Architecture is more than buildings and architects. It also involves photographers, writers, advertisers and broadcasters, as well as the people who finance and live in the buildings. Using the career of the critic J. M. Richards as a lens, this book takes a new perspective on modern architecture. Richards served as editor of The Architectural Review from 1937 to 1971, during which time he consistently argued that modernism was integrally linked to vernacular architecture, not through style but through the principle of being an anonymous expression of a time and public spirit. Exploring the continuities in Richards’s ideas throughout his career disrupts the existing canon of architectural history, which has focused on abrupt changes linked to individual ‘pioneers’, encouraging us to think again about who is studied in architectural history and how they are researched.
Price: $130.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Studies in Design and Material Culture
Publication Date:
27 December 2022
ISBN: 9781526143754
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
History of art, History of architecture, Social and cultural history
'Jessica Kelly’s deeply researched study of Richards — less a biography than a critique — is, by her own definition, ‘a view from elsewhere in architectural history’ in which she eschews the accepted canon in favour of ‘a “revisioning” of the history of modern architecture’
Neil Jackson, Architectural History
Jessica Kelly is Reader in Architectural and Design History at the University for the Creative Arts
Introduction
1 Critical connections: Jim Richards’ network 1924–38
2 What is wrong with architecture? The Architectural Press, the profession and the architectural public
3 ‘Cranks and laymen’: Propaganda for modern architecture 1935–41
4 The Castles on the Ground: Reconstruction, public participation and the future of modernism, 1941–51
5 Stocktaking: The contesting voices of architectural criticism, 1951–61
6 ‘Life is Right, the Architect is Wrong’: Public participation and architectural criticism 1962–73
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
