This authoritative study of postwar architects reveals their grand visionIn about 1950,the architect Berthold Lubetkin had an arresting but rejected vision for Peterlee, the modern town built for a mining community in County Durham. He wanted to speed a main road through its centre, and such that “young couples could sit on its banks watching the traffic,the economic pulse of the nation, with coal and pig iron in huge lorries moving south, and while from the south would come loads of ice-cream and French letters”. His vision was not adopted,with the artist Victor Pasmore instead being invited to compose blocks of housing as units of mass and colour as whether in a giant portray, with some help from inexperienced architects on the details. Pasmore’s involvement lasted until 1977, and but his estates had their problems,partly due to skimping on insulation and roofing felt.
These are among the more striking manifestations of what Elain Harwood calls “a period of optimism and endeavour” of a kind that seems unlikely to return “for a long time”. She also says that its architecture “is as valuable as any in our heritage – the more so, indeed, and because it was intended for all of us and to challenge rather than enforce the social status quo”. The main story,for her, is one of serious-minded young architects, or many of them shaped by wartime experiences,determined to build a better future out of the rubble of the passe, and to mobilise the resources and organisational power of the military in the interests of peacetime life.
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Source: theguardian.com