BOOKS Seventies Celebration

Charles Holland on a transitional decade that set the parameters for today’s architectural scene.

Burrell Collection, Glasgow (1978-83), Barry Gasson (ph: Glasgow 

Journal 10: The Seventies

Edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers

Twentieth Century Society, 184pp, £19.50

At the back of this fascinating study of the architecture of the 1970s is a highly revealing timeline linking the decade’s key buildings to contemporary art, films and pop music. So we see the decade open with Lyons Israel Ellis and the Beatles, and close with Norman Foster and the Human League.

These names mark far more radically different points in time than would seem possible given the short space of nine years that separates them. While the former belong firmly to the post-war settlement and to Britain of the fifties and sixties, the latter are part of the neo-liberal landscape we inhabit today.

College of Engineering & Science, London (1970), by Lyons Israel Ellis

Thus the seventies appears as a period of radical transition and change. It was also unmistakably a profoundly depressing decade in which the seeds of Thatcherism and the end of the welfare state were sown. While the critique of modernism that was thrown up during the time offered new and radical possibilities for architecture, it was the more conservative and reactionary ones that proved most influential.

As this book makes clear, a lot was going on. There was the burgeoning conservation movement, detailed here by Gavin Stamp, the beginnings of ecological design, activism and public participation as well as an interest in high-tech materials and temporary, supposedly egalitarian structures. All these sub-movements grew out of a creeping disillusion with modernism and the social democratic project that was its patron.

Above Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters, Ipswich (1975) by Foster 

Fans of the poor taste and louche sensibilities associated with the decade may well be disappointed however. The book offers no analysis of the importance of the ‘conversation pit’ or the shag-pile rug in domestic planning for instance. Indeed, it has a dryness in parts that even the most dedicated seventies enthusiast might find challenging. Two of the essays focus on such currently uncelebrated buildings as Arup Associates’ Gun Wharf, Chatham, and Barry Gasson’s Burrell Collection in Glasgow. The latter essay though offers a fascinating cross section of 1970s architectural tropes via a study of the unsuccessful entries to the gallery competition. High-tech sheds predominate naturally, alongside shameless rip-offs of late-period Corb and early-period Stirling.

Aside from this appearance by proxy, James Stirling is strangely absent from the book, despite his now-demolished Runcorn housing estate gracing its cover. This absence is all the more marked because Stirling’s work of this period encapsulated the decade’s more adventurous mix of Brutalism, space-frames and acid-pop colours.

Hillingdon Town Hall (1976), by Andrew Derbyshire at RMJM (ph: JOD/EH).

Against this backdrop, Geraint Franklin’s mapping of the ‘White Wall Guys’ – the architects and critics (including Alan Colquhoun, Douglas Stephen and the late John Winter) who rediscovered the radicalism of 1920s modernism – stands out. This loosely affiliated group represented a home-grown version of the New York Five, although in typically British style, they were less prone to outlandish formalism than Eisenman, Graves et al.

Such restraint characterises the book. Aside from Louis Hellman’s slightly self-indulgent reminiscences, the tone is serious and scholarly, almost to a fault. As you might expect of the book’s publisher, the Twentieth Century Society, it eschews grandiose claims and polemic in favour of considered research and historical accuracy.

It ends with Kenneth Powell’s account of the early post-modern work of Terry Farrell and Jeremy Dixon. Were it not for the elderly Ford Escorts and Transit vans in the photograph of his Lanark Road housing, Dixon’s neo-Georgian design could have easily been built today. This familiarity reveals much about the continued influence – both good and bad – of the architecture of this period as well as the relevance of its reappraisal.

Underhill, near Holmfirth, Yorkshire (1978) was the UK’s first latter-day earth-sheltered house and home of its architect Arthur Quarmby;
King's Walden Bury, Hertfordshire (1971), by Raym

Charles Holland is a director of FAT and a visiting tutor at UCA in Canterbury.