Man-Made Future: Planning, Education and Design in Mid-20th Century Britain

by Whyte; Iain Boyd

• ISBN13: 9780415357883
• ISBN10: 0415357888
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-02-23
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

An anthology of essays by a group of distinguished scholars,The Man-Made Futureinvestigates post-1945 city planning in Britain not from a technical viewpoint, but as a polemical, visual, and educational phenomenon. It is structured in four sections: the first addressing postwar scientific humanism and the faith invested in the boffin--a potent metaphor for the hope that science and technology would lead European society out of the ashes of World War II and towards a bright, new scientifically planned future. The second section reveals the way in which visual imagery was used to depict and market this rebuilt, postwar world. The topic of the third section is the creation and education of the planning profession, while the fourth and last section analyses exemplary models of totally-planned environments. While the postwar period and the 1950s are increasingly the focus of scholarly interest and research, the emotional and aesthetic context of postwar planning has been accorded comparatively littleattention. Although each essay is grounded on original archival research, the book will be aimed at the general audience of architectural, economic, social, and urban historians, and at students in these fields.

Table of Contents

List of illustration credits	p. vii
Preface	p. x
List of contributors	p. xii
1947 and all that: why has the Act lasted so long?	p. 1
Otto Neurath and the sociology of happiness	p. 16
Surveying and comprehensive planning: the 'co-ordination of knowledge' in the wartime plans of Patrick Abercrombie and Max Lock	p. 38
Everywhere at any time: post-Second World War genealogies of the city of the future	p. 59
Perceptions in the conception of the Modernist urban environment: Canadian perspectives on the spatial theory of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt	p. 78
Selling the future city: images in UK post-war reconstruction plans	p. 99
Paper dream city/modern monument: Donald Gibson and Coventry	p. 121
Conceptions and perceptions of urban futures in early post-war Britain: Some everyday experiences of the rebuilding of Coventry, 1944-62	p. 145
'Into the world of Conscious Expression': Modernist revolutionaries at the Architectural Association, 1933-39	p. 157
Plan: a student journal of ambition and anxiety	p. 174
'Destroy all humans!'	p. 191
The English university of the 1960s: built community, model universe	p. 205
The tall barracks artistically reconsidered: Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks and the total environment of modern military life	p. 223
Index	p. 247
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