Convenors:
Stanley Mathews, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, NY 14456, USA, mathews@hws.edu
 
This session traces the complex and diverse avant-garde architectural responses to the new post-war consciousness of social issues. In the post-war years, architecture became the quintessential expression of social reform and aspiration for the New Britain. For many architects, society and the \'common man\' became central concerns, and more than a few architects embraced openly leftist positions. In the early post-war years the social aspirations of the Welfare State found expression in two mainstream architectural tendencies: the Swedish-inspired \'New Empiricism\' which sought to ameliorate social conditions by emulating a nostalgic and homely \'Englishness\' of cottages and village life, and the \'New Brutalism\' which countered the pastoral vision with a rigorous and starkly modern urban social view. Yet, the younger generation of British architects were not entirely satisfied with either of these alternatives, and began to view mainstream architecture as outmoded and increasingly out of step with the rapidly changing political, social and cultural scenes. In the 1950s, various avant-garde contingents of English architects abandoned what they considered the aesthetically and culturally conservative orthodoxy of mainstream architecture.

Still Thinking About \'Endless Architecture\'
Sam Gathercole (University of Liverpool, England)

\'Endless Architecture\' was a notion first articulated in 1951 by the architect, Richard Llewelyn Davies. What began as a means of understanding a modern building type became, over the next ten years,the ideology of a design process, culminating in the 1965 publication of a paper by Llewelyn Davies\'s professional partner, John Weeks, called \'Indeterminate Architecture\'. This paper will consider the work of Llewelyn Davies and Weeks between these two statements. It will concern itself with their identification of the need for a new kind of architect to respond to \'modern\' conditions and \'modern\' problems with \'modern\' solutions. This demanded the wholesale reassessment of the architect\'s role by Llewelyn Davies and Weeks: they questioned the use and functionality of "architecturally distinguished" buildings and stressed the importance of social purpose. Rather than seek a control system within a finite form, they defined an additive process, with outcomes never limited by aesthetically determined boundaries. Indeed, the implication was that no aesthetic judgement was to be allowed to interpose itself between function and form. This paper will set Llewelyn Davies and Weeks\'s work alongside that of contemporaries including the Constructionist group of artists with which Weeks was associated and with which he worked in collaboration on a number of occasions.

Anthony Hill: The Intersection of Art and Architecture
Jonathan Hughes (independent scholar)

This paper deals with Anthony Hill\'s work in relation to an ongoing debate within the 1950s British artistic and architectural avant-garde about the scope for the "synthesis" of art and architecture and the extent to which this was actually realised. Hill\'s work clearly stands on the intersection of artistic and architectural practice although his initial high hopes for synthesis (along with others at 1956 This is Tomorrow) seem to have significantly cooled after the 1961 International Union of Architects congress building. The paper seeks to consider Hill\'s stance (and his perceptions of failure at the IUA) alongside the work of his other Constructionist peers (e.g., Pasmore at Peterlee, Mary Martin at Musgrave Park, etc, etc), collaborators such as Theo Crosby, related architectural projects (e.g. John Forrester\'s involvement at Sheffield\'s Park Hill and Peter Stead\'s Neovision work with Stephen Gilbert - and through that to Cobra and the Situationist International) and the wider European Constructivist and avant-garde traditions within which the artists self-consciously situated themselves.

This is Tomorrow: Ernö Goldfinger, Architect and Art Collector
Barbara Pezzini (The Goldfinger Collection, England)

This paper explores the relationship between Goldfinger\'s architecture and his activity as art collector between 1950-1970. In recent research I have studied the formation and the scope of Ernö Goldfinger\'s art collection. On this occasion, I am planning to focus my talk on the implications of the change in Ernö Goldfinger\'s taste, which reflected the transformation in his architecture. As it is clearly indicated in his essay "The sensation of space" (1941), Goldfinger was aware of the interactions between the visual arts and architecture from very early on. This encounter was somewhat conflicting in his writings and works of the 1930s and 1940s, but found a synthesis in the 1950s. This new outlook stemmed from his participation in the 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow, where visual arts and architecture were then beginning to collaborate in a common aesthetic programme. My paper will follow Goldfinger\'s evolving aesthetic and reconstruct the circle of artists that gravitated around him. It will also identify common ideals and social striving in postwar art and architecture. I hope that this interpretation may be of interest for an interdisciplinary analysis of the cultural milieu of this period.

The Avant-Garde Academy
Simon Sadler (University of Nottingham, England)

One of the paradoxes of the avant-garde since the Second World War - certainly in Britain and in the field of architecture - has been its sponsorship by the Academy. This paper will question how and why the alliance between academy and avant-garde came about, and whether the relationship has altered either party. Did the academy save the avant-garde from the extinction that it is generally thought to have suffered, and has the academy itself been transformed in the process? Special attention will be made in the paper to the changing complexion of the Architectural Association in London, in particular to its Archigram-powered \'Electric Decade\' of the 1960s. The paper proposes that \'leading\' British architectural schools conceived of themselves as laboratories in the vein of the Bauhaus, with a license to \'think the unthinkable\' about the relationship between architecture, society and the economy, prompting a range of intellectual \'schools\' competing for the modernist agenda.

To be announced
Hadas Steiner (School of Architecture and Planning, University of Buffalo)