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Jessica Kelly and Neal Shasore, "Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Wells, one of your hosts, and today I'm delighted to be speaking with Jessica Kelly and Neil Chassor about their edited volume, Reconstruction Architecture, the Built Environment and the Aftermath of the First World War. One of the prevailing histographic trends is that Britain lacked the preconditions that generated modernism. Elsewhere, new technologies, progressive clients, artistic movements, and therefore modernist art and architecture was imported in the years following 1927. As John Summerson wrote, the modern movement in England was mostly talk, talk, travel and illustration. This edited volume from Neil Chassor and Jessica Kelly looks to question this prevailing narrative by exploring the architectural debates and demands of interwar Britain. These were manifest in new forms of commercial real estate, reform movements based around public housings and public housing and changes to architectural practice itself, amongst many other things.
- [02:07]
C
Jessica and Neil, thank you so much.
- [02:09]
B
For joining us on the podcast.
- [02:11]
C
No worries.
- [02:12]
D
Hi, thanks for having us.
- [02:15]
C
Jessica, could you please start off by.
- [02:17]
B
Telling us how you guys came to this topic? And what do we. How can we define the term interwar?
- [02:23]
D
My goodness. Well, I can explain how Neil and I, what Neil and I have in common and why it made sense for me to actually get involved with this project, which was really started by Neil and a conference that was a symposium that he organised for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, which I'm sure he'll say more about the sort of genesis of those ideas. But the thing that Neel and I share is this concern and. Or maybe fascinations and exaggeration with the expanded notion of architecture and an approach to architectural history that looks beyond the building as product, looks beyond the building or the architect as the kind of central player within architectural history. And when Neil organized his symposium about reconstruction, I gave a paper which is one of the chapters in the book. And what was so interesting about that event and the conversations that came out of it, which I think we capture in some of our introduction, are these kind of larger thematic questions about architectural history. But like you say about this period, that has been termed the interwar. And we are not alone in questioning that as a periodization or as a useful term, but it certainly was one of the drivers for the volume, but I think also has come out in both of our individual work. Beyond that, the idea of the First World War as the end of something and the beginning of something else, and then the Second World War as another bookend, whilst useful in some ways, also is very simplifying and loses a lot of nuance and loses a lot of really important broader historical context for understanding architecture, which again brings us back to that kind of common interest that Neil and I have, which is wanting to put architectural thinking and practice into a broader cultural context. So in the book, we write a lot about other ways of conceiving of this periodization of these decades between the two world wars. Neil, I don't know if you'd want to add something to that.
- [04:46]
B
Yeah.
- [04:49]
C
I mean, everything that Jess has said is correct. To wind back a little bit further, maybe in 2013, I'd organized a conference with David Lewis at St John's in Oxford called Stylistic Dead Ends Question Mark, which was an attempt to bring together those active in the historiography of interwar Britain, on which both David and I were working, he specifically on a monographic study of Giles Gilbert Scott and me. I think at that point, still figuring out what my doctorate was, far too far into it. And that's where I met Jessica. And for various reasons, we never really did anything with the proceedings of that conference. On some level, I'm pleased we didn't, because it was a good testing ground for some ideas and for advocating for a kind of shift in emphasis from a kind of stylistic Rolodex to something that was more archivally rooted and indeed more Critical. I also had been a trustee of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for a couple of years by the time of 2018, and was really keen that the Society organized symposia that enabled people with expertise to convene, but also had more timeliness and more critical punch. And obviously, because 2018 was the centenary of the cessation of the main part of hostilities in the First World War, I thought, well, let me use this as a test case. And I wrote the call for papers in such a way that was trying to encourage people to think about the democratization of architectural discourse and architectural culture. And as part of that reconstruction, I don't think, if memory serves, actually, I think reconstruction kind of was a sort of metaphor that I was playing with. And it was also a response to Elizabeth Darling's book Reforming Narratives of Modernity After Reconstruction. And it was a kind of play with that, because there's so much in Elizabeth's work that I think influenced and influences both Jess and I methodologically and also historiographically. But maybe to take her, or to take that historiography a little bit to task and say, well, actually, what was modernity before the reconstruction that we're mainly familiar with? Anyway, we did the symposium. The response to the call was kind of like really great and full of kind of rich and complicated papers. And it was over two days and we had tours and, you know, it turned into a massive thing, which for some reason I decided to do on my own, and having embarked on the book project, convinced Jess that it would be impossible to do without her. And she very kindly acquiesced, you know, for a little short burst of editing the conference proceedings, which then turned into a five year process, but which was enormously enriched by her editorial talents as well as her, you know, written and substantive contributions.
- [09:18]
B
And then, so then, so then when you, you know, you come to the end, and, you know, you come to the end of these conferences, these conferences, and there's the two of you working on the project, how then did you decide to structure the book? How, Jessica, how did you kind of frame and order this exciting series of material?
- [09:36]
D
I mean, the majority of the contributors were speakers at the symposium in 2018, although we did then sort of invite, solicit, for want of a better word, some additional content. I think it's really, really important to understand the context of this book being put together during the pandemic, which, as Neil said, this having been sparked by the centenary of 2018, followed then by a global pandemic which mirrored a lot of what happened after the end of the First World War. That did sort of really impact on our thinking about the content and structuring of the book. So the final section was an addition based on sort of reflecting on that process of, like, what is reconstruction in a health sense? And the place of architecture and building in that. But, yeah, obviously also, whenever you're making an edited volume, there's an awful lot of kind of pragmatism around who's actually able to produce the content in time and all of those things. And you're always. We're very conscious of what is missing from this volume as much as what we chose to put in there. And I think one of the conversations we had throughout was this volume cannot be exhaustive. We can't cover everything about reconstruction and architecture, rethinking architecture after the First World War. But what we wanted to do was offer a provocation along the lines of the themes and ideas that Neil has set out that we were talking about before, about what is it to rethink these existing historical narratives about British architecture during this period, period, but also about culture and society and politics and economics more broadly. And so the sections, I think, are really thinking through that historical lens of which architecture then becomes a helpful case study. Another one of the goals of the volume was to offer almost a case study or a set of examples for how architecture can be useful outside of architectural history, for how historians with different sets of questions and preoccupations can still look at the built environment, the work of the architectural profession, what we would broadly term architecture. Because I really wanted to just pick up on the point you made at the beginning about the Summerson quote and the idea that obviously the modernist traditionist dichotomy is running all the way through this, but we're trying to look beyond that. And one of the arguments I always have against that Summerson quote is who says that talk and illustration is not important to architecture? You know, the presence of buildings is not the only way of measuring architectural activity. And that, I think, is certainly what the first section, which my chapter is in, is about the professionalism, the construction of the profession of architect during this period. But, yeah, that lens of trying to present architectural history as a way in to other historical narratives, I think was also really key to our structure.
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B
And thinking about the profession, but also broadening as well, is quite a challenge. I wonder, Neil, who are the other actors in this story, beyond the architects and the architectural profession? Do we jump out once we've analyzed.
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C
Them to some extent yeah, massively. And I mean that actually was part of the intention of the conference, I'm now remembering that, and have consulted my, my files and see that, you know, we had sessions from the global and imperial to the local and the domestic. We talked about economy, about business, about government, about. And then also about affect. So we thought about atmosphere, we thought about the public realm, broadly speaking, and we thought about the implications of the technologies of warfare. So I guess yes, the point was in a sense to de center a kind of polite architectural history that was monographic. And that's very true of the papers that we ended up selecting that I'd selected for the conference, but also that we carried forward to the, to the O2 volume maybe also to build on what Jess was saying. You know, I think she's absolutely right that we were trying to think about buildings or architecture not just as objects, but as a set of processes, sort of including real estate development and design as well as construction, specification, inhabitation, as a kind of historical evidence that is as constitutive of a context as arguably other forms of historical evidence. And that's where I think the point that Jess just made about trying to make architecture a little bit less scary to people who are not architects or indeed architectural historians, that there's all kinds of insights that the production of space, but the production of buildings in particular through what we in contemporary language would call capital works projects, focuses so many actors, so many different forms of agency. And I'm not sure that actually methodologically and certainly when it comes to 20th century, and especially when it comes to 20th century Britain, out with the.
- [16:25]
B
You.
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C
Know, people's kind of formal preferences, we're not very good at using that evidence in that way. And that seems a missed opportunity. And by the way, that ethos informed a lot of the attitude that we took to illustrations more on which perhaps later. The other thing I'd say is that we wanted a graduate student who might be interested, vaguely or embarking on a significant project in interwar British history or 20th century architectural history to be able to sort of land in this quite strange territory and be able to navigate themselves. And that was, that was, that was partly because I don't think either of us enjoyed such a, such a guide as it were, and dare I say, even if we had, it would have looked like a stylistic survey rather than something that was considered and coherent but also sufficiently open ended that you could kind of find, you know, find your niche in it. The final thing I'd say on that is Jessica has slightly Underplayed how we got to the structure. My memory is that, and I think it's my memory because it was largely my fault that there was a huge, huge amount of iteration of structure.
- [17:56]
D
Yeah.
- [17:58]
C
And we did it over and over again. In fact, it stalled for some months the progress of the project because I was really keen that we made it coherent. And just to make a niche point, perhaps for UK and in particular UK academic audiences, edited volumes are of or were in the last ref. Round of low currency. And that's why I think often they feel slightly cobbled together and rushed out. And we took the position, I think, because of the. Probably the particular moments that we were at in our careers respectively, which were not the same, that we could spend more time on getting this right. And I've got to say it's been a matter of enormous pride as well as surprise that people have really picked up on what I feared might otherwise have been a slightly overwrought structure.
- [19:07]
B
That was very clear and also very, I think for a non English, non British audience to see some of the academic pressures that are going on in production of any kind of academic scholarship at the moment in the uk.
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C
I wonder if we.
- [19:25]
B
To jump from this slightly more macro to kind of thinking about. Because I feel like we've teased people with the structure now.
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C
So just go. If the first part was.
- [19:34]
B
The first part of the book is about. Or the edited volume is about the architectural profession thinking about how it's constructed and mediated. I wonder with the second part, where does this move to? It's about community. Did new ideas of community emerge? How did this apply, affect buildings? Could we. Is there a particular example that we could draw out to think about this. These massive changes in the light of post First World War. The post First World War world.
- [20:02]
D
Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting here is we're thinking or again, one of the sort of guiding thoughts or principles of the book. This period in British architectural history, when it is talked about, is very much talked about in terms of housing and the history of Homes for Heroes and the work of the Reconstruction Committee around providing or their ambitions of providing for housing is the sort of dominant factor. And Neil's absolutely right in his memory of the various iterations of structure that we went through, but wanting to have or. This section, I think, reflects that thinking of looking beyond housing. We don't really talk about housing very much. I mean, it comes up a bit in some of the later chapters around citizenry, but these three chapters in the section on community infrastructure, I Think infrastructure is almost as important as the word community for that chapter of what other forms of building were becoming important that represented this, I think, broadly speaking, represented a changing thinking about the role of the state, but also a changing idea around leisure. And one of the key points, which, again I credit Neil with, is recognizing the centrality of religion in British culture at this time as well. And we have a chapter on the parish church by Clare Price. But even in Julian Holder's chapter on the public house, there's an awful lot that chapter is very much framed around. How do you make the public house the sort of, you know, not the image of the 18th century gin palace or the sort of 19th century Dickensian pub? How do you make this a sort of wholesome, for want of a better word, form of leisure? And public house building during that period looked like, he terms it the improved public house. And Alastair's work on the community centre within the context of housing estates. But again, thinking about how is infrastructure being used to communicate a changing idea of the role of the state, a changing idea of citizenship that's happening during that period. So I think together they work to try and articulate that, yes, it's all.
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C
Coming, it's all flooding back now to me that first of all, we gotta lightly castigate Matt for missing out a very important word in the subtitle, which is architecture, society and the aftermath of.
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B
The First World War.
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D
This is because the title did change a couple.
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C
And so it absolutely did. But what we decided was that we wanted a kind of social driver to structure the four sections, what in the end became five sections of the book. That's why, because I remember torturing Jess about this. Every section title is led by a gerund promoting the business of architecture designing community infrastructure, building a rural citizenry binding subjects through statecraft and wedding peace with wellbeing. And that was also to impute those kind of social constructs, perhaps that we were interrogating with the. With the authors to give. To give them a kind of. To make them feel more active rather than passive. And then within each of those sections, essays had single word titles, so authors could use whatever subtitle within reason that they wanted. We wanted kind of Ron Seal subtitles, but we also wanted single words, almost like tags, to encapsulate the broader theme, in particular social theme or typology or kind of unit, social unit to which authors were responding. And that was, you know, this was not just. This was not just sort of window dressing that drove our brief as editors to all of our authors. And there are, you know, some really powerful examples. And we have to, you know, to credit the authors massively because, you know, because edited volumes come together in a certain way or did in a certain context at certain moment, people were really used to and felt quite possibly that they'd signed up for, you know, a quick run through of the paper that they'd presented, you know, whack in the footnotes and move on. And actually, we did every single thing that we could to in. To invert that or to challenge that process similarly with images. So all the images, all the photographs and other printed material are contemporaneous to the subject matter. However, because we were trying to demystify architecture for effectively non architectural and non architectural historical audiences, we took the decision to have plans as the main form of architectural projection. You know, knowing that even graduate students in architecture sometimes struggle with sectional drawings. So to have plans and to redraw those plans, because often these are, to use another Summersonian phrase, bread and butter buildings. So you may not have kind of beautiful presentation drawings or particularly interesting forms of architectural projection. So, you know, though we absolute, in our own work, are incredibly sensitive to, in a sense, the historiographical value of a contemporaneous drawing as a piece of source material. In this case, we thought, let's have them redrawn to scale with uniform and simple to understand line weights and labeling so that we are not freaking people out when they look at a plan that's actually, you know, a drainage plan dug up from an obscure local authority archive where they're not actually sure, like what that's really trying to tell you about the kind of broad spatial disposition and that created a whole other layer of work. But again, one that, in the end, I really don't regret. I think, you know, we worked with the brilliant young architect Hannah Tauler, works at Studio Bark, who, you know, did.
- [27:43]
D
Did this expertly, I think, and also just to jump in on that point, like the sort of broader methodology of that of us wanting to push authors and our readers to consider the illustrations as sources, what it is they're actually trying to communicate is the point of the plan, like Neel is saying, as a way of reading the space in order to sort of access that historical space, or is it as an image? And, you know, there was some interesting examples in Clare Price's chapter of looking at iterations of plans of churches and how they change. There were lots of elevations. One church. Yeah, yeah. There's lots of historical, you know, the actual images of Elevations, where that is really important, because it's not as important as it is for understanding what the building was imagined. Imagined or intended to look like. It's also about how architects were communicating, who the audiences were, what that language was. So we were really wanting to push that idea of the visuals in the volume as sources and how you think about them.
- [28:56]
B
Yeah, I think it comes across very clearly, very clearly explained. You just explained it very clear there. And also in your introduction you make such a clear an argument for this. And I think we thought about this, we thought about the method, some of the methodological approaches around images and illustrations, also thinking about the domains in which certain types of buildings have perhaps been excluded from this temporal moment. I wonder as well, whether there's a geographical element. I wonder is this is an international podcast and I wonder, is this a story that's exclusive to Britain and to Ireland, or is it. Are there other, you know, other dominions, the colonies, the protectorates of the British Empire at the time a part of this interwar story?
- [29:45]
C
Absolutely, we, we. And if we'd had more time and, you know, were to do this again, I think. I think we would want to tease out those international and trans local connections. We treat Britain as imperial Britain and there are essays that talk about Cairo Cathedral, that talk about Herbert Baker and Rhodes House. We tried to have representation across the nations of the United Kingdom. So there are essays on Wales and on Scotland. There isn't anything on Ireland, which is. Which is a shame, but yeah, it's there. It could have been much stronger. But again, you know, as Jess set up right at the start of this conversation, this was not exhaustive. This was to open up roots, you know, and we hope that more of that work will come through. It also represents a change, I think, a shift in the historiography which has, you know, probably, with the exception of Mark Crinson, been fairly parochial in its focus. What drives those international links? Again, it's not just stylistic, it's about architecture and the growth, for argument's sake, of a service economy, but also a manufacturing or a trade aspiration. Let me start that again. Two opposing views, often of economic and trade development. One which is about intra imperial trade and economy through imperial preference, and the other through free trade. And in the end, the romance of imperial preference makes very little difference to the balance of trade, to the balance of exports and imports, certainly for building products, for argument's sake, certainly in the case of empire timber. So again, I'm glad we didn't go there in this volume to the extent that the whole way that we think about internationalism, I think, can be a little bit superficial at times. And I feel only, certainly within my own work now, confident in being able to think about international dimensions of architectural practice in a critical and sort of useful way for a series of, let's say, relevant historical interrogations.
- [32:59]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think that's quite interesting about revisiting this. I say revisiting it was published two years ago, but already I think. I know we started it a lot longer than two years ago, but I think it's really encouraging and really exciting to think how different this would be if we were starting this book now. And I think all our contributors would say the same, that their thinking is developing even from this point, and the discipline is also changing, I think, slowly, but I think there is a shift.
- [33:35]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. And could I ask each of you, as perhaps as a. As a. As a looking forward, what are you guys working on at the moment? Is it in similar direction to the volume, expanding it? Are there other things you want to work on? Are the books you promise people and haven't finished yet?
- [33:53]
D
Always. I'll start, if that helps. I am working on a book project, another collaborative project, actually, sadly not with Neil, but joyfully with a colleague, Claire Jameson, at London Met. We're working on a book project that is actually, I think there are definite consistencies with this idea. The book is going to be called Beyond Public and Private, looking at the architectural profession in the public sector after the Second World War. So it's a different periodisation, but again with similar intentions of trying to pull out these longer historical threads and this focus on architectural history beyond the building, this attention to the profession, which fits into my broader work, which has always looked at media and communication within the architectural profession, the role of magazines and editors as architectural practitioners. So that is a huge book project that's going to be many years in the making. We are this year doing a short podcast series based on it. We got a bit of money from the RBA and the intention of that podcast is to try and bring architectural historians who are interested in this topic of the architectural profession in the public sector, together with contemporary practitioners in public sector architecture and the broad set of people that involve. And we're doing five episodes and those will be coming out on the SAHDB podcast platform in spring next year. And as part of that book project, I'm also trying to. Do, you know, how you get, like, specific little things that you become obsessed with that you know, are not going to be in the book and therefore you have to find something else to do with them. I am currently obsessed with 1970s community television in Milton Keynes and Swindon, which links to the bigger book project because it's about public participation and the changing relationship between the public and the architectural profession by the 70s. And I'm trying to write an article at the minute on the role of community television as a tool for communication between the architectural profession, local authorities and publics.
- [36:15]
B
Fantastic. Lots of things to follow. Lots of things to follow the next few years by the sounds of it. And Neil, how about yourself? How about you?
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C
Yeah, bits and bobs. I mean this book, Reconstruction I see as the second in a. In a trilogy of interventions into. It's this very obscure corner of architectural history. So my monograph Designs on Democracy, which came out the year before Reconstruction is this kind of meander through.
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B
The period.
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C
But very much a kind of argument about democratization. Then obviously Reconstruction is this polyvocal edited volume and then the third is a effectively a single building study of 66 Portland Place for the Riba, which is very, very, very, very many years overdue incidentally, and perhaps I should have said this before in my own sad little way, all the covers of these books are linked, despite working with three different publishers. So the idea was to use a font called petit serif by a small, I believe, Parisian foundry, independent Foundry, which is based on the. Some lettering by Percy Delph Smith of Door Note Workshop. So also contemporaneous to our subject matter. And the other thing about Reconstruction is that I basically designed the COVID whatever it says in the small print, because it is based on Darcy Braddle's how to look at Buildings which has this sort of ashlar motif. And we played a little bit around with that. Anyway, so the book about the Riba is. Is nearly done and that is a kind of history of in a sense a kind of conventional architectural historical account of the building in one part, but then starts to examine the building through a number of, let's say, timely critical themes. So energy, illumination, labor, myths, histories and geographies, uses and so on and so forth. So that should come out, I hope, before 66 Portland Place reopens at some point at the end of the decade. And then I am also beginning a project about some doing much more kind of post war stuff. So very interested in the housing practice. Darborne and Dark, who were designed Lillington Gardens in Pimlico and various estates in. In Islington and also Pershaw and thinking about low rise, high density housing, a kind of second generation as it were a second post war generation of architects of low rise, high density housing. I'm also doing a little project about Gillespie, Kidd and Coyer and some work they did Izzy Metstein and Andy McMillan for Wadham College. And I'm also, I've been running an architecture school for the last few years, which has meant I haven't been able to do a lot of research. But I see that as contiguous all the same with the research that I've done and I'm doing. And I'm quite interested in the story of, let's say, Letharban educational reform in the first half of the 20th century in the construction industry and what lessons that might have for us now. And then finally, the book that I really, really want to write, which I think about, you know, every now and then, is about standards and standardization and risk and the way is in which risk is, I think risk management and risk mitigation is stifling us as part of our ontological crisis long before we come to the exigencies of climate emergency and so on. And standards as part of that, procurement is part of that. All these kind of really sexy subjects. And so I'm trying to figure out whether I can write something that is kind of rooted in the built environment, but actually has implications beyond it and to write it in a way that is also historically rooted but propositional.
- [41:39]
D
Hopefully we do something together again.
- [41:42]
C
Hopefully together again.
- [41:45]
B
Fantastic.
- [41:46]
C
Okay, well, I am going to, I'm going to cut us there, but I.
- [41:48]
B
Am going to say the proper title of the book, which I think is wrong on Google Books. I need to go back and check it.
- [41:54]
C
But the book that we've been talking.
- [41:55]
B
About, of course, is Reconstruction, Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War. Thank you so much, guys for talking about it with us today.
- [42:04]
C
Thank you for having us.
- [42:05]
D
Thank you.