Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism

Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in. How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century, yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation, planning controls and bureaucracy. Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects, planners and students of architecture, design, town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects, critics and historians, including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period. List of contributors: Cedric Price, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, Ben Highmore, Yona Friedman, Paul Barker, Clara Greed, Barry Curtis, Colin Ward, Ian Horton, John Beck, Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles. Audience: Registered architects, town-planning bodies, students of architecture, students of urban planning and design, students of architectural history. Contents Preface Contributors Credits #01 Thinking the Unthinkable • Paul Baker #02 Cedric Price’s Non-Plan Diary • Cedric Price #03 New Right/New Left: An Alternative Experiment in Freedom • Ben Franks #04 Anarchy and Architecture: A Personal Record • Colin Ward #05 The Heart Of The City • Barry Curtis #06 Pervasion of the Picturesque: English Architectural Aesthetics and Legislation, 1945–1965 • Ian Horton #07 Recovery and Reappropriation in Lefebvre and Constant • Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas #08 The Indeterminate Building • Jonathan Hughes #09 Function Follows Form • Yona Friedman #10 Buckminster Fuller and the Politics of Shelter • John Beck #11 Off The Map • Hadas Steiner #12 Open Ends: The Social Visions of 1960s Non-Planning • Simon Sadler #13 The Death of the Planner? Paris Circa 1968 • Ben Highmore #14 After Non-Plan: Retrenchment and Reassertion • Jonathan Hughes #15 Can Man Plan? Can Woman Plan Better? • Clara Greed #16 Living Lightly on the Earth • Malcolm Miles #17 Empowering the Self-Builder • Chinedu Umenyilora #18 Towards an Unoriginal Architecture • Martin Pawley #19 Parasite • Michael Rakowitz Index A collection of papers based on the 1997 annual conference of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) at which the structures and practices of the established architectural and planning professions were examined In 1969, Christopher Booker published The Neophiliacs, his attack on the passion for change which had characterized Britain from the mid-1950s.