EAHN2021 Plenary Lecture: Miles Glendinning
From Richard Anderson
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Mass Housing: ‘National Character’ and Modern State Power in Architecture
Miles Glendinning, University of Edinburgh
This lecture focuses on the issue of national identity in architecture – one with obvious present-day resonances. Contrary to the politicised exploitation of the supposed ‘national character’ of elite historic architecture, or of ‘traditional vernacular building’, by 20th-and 21st-century nationalist regimes and governments, it instead approaches the subject from a more practical and low-key viewpoint, concerned with what modern societies actually built themselves, and how that directly related to their state organisation – and asks whether we can talk of ‘national character’, or local character, in this very different context. The key factor underlying this approach is the entry of the 20th-century state itself into the heart of the process of organising the built environment. The older nationalist historiography had simply appropriated traditional architectural history and pressed it into the service of the state. But in this lecture, we instead focus on the building activity of the 20th-century state itself – as the initiator and controller of a growing range of public building programmes, at a national and local level. In the process, the ‘national’ inevitably shoots back into full view – but in a more elementally geographical way, defined contextually by its relationship to wider geopolitical forces on the one hand, and to the intense forces of localism on the other.The lecture explores this argument by looking specifically in more detail at one of the most emblematic of these building programmes – the state-supported modernist mass housing for lower-income groups that mushroomed in many developed countries in the 20th century. It argues that modernist mass housing is not a phenomenon of driving, suffocating homogeneity but of ‘multiple modernities’: a global landscape of riotously colourful variety and complexity, responding both to the diversity of the 20th century and early 21st century state, and to the countless permutations of modernist architecture.
Miles Glendinning, University of Edinburgh
This lecture focuses on the issue of national identity in architecture – one with obvious present-day resonances. Contrary to the politicised exploitation of the supposed ‘national character’ of elite historic architecture, or of ‘traditional vernacular building’, by 20th-and 21st-century nationalist regimes and governments, it instead approaches the subject from a more practical and low-key viewpoint, concerned with what modern societies actually built themselves, and how that directly related to their state organisation – and asks whether we can talk of ‘national character’, or local character, in this very different context. The key factor underlying this approach is the entry of the 20th-century state itself into the heart of the process of organising the built environment. The older nationalist historiography had simply appropriated traditional architectural history and pressed it into the service of the state. But in this lecture, we instead focus on the building activity of the 20th-century state itself – as the initiator and controller of a growing range of public building programmes, at a national and local level. In the process, the ‘national’ inevitably shoots back into full view – but in a more elementally geographical way, defined contextually by its relationship to wider geopolitical forces on the one hand, and to the intense forces of localism on the other.The lecture explores this argument by looking specifically in more detail at one of the most emblematic of these building programmes – the state-supported modernist mass housing for lower-income groups that mushroomed in many developed countries in the 20th century. It argues that modernist mass housing is not a phenomenon of driving, suffocating homogeneity but of ‘multiple modernities’: a global landscape of riotously colourful variety and complexity, responding both to the diversity of the 20th century and early 21st century state, and to the countless permutations of modernist architecture.
Biography
Miles Glendinning is Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh.He has published extensively on modernist and contemporary architecture and housing, and on Scottish historic architecture in general: his books include the award-winning Tower Block (with Stefan Muthesius) and The Conservation Movement. His current research is focused on the international history of mass housing, and he has just published the first comprehensive global overview of this topic: Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power, a Global History (Bloomsbury Academic Press, February 2021). Other planned books include a history of public housing in Hong Kong (Routledge; likely publication 2023) and a history of postwar housing in London.
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