Join us for our online talk, ‘A Different View of the Twentieth Century, written and presented by Alan Powers, Patron of Turn End Trust.
After many years studying how the history of twentieth century architecture has been constructed, Alan Powers realised that it would benefit from a figure-ground reversal, in which what was previously seen as of primary importance – the aesthetically and technically innovative and visually striking – could become the background, while the foreground is taken by work that took the idea of Modernism in more gradual and adaptive ways, especially in the period 1935-1965 when there was a generational turn in favour of local character, often referred to as Critical Regionalism, a term that is, however, rather self-contradictory and opaque. After looking at a shelf of books about Brutalism in a bookshop, Alan realised that the title he wanted was 'Nice Modern', as it neatly characterises the alternatives, whatever their strengths and qualities, as 'not nice'. Given that 'nice' is usually a term of abuse in architectural circles, this is itself a provocation. Further justification can be found in the fact that a large proportion of new architecture in the past 20 years has revisited aspects of 'Nice Modern', demonstrating that it was not the backwater that historians have usually imagined.
Many other historians have recently been following a similar reversal, and the deficiency of literature, especially in English, on architects such as Ernesto Rogers and Kay Fisker, is being remedied. However, there is as yet no international survey of this phenomenon, and it is this that Alan is intending in the course of a few years to provide.
£10.00 (Friends £5.00)
