like an otherworldly phenomena possessed of uncertain qualities and shifting form, has been pored over, researched, and theorised from every conceivable angle.”

Read the full version in Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestos (Ashgate Publishing: London, 2013)

An essay on the relationship between the legendary agit-prop music group, Test Department, and the experimental music of the Soviet avant-garde.

“They fiddle, the oldies’ brigades,
The same old-fashioned parts.
Comrades!
Man the barricades!
barricades of souls and hearts.
All genuine communists
have burnt the boats of retreat.
“Don’t just walk, you futurists –
into the future leap!
What good is just building an engine
that goes off in a whirl of wheels?
If your song doesn’t deafen the station,
why have AC and DC?
Sing and whistle, pile sound on sound,
and forward
march.”

From the poem ‘Arts Army’, by Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1923

Our extraordinary ability to destroy buildings and cities, the industrialisation and mass production of armaments and building components, the impact of the ‘culture of fear’ on urban and architectural design, the ubiquitous presence of military technology in the civilian world, and the ‘soft’ militarisation of everyday life in advanced capitalist societies. These are just some of the themes that inevitably arise in any discussion about the relationship between war and architecture. ‘Sketches of War’ reflects upon these issues and is narrated in the form of a journey to the ‘graveyards of historical memory’. Narrated in a series of short fragments, it visits places as diverse as the military remains of the Cold War along the coastlines of Scotland, a slave fort in Brazil, Franco’s mausoleum, a bombed maternity hospital in Belgrade and the Oradour memorial village in France. Of the many questions posed, there is one in particular that ‘Sketches of War’ seeks to address: is it possible in any meaningful sense to objectify the memory of war and tragedy?

This essay was first given at a conference in Cork in 2010 and is published in the book of the same title, "Ordnance: War, Architecture and Space," ed Boyd, G and Linehan, D, (Ashgate: London, 2012). A further revised and extended version is published in Memories of Cities

"It should be self-evident that buildings and cities are not made by magic but are the result of the ‘union of human labour with the objects and instruments of production.’ However, it is rare in the conventional narratives of architectural and urban history that we ever hear much about building workers or, indeed, the labour of architects. Human labour might have a bit part, or be a passing reference, but it is seldom placed centre-stage. This antipathy towards ‘history as labour’ is all the more strange when we consider that what Marx called the labour process is the ‘universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence. ‘Letters from the Frontline’ makes a small contribution to this history of the human species as a history of the labour process. Written in 2011, it was assembled from notes collected in Moscow when the Soviet Union still existed. My research at that point was very much to do with the history of the labour process in the construction industry, and in particular, the Marxist critique of capitalist work practices. This naturally enough led me to look at how and in what ways the labour process had developed differently in the Soviet Union. The three ‘letters’ here, written as if I am a visiting journalist, chart a 20-year period from 1919 to 1938 – a tale of revolution and counter-revolution. To this day the question remains unresolved: what form will labour take in a post-capitalist society?"

For full version see, Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestos (Ashgate Publishing: London, 2013)

Regarding your architectural research, in which way are you interested in the issue of architecture and/in/as fiction?

“It would require a library to identify and disassemble the multiple ways in which architecture and fiction meet, over lap and on occasions merge. Some of the issues raised by such a debate are explored in a book I recently co-edited called Writing the Modern City – Literature, Architecture and Modernity. But a simpler answer is that like most people, I like stories and story telling. Everything begins and ends with a story, fictional or otherwise, and I cannot think of a building, book or indeed any other cultural and material object that doesn’t have a story to tell if you let it speak. It is also the case that just as I cannot think of a building that doesn’t possess a ‘plotline’ in terms of its function, the sensory experience of using it, or its ideological role, I cannot imagine a novel that isn’t rooted in some conception of space and time, whether it is a particular building, urban panorama or geographical zone. In a very real sense then both literary texts and buildings can then be thought of as narratives that are driven by the dynamic relationship between time, space and social reality…”

Full text published in "Arquitectura E Arte. No 13" (Lisbon, 2012)

Downloads: arqa

"The city spread over a plain into distances further than the eye could see. Whichever way he turned there was no end to it, nothing but houses and apartment blocks, streets, squares, towers, old and new quarters of town, mildewy storm-battered rented barracks and skyscrapers faced with modern marble, main roads and alleys, factories, workshops, gasometers and the clumsy looking great hall that he recognised from her as the slaughterhouse. And chimneys, chimneys everywhere..." (Karinthy 2008:111)

It is with an image of the limitless concrete geometries from the top of the Banespa Bank in Sao Paulo and the ziggurats and leaping flames from the opening clip of Bladerunner that I begin my course every year on the History of the Modern City. Like my vain attempt to draw Borges’ metaphor for the universe, the indefinite and infinite Library of Babel, it is a vision of a metropolis that has no centre and no end. And as it drifts and stumbles outwards to the periphery before disappearing into the hazy smog of the horizon, it is as if it is demonically possessed with a speed and complexity that mocks our efforts at comprehension, and defies our knowledge of earthbound demographics, semiotics and urban economics. As dusk falls over this city of twenty million souls, and millions upon millions of lights flicker and illuminate a nocturnal kaleidoscope of objects and bodies, the scene is almost indistinguishable from the Asimovan mega cities beloved of the fantastic imagination that have bled and bled until they enclose the entire surface of the globe. The first generation of modern writers were likewise shocked and astonished as they gazed in awe at the hypnotic antinomies and creatively destructive patterns of the nineteenth century capitalist metropolis. It is why Walter Benjamin, Marshall Berman and many others have found such lyrical power in one of the greatest poets of modernity, Baudelaire, who on his urban drifts though Paris tells us that modernity is best understood as “the indefinable… the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent."

Published in "Writing the Modern City", ed Edwards and Charley, (Routledge: London, 2011)

“Welcome to the marginal places that the obedient citizen rarely encounters. Welcome to the deviant places through which no God fearing middle class person would ever dare wander. And welcome to the parts of cities and towns where fearful prejudice forbid you to go. Enter the literary world of narcotics, theft, murder and weird technology, of back street alleys, cocktail penthouses and paranoid suburbs, of the lo-fi, the downbeat, and the popular, of crime, sci-fi, sex and drugs. In all of this beware of the pushers, pimps, and androids, who curl a beckoning finger and invite you to take a trip into the type of novels and buildings historically frowned upon by the great and good of the Academy. But be equally beware of the frock coated sages who reside within and who ridicule the idea that pulp fiction and the garden shed have aesthetic and cultural value and who shake at the proposition that the pigeon racers doocot should sit alongside the Opera House or that the novels of Dashiell Hammet should be allocated space next to Hemingway…”

Published in Writing the Modern City: perspectives on Architecture and Literature, ed Charley, Edwards, (Routledge: London, 2011)

Literary texts and buildings have always represented space, narrated cultural and political values, and functioned as sites of personal and collective identity. In the twentieth century, new forms of narrative have represented cultural modernity, political idealism and architectural innovation. This book explores the diverse and fascinating relationships between literature, architecture and modernity and considers how they have shaped the world today. This collection of thirteen original essays examines the ways in which literature and architecture have shaped a range of recognisably ‘modern’ identities. It focuses on the cultural connections between prose narratives – the novel, short stories, autobiography, crime and science fiction – and a range of urban environments, from the city apartment and river to the colonial house and the utopian city. It explores how the themes of memory, nation and identity have been represented in both literary and architectural works in the aftermath of twentieth-century conflict; how the cultural movements of modernism and postmodernism have affected notions of canonicity and genre in the creation of books and buildings; and how and why literary and architectural narratives are influenced by each other’s formal properties and styles. The book breaks new ground in its exclusive focus on modern narrative and urban space. The essays examine texts and spaces that have both unsettled traditional definitions of literature and architecture and reflected and shaped modern identities: sexual, domestic, professional and national. It is essential reading for students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, cultural geography, art history and architectural history.

Downloads: Writing the modern city flyer

In its geographical reach and typological inventiveness the spatial revolution of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was unprecedented in human history. It was all-embracing and affected every aspect of the architecture of daily life. As Marx famously commented: ‘The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.’ This spectacular story of progress and invention was from the outset scarred and deformed by its relationship with imperialism, slavery and colonial exploitation. In three interconnected stories about Glasgow, Liverpool and Brussels, ‘Violent Stone’ explores the pivotal role that their respective law courts played in providing a juridical and ideological foundation to this history.

Published in "Architecture and Justice", ed Tobe and Temple, (Ashgate: London, 2012) and first given as a paper at a conference of the same name held in Lincoln 2010.

This chapter is an extended version of a paper first given in Moscow at a conference in the Academy of Architecture held to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of Vkhutemas, the State Higher Art and Technical Studios. Set up in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1920, Vkhutemas was at the epicentre of an extraordinary ten-year cultural revolution in the arts and architecture. Many of the luminaries of the avant-garde, both Rationalists and Constructivists, passed through its doors, where they both practised and taught. Together with students, they helped build a creative revolution propelled by new social conditions that precipitated an unprecedented outpouring of innovative ideas in all areas of architecture and urbanism. It was closed like the Bauhaus at the start of the 1930s, but unlike its German cousin, has never enjoyed the same historical status. The conference in Moscow was part of an on-going quest to remedy that situation and to reinforce Vkhutemas’ position as one of the most important chapters in the history of modern architecture. ‘The (Dis)Integrating City’ takes a particular route through this history and investigates the relationship between the architectural avant-garde and the architectural dimensions of Russian literary modernism, in particular the work of Andrei Bely, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Andrei Platonov.

Published in Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestos (Ashgate Publishing: London, 2013)

Some of the most powerful literary evocations of architecture are to be found in literary texts where the city, rather than merely providing a setting, frames and propels the narrative. ‘Scares and Squares II’ explores this proposition further in a journey through the rather loosely defined genre of utopian and dystopian fiction that begins with Thomas More and ends with Saramago. It started life as an idea for a fictional chat show, in which rival teams of writers and architects battle it out over the idea of the modern city. On one side sat H.G. Wells, Zamyatin, Orwell and Huxley, on the other Tony Garnier, Corbusier, Hilbersheimer and Bruce. Through a series of at times hostile conversations, they explored the marked disjuncture between the way the architect and the writer depicted the early modern city. ‘Scares and Squares II’ plays with a number of recurrent themes that have been explored by many writers, but by two in particular: Darko Suvin in The Metamorphosis of Science Fiction and Frederick Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future. If I was to select one idea from these groundbreaking surveys, it is that such literature should never be confused with futurology or reduced to ‘Boys’ Own comic book’ tales of fabulous new technologies and gizmos. It was, after all, Philip K. Dick who argued that his tales were not so much about the future as about the here and now. Sure, his novels are weird and decidedly other-worldly, but there is always something familiar about the places and situations he describes. This is what is meant by ‘cognitive estrangement’. It refers to the way in which such literary representations allow us to recognise their subject, at the same time as making them seem unfamiliar. I have coined my own version to describe such tales that I think of as narratives of an ‘exaggerated present.’ There is, of course, much more to be said about such a genre that at its best deals with all of the complex issues affecting the human condition, from our understanding of history, nature, reality and technology, to our very existence as a species. My main interest in this essay is naturally enough with ‘space’ (!) and before we lift off, a few parting words from Jameson: ‘We need to explore the proposition that the distinctiveness of Science Fiction as a genre has less to do with time (history, past, future) than with space.’

Short version published in Once Upon A Place: Haunted Houses and Imaginary Cities, (Caleidoscopio: Lisbon, 2013)
A considerably extended version can be found in Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestos, (Ashgate Publishing: London, 2013)

“We gazed with earnest hope for signs of recovery and longed for the airwaves to tell us that ‘the worst is past, economic Armageddon has been averted, and house prices are rising again.’ Back in 2004, I wrote a short essay called ‘Boom and Slump on the Clyde and Liffey’, in which I expressed my astonishment that the Irish economy and housing market hadn’t crashed. For the situation in Dublin was quite unprecedented in economic history. At the height of the Soviet industrialisation of the building industry, the construction sector accounted for 13 per cent of GDP. But in Ireland by the end of 2004, it had reached 22 per cent, prompting the Bank of Ireland to admit in early 2005 that the construction industry’s role in the Irish economy was ‘above equilibrium’. The boom, fuelled by a massive increase in speculative housing, was clearly unsteady, and with over 40 per cent of new flats unsold and unlet, one didn’t have to be an economist to work out that something had to give. However, it is characteristic of all such gold rushes that in the race to capitalise on investments the normal laws of reason are suspended. ‘The Shadows of Economic History’ picks up on this debate and places the recent crisis in the architectural and building industry in an historical context. It argues that it was simply irrational for architects and contractors to behave as if the boom would go on forever. Capitalist development has always been marked by periodic crises, and building production has always exhibited cycles of expansion and contraction. So what caused the economic recession and where on earth did the profoundly mistaken belief come from that we could cheat history?...”

First published in the ARQ, Architectural Research Quarterly (Cambridge University Press, Vol 14, No 4, 2010). Revised and extended version published in "Memories of Cities"

Downloads: The Shadows of Economic HIstory

“Inside the court room...
Architecture Depends is an engaging and provocative critique of the fuzzy world of architecture that has more than a hint of a show trial about it. The chief prosecutor in this case is Till, who supported by his favourite witnesses, Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour, enters the courtroom brandishing his axe and pen. Equipped with an idiosyncratic armoury of anecdotes and philosophical diversions, he announces to the court that his role is to seek the truth, to root out the dangerous ideas, individuals and myths that continue to plague contemporary architectural practice…”

Critical Review of Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till. Published in In The R.I.B.A Journal of Architecture, Vol 15, (Chapman and Hall: London, 2010).

Downloads: ARCHITECTURE DEPENDS

The Glimmer of Other Worlds was prompted by my experiences as a teacher attempting to explain to students what the idea of an alternative to capitalist building production might mean. It struck me that one way to address this was to ask a series of questions that are typical of the kind I have received over the years. In effect, it is an architectural and political manifesto that addresses a specific politically engaged meaning of alternative practice understood as anti-capitalist resistance.

This essay started life as a paper at the Alternate Currents conference held in Sheffield in 2008. In the ARQ, Architectural Research Quarterly (Cambridge University Press, Vol 12, No2, 2009)

Downloads: GLIMMER OF OTHER WORLDS

This piece, in which the ideas for Scares and Squares II were first rehearsed is as yet unpublished but was written as a dialogue between architects and novelists.

SQUARES AND SCARES
A play on Architectural Utopias and Literary Dystopias

Take four architects. Take four novelists. Ask them all to imagine a future world. Give them the same rather vague brief. They must describe a city of the future. A city inhabited by large numbers of people engaged in mass activity. A city jam packed with science and machinery. A city under the rule of law with regulated forms of conduct and movement. A city in which the political state is required to organise social life. Something strange happens. A rupture immediately appears. The architects imagine a new world that is geometrically ordered and where the righteous, the courageous and the morally resolute live in organised happiness. But the novelists see the city of gleaming towers as a world that disguises an authoritarian, totalitarian nightmare in which individual freedom is annihilated. Squares and Scares imagines the 'utopian' architects Tony Garnier, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hilbersheimer and Robert Bruce in conversation with the 'dystopian' novelists H.G Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. They discuss the relative merits of their respective works in a vain attempt to explain the apparently unbridgeable gulf between them.

The Players and their Works

Tony Garnier - La Cite Industrielle (1906)
Ludwig Hilbersheimer - Plan for Berlin (1928)
Le Corbusier - Le Plan Voisin, La Ville Radieuse (1922-35)
Robert Bruce - The Bruce Plan (1946)

H.G.Wells - The Sleeper Awakes (1899)
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We (1926)
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1936)
George Orwell - 1984 (1948)

“It is still boom time and the crane operators and scaffolders scurry between historic square and water's edge laying the foundations for glitzy offices and chic apartments in the race to boost the value of real estate. The capitalisation of culture or more precisely of eating, drinking, and caffeine injected art galleries is a vital component of this process as the city is reborn as a post-modern metropolis serving duck instead of mutton. It isn't difficult to crack the veneer of prosperity that camouflages such urban development. The Liffey still funnels milk bottles, bus tickets, teabags, and surgical debris towards the sea. And as in all 'regenerated' cities a quick detour from the prescribed tourist route returns you to the reality of urban poverty.”

Published in "Building Material", Journal of the Architectural Association of Ireland, (Dublin, Issue 14 winter 2005)

Downloads: Boom and Slump on the Clyde and Liffey

They say that I am old. Ancient. That I was played with in Imperial China and christened in the Coliseum and Pantheon of ancient Rome. They say that wage labour is old too. That on the same building sites of antiquity, workers paid by the piece or the day laboured alongside slaves. But like myself, the idea of a wage as a general condition underpinning everything we do is very modern indeed. I am concrete. I underpin modernity. I think of myself in two ways. As a noun referring to my use as a building material, and in a more philosophical sense. To make something concrete. To materialise an idea. To concretise a revolution.

Published in "Tracing Modernity", Ed. Hermannsen and Hvattum (Routledge: London, 2004)

Short sketches for GLASpaper 05 A-Z of war. A for accumulation, K for Kriegspielzeug (war games), R for Reserve Army of Labour, and S for Spatial Tactics of Resistance

Downloads: Pages from glaspaper05_06-2 Pages from glaspaper05_06-3 Pages from glaspaper05_06-4 Pages from glaspaper05_06-5 Pages from glaspaper05_06-6

My first foray into semi fictionalised accounts of my experiences in Moscow over the course of a decade narrated through a series of fragments and short vignettes.

First published in the Unknown City, ed Borden, Rendell, Kerr and Pivaro, (MIT 2001)

Downloads: MOSCOW DIARY

An essay and manifesto that took a critical look at the dilution and abandonment of the idea of revolution and its relationship to urban development with the ascendancy of neo-liberal ideology that followed the fall of the Berlin wall.

Published in Architecture and Revolution, ed Leach, N, (Routledge:1999)

A short essay that takes a comparative look at Glasgow and Moscow that by a stroke of luck, (for me at any rate given my obsessions) share the same latitude. Published in, G99 Glasgow Journal of Art and Design, December 1999.

Downloads: 56 Degrees North

In the early 1990s I did some teaching on the Masters Degree in Critical Theory and Architecture run by neil Leach at Nottingham University. It was a pivotal era in the development of the theory and history of architecture, part of what Edward Soja labelled the 'spatial turn'. It was also distinguished by a large section of the architectural academic community turning to writers and thinkers that had previously been the territory of social science, literary studies, philosophy and politics such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Derrida et al. Rethinking Architecture by Neil Leach, was one of the best introductions to what for most architectural students was forbidding territory. Published in Building Design (11.6.97)

A chapter of my PhD printed in the first issue of the R.I.B.A journal of architecture. It offers a critical analysis of the development of the Stalinist City and the ideological culture of 'socialist realism' that I argued in terms of the gulf between revolutionary rhetoric and the reality of everyday life in 1930s Moscow, was better understood as the 'realism of social deception'.

Downloads: DIALECTIC OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

My first attempt at a polemical manifesto, inspired by Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, Walter Benjamin's Theses on History, and of course Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

Published in Strangely Familiar, ed Borden, Rendell and Kerr, (Routledge, 1996)

An early overview of a theory of industrialisation and capital accumulation, again adapted from a chapter in my PhD and published in Architecture and the Sites of History: Interpretations of Buildings and Cities, (ed), Borden and Dunster, (Butterworth, 1995)

Download forthcoming

An adaptation of a chapter from my PhD, written as an introductory primer for students unfamiliar with the Soviet Avant Garde, published in Architecture and the Sites of History: Interpretations of Buildings and Cities, (ed), Borden and Dunster, (Butterworth, 1995)

This essay published in the Proceedings of the Bartlett International Summer School, Volume 17, Glasgow, 1995, was a reworking of a public lecture that I had given at the R.I.B.A earlier that year. It was a critical response to the emerging culture of endism and postism, that at that juncture had proliferated across conversations in all areas of public life from politics to architecture. It was at best irritating and at worst idiotic...a series of mis-understood shibboleths that spoke of the 'end of history', 'the end of socialism', 'post ideological society', 'post industrial society' and so on and so forth.

Downloads: Review of my lecture at the R.I.B.A, *Resisting The End Game*

Review of the Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art Architecture and the City by Catherine Cooke, published in the Architects Journal (26.10.95). Catherine Cooke was a pivotal figure in rekindling interest in the history of the Soviet avant-garde. A prolific author, great teacher and inspiration she helped introduce me to key areas of Soviet history. The opportunity to review her fantastic volume of essays produced with her customary scholarly detail was a privilege and a pleasure.

Download forthcoming

Downloads: When Design and Politics were Fused

This review is included because the book Buildings and Power by Tom Markus, was a hugely important landmark in the study of the relationship between social power and the development of architectural typologies during the initial stages of the development of capitalism in the 19th century. Published in Building Design (26.11.1993)

Interview with the then President of the Architects Union of the USSR on the impact of Perestroika on architectural and urban development. Published in Building Design (23.6.92). This was about the last journalistic piece that I wrote about the situation in Russia with the fall of the Soviet system. Below, there are PDFs of selected others back to the first written in 1988.

Downloads: Reform Club

Compared with the quantity of pages devoted in the west to the celebration of the avant-garde, relatively little ha been published that looked at the legacy of Stalin era architecture. This book Stalinist Architecture a colour glossy picture book by Andrei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze was one of the first. The review was published in Building Design (26.6.92)

A short essay examining the Soviet experience with system building, an extraordinary technological revolution that saw similar types of prefabricated buildings being constructed from the suburbs of east Berlin, to the Japanese sea.

Downloads: Taking Russian Lessons 1 Taking Russian Lessons 2

This was a review of a conference on the impact of Perestroika on Russian Architecture, published in Building Design (3.3.89). It was memorable because I got the chance to meet and pose some questions to Berthold Lubetkin one of the greatest figures of twentieth century architecture. A Soviet emigre, founder of Tecton and ATO, he was the key figure in the design of some of the most seminal modern buildings in Britain such as Highpoint and the Finsbury Park Health centre.

Downloads: Dialogue of Design

Review of the Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture, by James Craft. This book charts the history of the europeanisation of the Russian town and city introduced by Peter the Great and continued by Catherine the Great who were determined to "destroy the Asiatic sprawl of Moscow.

Downloads: Window on the West 1 Window on the West 2

In the late 1980s a group of young Russian architects became the focus of considerable attention with an exhibition of some extraordinary drawings that became know by the euphemism 'bumashnaya arkhitektura', 'paper architecture'. This is a review of an exhibition of their projects at the Architectural Association in London. Children of the revolution, was published in Building Design (2.12.88).

This was in actual fact the first ever piece that I had published in the journal Construction News 6.10.88. In it, I attempted to describe the operation of the then quite monolithic structure and organisation of the Soviet Building industry that prior to the collapse of the Soviet system employed over 13 million building workers, architects amd technicians in what was dreamt of as being a continuous semi-automated process of design and build.

Downloads: How The Soviet Industry Works 1 How The Soviet Industry Works 2

Book Review of Ivan Leonidov by Andrei Leonidov, Andrei Gozak, and Catherine Cooke, Building Design (25.11.88). Leonidov was the author of one of the most celebrated and iconic images of the avant-garde, The Lenin Institutue and library in Moscow, his diploma project from 1926.

Downloads: A story of a paper tiger 1, Book Review A story of a paper tiger 2, Book Review

This was my second foray into the printed world that I wrote immediately on my return from a year long British Council research scholarship to Moscow where I had been a student at the Moscow Institute of Construction and Engineering doing research for my PhD the Dialectic of the Built Environment.

Downloads: Back From The USSR 1 Back From The USSR 2