The uncivil civility of Richard Rogers

By Richard J Williams | 31 July 2013 The idea of ‘civility’ crops up a lot at Richard Rogers’s exhibition. It’s there right from the start in a room decked out in orange vinyl, with a series of panels laying out Rogers’s ‘ethos’. In practice, it’s most clearly represented in Rogers’s non-architectural work, such as his chairmanship of the New Labour government’s Urban Task Force (1999), his work as London’s architecture ‘tsar’ for...

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CHINA The progress of an emerging superpower undergoing the largest urbanisation project in human...

The First London Olympics

‘The First London Olympics’ by Rebecca Jenkins; Piatkus, 2008. 278pp Reviewed by Alison Walker | May 2012 This book is a straight history of the fourth modern Olympic Games, held at White City in 1908. It starts with a description of how London was chosen for the games, and the men who were the main organisers, Lord Desborough, a typical English sporting aristocrat, and Imre Kiralfy, a Hungarian who had made a fortune as...

Made in Britain : How the Nation Earns its Living

“Made in Britain ” is an optimistic state-of-the-nation book. In it, Evan Davis argues that we shouldn’t worry so much about UK ‘s Western decline… but then again, it was published 6 months ago. So why does Britain – one of the richest nations in the world (the sixth-largest manufacturing nation in the world in 2008) – seem so...

Green Philosophy

‘Green Philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet’ by Roger Scruton; Atlantic Books, 2012. 464pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 2 February 2012 Last year, Green MP, Caroline Lucas launched the “Home Front” initiative, which used the language of the Second World War to hark back to the joys of a war economy. In this rose-tinted world-view of global conflict, “31,000 tonnes of kitchen waste were...

The End of the West

‘The End of the West’ by David Marquand; Princeton University Press, 2011. 224pp Reviewed by David Bowden | 13 January 2012 Aside from being a well known commentator and academic on British constitutional politics, David Marquand is also a former Labour MP from 1966 to 1977, the son of Hillary Marquand, who was in the original Bevan post-war Labour administration. After he resigned from parliament, he was a Chief Advisor...

One Million Acres and No Zoning

‘One Million Acres and No Zoning’ by Lars Lerup; Architectural Association, 2011. 322pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 21 November 2011 Henry Ford is reputed to have said that he had to “invent” the motor car in order to escape the crushing boredom of a mid-Western farm. Since then, the freedom of the open road has become emblematic of 20th century America’s size and its population’s desire, and...

Urban Design since 1945

‘Urban Design since 1945 – A Global Perspective’ by  David Grahame Shane; John Wiley & Sons, 2011. 360pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 31 August 2011 The world is changing and some of the past certainties, it seems, are not so certain any more. America’s economic woes and Europe’s anticipated double dip exemplify the fear of the future in the Western hemisphere. Similarly, a mere 30 years after the break up of the...

The mantownhuman debates

Challenging the Orthodoxies 1: ‘Architecture & Climate Change’, 25 March 2010 Reportback by Austin Williams The first in the series of mantownhuman debates – held at BDP and sponsored by BD – got off to a fiery start with a row about “Architecture and Climate Change”.  My opening provocation concentrated on the way that the climate change discourse blames humanity for its consumption patterns, leading...