67

Richard Anderson 3 A Screen that Receives Images by Radio

Mario Carpo 16 Micro-Managing Messiness

Will McLean 19 Dante’s Inflatables

Paul Martin 24 Many a Dull Moment

Samantha Briggs 29 Thomas Hardy and the Evolution of Architecture

Thomas Hardy 36 How I Built Myself a House

Elisabetta Andreoli 40 Learning from El Alto

Mari Lending 46 Proust and Plaster

Peter Carl & Irena Murray 49 Geometry and Analogy

Andrea Fredericksen 61 What Not to Forget in a Hackney Cab

Alex Schweder 72 Hotel Rehearsal

Mark Swenarton & Thomas Weaver 75 In Conversation with Neave Brown

Henderson Downing 92 Fitzrovia Phantasmagoria

Wayne Daly 98 Concordance

Timothy Brittain-Catlin 103 The Talented Mr Paget

Elizabeth Wilson 113 Haunted Houses

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen 119 Interacting with Albers

Josef Albers 130 Teaching Form Through Practice

Christine Hawley 132 Peckham Revisited

Pierre Chabard 138 In Conversation with Alan Colquhoun

François Charbonnet 147 Portraits

Mark Cousins 158 Tattoo

160 Contributors

67
 Neave Brown
in conversation with
Mark Swenarton
& Thomas Weaver

To most architects and scholars Neave Brown designed while he was at Princeton. Through doing his National Service did he settle on
(1929–) is known as the man responsible for his teaching he also made links – personal and architecture at the AA. As Brown matured,
Alexandra Road, a masterwork of postwar intellectual – in unexpected quarters: at one these broader interests remained: designer
British architecture and one of only a small end of his career Colin Rowe asked him to come of buildings, of course, but also artist and
number of English housing projects to com- to Cornell, at the other Jo Coenen invited him public intellectual, a person informed about
mand worldwide attention. Yet Brown’s story to take over his own professorship at Karlsruhe. the issues of the day.
is a good deal more complex than this might Here, then, was a rich mixture of ideas and Finally there is the complexity of Brown’s
suggest. To start with, he is only half-British inspirations. attitude to Le Corbusier and the legacy of
– his mother was American, he was born in the Thirdly, Brown has an unusually broad view modernism. Like many of his contemporaries
United States and schooled equally in the US of the role of the architect. As a schoolboy he Brown believed in modernism but also in
and the UK. In formation as much as outlook, was passionate about modern art and his initial Englishness. Specifically he loved Corb but
therefore, Brown is transatlantic – although by desire was to go to art school; but he then hated his ideas about cities. From that
no means in the Churchillian sense that this decided to read English at Oxford. Only while dynamic sprang the inventiveness of his own
might imply. proposals for housing and cities: proposals
Secondly, while famed as a practitioner, Neave Brown,
that were mainly made in Britain, but were also
Brown has had a parallel career as an academic. photographed in the garden the product of much more besides.
The most complex part of Alexandra Road was of Winscombe Street, c 1995 —Mark Swenarton

aa files 67 75
 MS  I wonder if we could start with a In England, the rich kids always knew perfectly MS  And how has that manifested itself
description you once gave me of yourself – that well that they were part of the gentry, but in with regard to your relationship to England or
you are a transatlantic person. Your father was the US everyone only defines themselves by Englishness?
English and your mother was American and you their Americanness. NB  It manifests in the form of a tension
were educated partly in the US and then partly MS  How long did you all stay in Bronxville? between my privileged background and the
in England. Was that upbringing an important NB  I was there six years, through till tenth fact that I’ve never really identified with any
aspect of your formation and your sense of who grade – so until I was 16. At the end of tenth particular aspect of English society. I actually
you were, or indeed are? grade, in August 1945, which also coincided with detest all aspects of English social stratification
NB  Undoubtedly. It made me who I am. the end of the war, we all came back to England, – strange, perhaps, given my schooling
I was born in the US and came to England when and in September that year my father sent me alongside the English gentry, but consistent
I was three years old. Aged ten, at the beginning away to public school at Marlborough College, with the fact that I’ve long found the English
of the war, I’d been ill and had to stay in bed for where I stayed until just after my 19th birthday. upper classes to be the stupidest, dullest, most
a while. My mother wasn’t sure what to do with TW  By then, after six years in the US, you culturally myopic of any people on earth.
me. But then her brother-in-law paid us a visit must have been assimilated into an American TW  But given your resistance to certain
– he was an executive with Erwin Wasey (one boy? entrenched aristocratic English structures,
of the first of the big, US advertising agencies), NB  Oh, at Marlborough I was always known and given the appeal of a kind of transience,
and he’d been in Europe to sort out their affairs as the Yank, but I never felt isolated, and a kind of lack of identity, surely America would
before the onset of the war. I remember him actually had a wonderful few years there. Even have seemed more attractive than postwar
coming to our house just outside Birmingham though it was a well-established English public England, and precisely at that first moment in
– we were living in Solihull at that time – and he school it was quite liberal in its education and your life when you could actually choose for
suggested to my mother that I return to the US in its thinking and ideas. But as it was a school yourself where you wanted to live?
with him. I can clearly recall my mother putting set up largely for the sons of the English clergy, NB  Of course many aspects of America were
this proposition to me – ‘How would you feel we were all expected to get confirmed. I refused. much more appealing because as a society it
about moving to America for a while, dear?’ I remember telling the school chaplain that didn’t impose the things that I disliked so much
I was all for it. And so they got me out of bed and I didn’t believe in god. This caused a bit of a stir, about England. But ultimately I stayed here
we travelled down to London. I was then put on but I was still accepted and in the end did well because I wanted to be a European, to engage
a train with my uncle and then a boat to Ireland. academically, as well as doing all the usual with European culture. Although, to contradict
There we boarded the Yankee Clipper and flew plays and art, and joining the poetry society and myself and add a bit more confusion to this
to New York. I was the first child evacuee out of things like that. Marlborough suited me story, despite my hatred of English aristocratic
England by air, and flew with my gas mask. incredibly well, and also gave me all the extra rituals, the first thing I actually did when
TW  Did you have any siblings who travelled teaching I needed to pass the scholarship exam I left Marlborough was two years of officer
with you? to get into Oxford. training and national service with a snob cavalry
NB  I have a sister. She stayed in England but MS  After finishing at Marlborough did you regiment in Chester and Germany.
joined me later. consider going back to America? TW  Snob regiment?
TW  And where did you live in the US? NB  Definitely, in part because I was having NB  You know, Viscount Glentworth, the
NB  My uncle and aunt, who became a all these doubts about who I was – was I Honourable Rodney Elton and Sir Somebody
psychoanalyst, lived in Bronxville, north of American or English? I was never quite sure. or Other.
Manhattan. I have to say it was an extremely I also had to decide where I wanted to be TW  Everything you despised?
privileged community for rich people living just because of the imperative to do my military NB  Yes, but in a curious way I simply took it
outside the city. And I went to school there. service – even if I abandoned England I would as what it was. After Chester we were part of the
It was actually an incredibly good school – what still have had to have done it in the US. British Army of Occupation in West Germany,
the Americans called a progressive high school. TW  Did you ever consider being a conscien- and spent most of our time in Hamburg,
So I went from boarding at an English prep tious objector? Hanover and Lüneberg Heath. I found Germany
school, to four months in bed, to an American NB  No, never. I always thought that Hitler fascinating, but soon began to loathe the army.
high school in Bronxville. I can remember was someone who had to be fought. I felt very The food in the officer’s mess was actually really
on more or less my second day in the US my strongly about that, and also about all sorts good and the people were very friendly – I
aunt taking me to buy some new clothes so of aspects of the politics of Europe. I mean, I had lost my American accent and so they all just
that I would look like an American schoolboy. wasn’t a revolutionary and I never stood up and assumed I was one of them. And as the regimen-
In England, even as a child, I had dressed so waved my arms around, but as a young Ameri- tal entertainments officer I even managed
formally – grey flannel trousers, ties and jackets, can I took on certain kinds of liberal thinking, to organise a couple of concerts – some of the
etc. There I was liberated into casual dress, although much of this, ironically, had been orchestra of the Viennese State Opera were
and wore shorts and t-shirts like everyone informed by Marlborough. I had a wonderful living in the Displaced Persons Camp just
else, though everyone still knew I was English history master there called Bill Spray, who really behind the fences of our base. But to be part of
because of my accent. expanded my thinking, and got us to read an occupying army regiment inside a defeated
TW  Did you feel rich or privileged? things like The Communist Manifesto and Marx. country was just terrible. I think about that time
NB  No, I never really realised the whole Imagine that, discovering Marx at Marlborough! now, as a second lieutenant in the Queen’s Bays,
time I was there just how privileged we were. And so I fitted in with the ideas of the time as being intensely uncomfortable. I couldn’t
Of course, I knew my uncle was wealthy, and my without ever feeling quite secure about my own wait to get out. After two years the army tried
mother ended up working in his advertising sense of belonging. to persuade me to stay – as they did with
agency when she and my sister later came over MS  Is that something that has remained everybody else – but I said ‘absolutely no way’.
to join us. I guess I was simply thinking like all with you, that sense of being neither one thing MS  And it was then that you made the
the other American kids around me – that our nor the other? decision to switch from studying English at
life was not rich or poor but simply American. NB  Yes, absolutely. Oxford to architecture at the AA?

76 aa files 67
 NB  I had first thought of going to art school changed my mind. I’ve now got a place at the AA TW  And what was the AA’s relationship to
when I was at Marlborough, because I’d always to study architecture for five years.’ She raised modernism at that time?
painted and drawn, and spent hours each day in her eyebrows and said, ‘Well, that’s nice too.’ NB  Our teachers when I arrived were mostly
the art studios, but I knew that if I did so there We talked and her assistant then walked me to English and all modern. But bear in mind
wouldn’t be so many options available to me the door and told me I should hear from them that English modernism from before the war
afterwards, whereas if I had a degree I could in two weeks, but, putting his hand on my was pretty gentle kind of stuff, in comparison
teach. And so I took an Oxford exhibition exam shoulder, he added that I needn’t worry. to Gropius and the Bauhaus and the rest of
instead, and planned to study English literature Two weeks later I received a letter informing me European modernism. But on the other hand,
in combination with philosophy. However, that I had a County Major Scholarship and where England and the architects of the AA were
before I did my national service, and while Surrey would cover all my fees and also provide radical was in their identification with socialism
I was still at school, the architect Bill Howell – a living grant for all five years. Talk about good and the idea of making a new society. And
a Marlborough old boy – came back to visit. luck stories! my god, I personally felt that England really did
We quickly became friends. I remember he was TW  What did you understand architecture need a new society at that time.
in his full air force pilot uniform, and he had as at that time? TW  When I interviewed John Winter
masses of ribbons on his chest and a huge NB  It was all mostly through Le Corbusier. a couple of years ago he said that his own
moustache. We talked about Le Corbusier and As I said, Bill Howell followed his work closely, decision to become an architect in that same
modern architecture and Bill soon tried to as did another friend of mine at Marlborough immediate postwar period was entirely
persuade me not to bother with Oxford but to called Colin Glennie, who also went on to the pragmatic – that England had been largely
go to the AA instead. During the following two AA, and who would sit in the art studios at knocked down and he figured that someone
years with the army I obviously had a lot of Marlborough endlessly doing all these Corb- had to help building it back up again.
time to think about things, and increasingly type drawings. By the time I was 18 or 19 I had NB  I felt no such sense of professional
the congenial company that Bill and the AA also read Vers une architecture. responsibility, but I did believe in a new society.
promised seemed so much more appealing TW  And so you were a committed And the model in the back of my mind was
than the traditionalism and conservatism of modernist? mostly America. Of course, the US had numer-
the Queen’s Bays or Oxford. And so only a week NB  Goodness me, totally! And it was not ous problems of its own – like race and the
or so after leaving the regiment, in February just architecture. I also read a lot of modern unequal distribution of wealth – but there
or March 1950, I went to London and knocked poetry and of course I admired modern art. The was an openness to its society that I especially
on the door of the school principal, Robert art teacher at Marlborough was a very nice man admired. By contrast, England was so divided.
Furneaux Jordan, and told him my story and by the name of Colonel Hughes. He thought In that period something like 70 per cent of
that I wanted to enrol. He said, ‘You want to modernism was tolerable, but only up to the people in England considered themselves
come to the AA without any letters of recom- Impressionists – for him, by the time you got working class; the rest were middle class and
mendation?’ I said, ‘Yes’. He continued, ‘You to Gauguin things were pretty uncomfortable. the upper class who didn’t care about anything
want to come to the AA without any references, I remember one class when Picasso came up but themselves. Each group spoke their own
without taking the entrance examination and and he said, ‘Well, Brown, the thing is, Picasso language. And physically everything needed
you want to start this September?’ ‘Yes, exactly’, can certainly draw, but he has a very dirty repairing – the cities were still bomb sites
I replied. ‘Outrageous!’ he said. But then mind.’ But I loved all the contemporary artists. and with no Clean Air Act there was smog
he added, ‘Come back tomorrow with your And I had seen a lot of their work while I was everywhere. But at the AA, the constraints that
portfolio and we can discuss this further’. still in the US – walking up and down Lexington typically went with class prejudices and
So I went home, put my portfolio together and Avenue and Madison Avenue and going to all structures simply weren’t there. Surrounded
returned the following day and showed him the galleries in 1944 and 1945, as well as to by like-minded people, we all felt we could
my work. We chatted about my drawings and MoMA. The Abstract Expressionists had yet to tackle these problems.
about all sorts of other things – I kept wonder- really arrive then, but there was still so much MS  Who were these like-minded people
ing why aren’t we talking about architecture? interesting stuff going on. Appreciating this in your year?
He then asked me to wait a moment, and got work didn’t seem revolutionary or avant-garde, NB  Oh, friends and colleagues like John
up and spoke to some people in the room next only natural. Miller, David Gray, Ken Frampton, Colin
door before returning with his verdict: ‘Okay, MS Given that you had had this broader view, Glennie, Adrian Gale, George Finch and of
you can come in September’. coming from America, did you find the culture course Patrick Hodgkinson.
MS  How did you pay for your studies at in the AA a bit narrow and English? TW  That is quite a group.
the AA? NB  No, quite the opposite. Culturally, NB  I had no idea at the time.
NB  Before I went to the army I had con- Marlborough was incredibly insular and MS  But nonetheless, looking back, it was
tacted Surrey County Council about applying traditional – I mean, we all had to learn how to extraordinary. How did it all work? Was there
for a grant to study at Oxford. I’d fallen out with walk with an umbrella, like a City gent – but the a strong collective sense or did people go into
my father and needed help with funding. And so AA in many ways felt like being back in America. their own little corners?
a couple of days after my meeting with Furneaux It didn’t have a snob aspect to it, everyone NB In the first two years we all worked
Jordan I went to see the Surrey education was talking about making a new, open society, together in the studios, with Leonard Manasseh
committee. The chair of the committee was this and I was suddenly studying with women as well and the Architects Co-Partnership. In the third
elderly lady who sat at the end of a long table. as men. year – run by Hilton Wright, whose brief we
She looked over the notes she had in front of TW  But it was still an English club, and club all rejected as not engaging enough – we worked
her and said, ‘Well, Mr Brown’ – because in culture, wasn’t it? more individually on our own programmes.
those days everyone was addressed as ‘Mister’ NB  It was a club, but one which had always In the fourth year we all did housing projects,
– ‘you’re going to Oxford for three years to read prided itself on its liberalism. The AA then was and some (including me) did the Tropical
English literature. That’s very nice.’ From open to all sorts of things. To me, this came as a School run by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who
the other end of the table I said, ‘Actually, I’ve staggering relief. had worked with Corb on Chandigarh, and in

aa files 67 77
the fifth year we did our individual design and they moved to East Africa where he was NB  In my head, it’s always like that, it’s true,
thesis, although my thesis – for a new museum to run a branch of the family firm. They offered but at the same time, in designing a building
and faculty of classical archaeology at Cam- me the chance to design them a house and it was never as if we simply produced a neutral
bridge – developed in the context of Patrick I couldn’t resist. But the house never got built, diagram that was then tech-ed up. For me and
Hodgkinson’s thesis, which redesigned the largely because the design kept changing. all the young architects at Lyons, Israel & Ellis
whole university, and so it was in effect one part It wasn’t an especially happy period, living there was an integral aspect to what we did,
of Patrick’s masterplan. together with my sister and brother-in-law working from the concept all the way down to
MS  More than all the others, the way you and trying to produce a home for them. Soon the detail. In many ways the importance of this
describe it, Hodgkinson was the key figure. afterwards, though, I started working for way of working meant that the firm provided
NB  Patrick was easily the most influential another firm there, designing a hospital in the an extension to our architectural education,
of our student group. And his key design up-country north of Dar es Salaam. It was for but of course we never perceived it as a school,
project was not so much his thesis as his the American Medical Methodist Mission. Can only as a practice.
fourth-year project for a housing scheme. you imagine? Straight out of school, never built MS  You mentioned that you arrived at the
Whereas all the rest of us did Corbusian slab anything and being flown in a little airplane firm just as Stirling was leaving. Did your
blocks – me included – Patrick turned up with to this completely bonkers hilly site in the subsequent friendship go back to those days?
a continuous, low-rise building, with high- middle of nowhere. I had a wonderful time NB  Yes, we became quite close. I used to
density, split-level sections clustered around designing it, but in the end I got fed up and play squash with him, and would occasionally
and a rue intérieure. The whole thing was simply came back to London. have dinners at his house with his wife Mary
an astonishing achievement for a student. MS  And was it ever built? Shand, who I actually knew before she met him.
We all looked at it with awe – students and NB  No idea. But I still have the drawings Jim and I got on well but we would also always
tutors alike. He was a sort of genius, partly somewhere. be fighting about architecture. I remember
because there was an aspect of him that was MS  And having not yet designed a house huge arguments, for example, a little later in
very disciplined, orthodox and traditional, you somehow managed to design a hospital. 1959, after he had finished the Leicester
while in another sense he had a totally inde- NB  Yes, and a hospital for an American Engineering building. Of course it is a wonder-
pendent way of thinking about things. medical mission was so much easier than ful building, but it is also so isolated. To
And that housing project was the scheme that a house for my sister. continue in the same spirit you would simply
got him his job with Leslie Martin, for whom TW  So what did you do when you got back? have had a series of independent buildings and
he designed a housing proposal for St Pancras NB  At first I had no idea what the hell I was not an integrated campus. For me, Leicester
that really should have been built. Patrick going to do, but then I met up with my friend wasn’t a piece of architecture but simply
and I became really good friends, but all along John Miller, who was working for Lyons, Israel a monument – and a monument largely to
he made it clear that I was the naive, half- & Ellis, and he got me an interview with the its architect.
American, messy, enthusiastic innocent, same firm. I showed them my AA projects and TW  Did Stirling give as good as he got?
whereas he was the sophisticate, and was going the hospital drawings and they hired me. James NB  Oh yeah, he was much better than me.
to be England’s answer to Alvar Aalto. He Stirling had just left, but he was always still in But anyway, we’d argue and then we’d go and
never did this with any bluster or self-aggran- and out; James Gowan was there, but planned play squash. I was really very fond of him, but
disement, he never quite joined in with the to leave; Alan Colquhoun also worked there, I could never fully subscribe to his ideas about
conversations, but rather just quietly, indepen- as did David Gray and later Richard MacCormac architecture. I still can’t. Thinking about it now,
dently asserted himself. and others. It was an astonishing group. this rejection seems part of my questioning
TW  If Patrick went off to work with Leslie TW  Another astonishing group. of certain modernist ideas – in particular the
Martin where did you go after the AA? NB  Lyons, Israel & Ellis was such an notion of the tabula rasa. Stirling’s Leicester
NB  I went to Tanganyika – Tanzania as it is interesting firm. They did some fantastic was like Corb’s Plan Voisin, where he wipes
now. My sister had just married a school friend buildings, but their work never really features out everything except a few isolated monu-
in the recent anthologies on brutalism. ments. That way of perceiving architecture was
TW  Did you perceive yourself as a brutalist an approach I was increasingly rejecting.
architect?
NB  Absolutely not. At that time, we were
all simply working by instinct, following Ellis
mainly, because he always had these grander
ideas about modernism and Le Corbusier
– although they never built anything remotely
Corbusian. By contrast, Lyons was more
pragmatic and Israel practical – Lyons would
organise a design extremely quickly, producing
an outline diagram on the drawing board, and
then doing the basic geometry before adding
all the details, like the drainage, etc. The young
architects in the group were mostly working
with Ellis.
TW  Listening to you now, it seems that your
interest in architecture was more abstract or
Interior view of the first-floor
intellectualised or cultural, rather than being living room, Winscombe Street, 1968
Neave Brown, axonometric drawing drawn to it as a pragmatic, problem-solving, © Martin Charles/RIBA Library
of Winscombe Street, 1968 technical discipline. Photographs Collection

78 aa files 67
 MS  Before we talk more about your own later, when he got the Cornell professorship, And so I gave up my own work and joined
ideas about architecture and the projects you Colin brought me over to Ithaca. It was a great Camden. It was the best decision I ever made.
did, can we first talk about education? Because experience. I’d be there for a semester teaching The architects department there was run by
one of the interesting things about your career my programme, but then I’d pick up the phone, Sydney Cook, who was unbelievably wonderful
is that although you’re known mainly as talk to somebody or other in Illinois or towards me, and allowed me to periodically take
a practitioner, you have also consistently been California, and before I knew it, I’d be invited up these visiting positions in different schools.
involved with teaching, alternating between to Chicago or Los Angeles or Canada or New TW  And were the briefs you set at Cornell
practice and education – in various different York. I had a wonderful time tootling around. and Princeton similarly goal-orientated?
schools – all of your life. How did that other TW  How did you manage to get the time off NB  Not at Princeton – where the students
aspect of your architectural career begin? from your work in London to teach in the US? always set their own briefs – but at Cornell, yes.
NB  Well, after Lyons, Israel & Ellis I went NB  After working at Middlesex County I think the first one was for a medical building,
to Middlesex County Council to work on the Council and then doing a couple of smaller jobs and I gave them a small site on Winscombe
design of its primary schools programme, I went into private practice, sharing an office Street. I can’t remember exactly what the
designing five schools, but at the same time with the engineer Tony Hunt, who had done the programme was, but I would have given them
I got a position at the Regent Street Polytechnic engineering for an ancillary workshop building a variety of elements to deal with.
teaching evening classes to its architecture I had designed at Hammersmith hospital for TW  Did you also run into Eisenman and
students, two nights a week. Lyons, Israel & Ellis. After one or two interesting Ungers at Cambridge and Cornell?
TW  And did you perceive your teaching commissions it got increasingly tough – I wasn’t NB  I met Ungers, but I was never able
as an extension of your daily working practice getting any work – but then an old friend from to agree with a single thing he said.
as a local authority architect or as something Middlesex called Richard Gibson, who was TW  But his agenda was similarly goal-orien-
quite distinct? working for Camden Council, got in touch tated, no?
NB  I always thought of it as simply a and said that they were looking for architects. NB  Yes, but everything was dictated by a
different aspect of the same thing, and the same kind of formalistic approach, with various sorts
thinking. This meant that it was highly goal- of predetermined geometric systems – all
directed and in perfect symmetry with the social these different kinds of rectangles, spheres and
ideas and needs of the time. We would identify squares. I could never go along with that.
a need and a site and a programme and MS  But the crits must have been
a procedure and then would work on the design entertaining?
of a building to satisfy all those requirements. NB  Oh yes, they were good.
MS  Later, you also taught at Princeton, with TW  And what about the peculiar figure that
Robert Maxwell, and at Washington University is Peter Eisenman?
and Cornell too. How did that come about?
NB  The Cornell invitation was through
Colin Rowe, who I had met in the early 1960s
Interior view of the children’s bedrooms,
when he was still teaching at Cambridge.
Winscombe Street, 1968
Like everybody else, I would do the occasional
lecture or design crit in schools of architecture Interior view of the kitchen,
in and around London, and through Patrick Winscombe Street, 1968
Hodgkinson – who was also teaching at the
Interior view of the spiral staircase,
school at that time – I was invited to Cambridge.
Winscombe Street, 1968
There I brushed past the aloof presence of
Leslie Martin, who was head of the school, and © Martin Charles/RIBA Library
met Colin. We became quite friendly. Some time Photographs Collection

aa files 67 79
Neave Brown, sketch cross-section through
the three housing blocks of Fleet Road, 1967
© Neave Brown
 NB  I met him too. Awful architect. In the
US you saw all these ambitious young designers
who soon after finishing their first or second
building would set up groups and architectural
affiliations – like the New York Five – and
quickly acquire a strange kind of aura. With that
aura they’d establish practices and employ
people who they never really paid properly.
Of course, some were better than others. I liked
Richard Meier, who was a very thoughtful,
careful man and a very good architect, but still,
his all-white architecture and ideas about how
buildings ought to work within society were at
odds with my own.
MS  Just returning back to your work in
practice, you mentioned your move to Camden
Council, but before this happened you had
of course managed to design and build your first
major commission – the five houses at Wins-
combe Street – where you lived with your first
wife and later with Janet and your children …
NB  … next door to Michael and Patty
Hopkins on one side and Adam Wolfit – a
photographer and son of the stage actor Donald
Wolfit – on the other, with Ed Jones and his
wife Beatty, and the painter Lewin Bassingth-
waighte two doors away. The whole collective opening onto a terrace with stairs down to the it?’ I said, ‘Yes, that might be a good idea’,
was really quite special. We’d come together garden, which the kids’ rooms opened onto so not letting on that this had been the one thing
because all of us wanted somewhere to live but that they could run directly in and out. You we had all craved. I then went back to Camden
none of us had any money. The site was a never quite knew whose children were in your Council and asked if they could lend us
small neglected pocket of undeveloped land in house. Each house had three circular stairs some more money to buy the adjacent land
Dartmouth Park, and Camden agreed to help – concrete in front, plywood in the middle, steel (pointing out to them that the houses had
us acquire the plot if we in return were to set up to the garden. been built in strict accordance with their terms
a housing association. MS  Did that division of spaces and inver- and standards, and that the garden site didn’t
MS  And you designed each of the five sion of convention – with children below adults have a frontage and was not developable). The
houses individually? – come from something you had experienced planning officer at Camden looked at the plan
NB  Well, that’s part of the story. I was the elsewhere or just from your own thinking about and then nodded and said that he thought
project architect, with Tony Hunt doing the the ideal family home? this would be fine. I remember we had a lovely
engineering and Max Fordham working on the NB  It stemmed from thinking about both day when we finally knocked down the fence.
services, but the other four owners soon got the ideal family home and the communal The children rushed into the garden like
uncomfortable with the idea that what they garden. Fortunately, the Winscombe Street site a hoard of Dark-Age Huns invading western
would be getting would be something designed had a slope and so with a few steps up to the Europe. It became their space, and the site of
with someone else in mind, and not them. front door, which is very English after all (and all their mythologies and stories and secrets.
And so I had to think fast and said, ‘I can design makes the resident feel special), and a few steps Even now, as adults, they talk about it as a kind
something for each of you but only on one down to the garden (through a quasi back door), of folkloric paradise.
condition – that you never talk to each other both openings could seem to be at ground TW  Had you seen any similar garden or
about what you want and you only meet with me level. Initially, the back garden was quite small, collective space before?
privately.’ So I would have four sets of dinner because that’s all that the plot allowed, but as NB  No, it just seemed obvious to me. I can’t
parties, with lots of food and lots of talk, and go the houses were being built we all kept peering claim any great intellectual ownership of the
over what each of them wanted. I then went over the fence at the back towards an empty idea, but the notion of the collective affected
away and designed the houses I wanted for the space that used to be tennis courts before the me greatly, especially when allied with the idea
site – which because of its constrictions didn’t war. We desperately coveted that space. One day of the house addressing the street, with
allow for too many options or variations. A few I waved at a man working there and he put down semi-public space in front and the communal
weeks later we all met up over dinner, again his shovel and came over and we chatted over garden behind.
individually, and I showed them their design. the fence. He told me how he’d been watching MS  You described earlier the front door
They all said, ‘Ooh, yes, I like that’, but their the houses being built and how nice it was to see as a nod to an English way of building, so to
curiosity also made them want to see the other all the children running around, etc, etc. Then what extent was Winscombe Street drawing on
houses. I then uncovered the rest of the plan he said, ‘I’m getting old, and this garden is too a London tradition, rather than being a purely
and elevations and revealed all five houses as much for me. Would you be interested in buying modernist enterprise?
being absolutely identical – three storeys, NB  It was modernist, but also very much
children on the ground floor; adults, bedroom Garden elevation of Winscombe Street, 1968 to do with the street. An overriding problem –
and living room on top; and everything meeting © Martin Charles/RIBA Library an architectural problem – is that contemporary
in the middle with the kitchen–dining room Photographs Collection modern houses in Victorian streets are always

82 aa files 67
miniatures, which means that the scale breaks with the client – a very nice man called Llew
down because they are so small. So here the Rowley, who was Camden’s director of housing.
issue was how to make the facade of the five It was lovely dealing with him. At first he had
new houses compatible with the modest, but difficulty comprehending the scheme, but
three-storey, brick mid-nineteenth-century through the idea of the alley he understood
houses which ran up to it. I wouldn’t say this and accepted it, as did the planners. But then
problem generated the form, but it certainly when it came to presenting the scheme to the
responded to it. In section I designed it with an housing committee, before I went into the room
overhang on the storey above, which combined Rowley put his hand on my shoulder and
with the sunken ground floor meant it could said, ‘Neave, don’t refer to ‘‘alleys’’ because the
be consistent with its surroundings – with just committee will associate this with working-class
one window above – and yet have a scale housing and they’ll turn the scheme down.’
element already much bigger than an ordinary outside your front door, with the kitchen So I called them ‘passages’ instead and the
terrace house. All of this involved quite a lot addressing this street, and a canopy over the committee passed the proposal.
of manipulating of the section and elevation. main entrance. MS  It’s amazing when you think back
MS  Did you therefore see Winscombe Street TW  But as with Winscombe Street, did you on it now, that Camden was supporting an
as a counter model to the kind of housing then see this as the affirmation of an existing architect – you – in coming up with such
being built? typology or as its critique? a radical proposal for high-density housing.
NB  No, it wasn’t really a model, only an NB  It was never set up like that. The design You say that at first Rowley found it hard to
event, something that simply happened. And it simply worked itself out through its making. follow, but this seems understandable given
had no great pretensions. It was really just about The temptation for all architects is to talk about that nobody had done modern housing at this
doing it my way, which was the way I’d learnt your work as if it were the conclusion of all that density and at this three-storey height before.
for myself and from the experiences I had had you had been previously thinking. In fact, you It was a new prototype.
with Lyons, Israel & Ellis. only really discover what you do by doing it. NB I think that’s right. We actually
MS  But when you moved to the architects Of course, at the back of your mind are all sorts exceeded the planning density by quite some
department of Camden Council and were of complicated motives and memories and margin. Camden couldn’t believe it. But a lot
given the job of having to design Fleet Road, references. But just as with painters, these of it was down to the remarkable man that was
were you thinking that here in my back sources are not hierarchical, and sometimes Sydney Cook. I basically got the job with Sydney
pocket I’ve already got something that could you seek out a reference only after you have – or rather Mr Cook, I should never call him
be the first step? developed something. For instance, at Fleet Sydney, and he called me Mr Brown – after he
NB  It wasn’t in my back pocket, it was in Road I had the idea of creating this series of saw Winscombe Street. The planners had also
my mind. But you’re right, the thinking routes down through the middle of the scheme, been up to visit Winscombe Street, as had
between the two was consistent, certainly in but it wasn’t until after I had done this that Rowley and Peggy Duff, who had long champi-
terms of the elements – windows (stained I wondered what the hell I should call them. oned English council housing and was a very
softwood frames) and details (balustrades with Up popped the word ‘alley’, which then made important figure at that time, both in Camden
their heavy upper handrail and steel reinforcing it seem as if they were a reference to a particular and nationally. I used to frequently meet with
mesh, etc) and also the interiors, which were part of London’s street culture and history. Sydney Cook. Even though Fleet Road is now
all flexible spaces with sliding partitions I remember using the term in all my discussions listed as being built between 1966 and 1967 the
(and which were all later used again at Alexan- dates are misleading. It took a long time to
dra Road). But that’s not to say the whole thing develop the scheme, and I struggled horribly
followed easily. It was actually an incredible with all sorts of messy things, but eventually,
effort to arrive at the complex section at Fleet working always through sketch sections, the
Road, and I tried all sorts of combinations design took shape.
of slab blocks and low blocks. Ultimately, the MS  And as much as the alley, or rather
key to the section was the alley down the middle passageway, was crucial to the scheme,
of each block, with the houses backing onto this a dominant element – as at Winscombe Street
(something Ed Jones was a bit critical of). – was the communal garden.
But the alley allowed the houses themselves NB  Yes, but as planned, the scheme was
to be wide frontage and not deep, with this also hugely informed by the idea of continuity
width meaning that you could design an interior and the road – not just the new vehicular layout
that people could move around in. The alley around Fleet Road, Southampton Road and
also meant the front door was accessed through Mansfield Road, but a pedestrian route
a threshold, like Winscombe Street, and like that bound the whole thing together. Two key
those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century planners – Bruno Schlaffenberg and his
London town houses. For the upper dwellings assistant Tony Michael – had come up with
at Fleet Road, you also get a special place a model for London built around the idea of
a series of what they termed ‘critical routes’,
which were basically pedestrian systems linking
Above: Neave Brown, axonometric drawing existing destinations with new buildings. The
of two-, four- and five-person units,
Fleet Road scheme was to become integrated
Fleet Road, 1969
into one of these critical routes, and so pedes-
Aerial view of the Fleet Road estate, trian traffic was to ramp up from street level to
looking west towards Hampstead, c 1975 bridge over Mansfield Road and be continued

aa files 67 83
 tea – and Alvin was clearly of their persuasion.
As far as I was concerned, he was sympathetic
with them because he was from North America.
In the US and Canada there had never been
the same terrible war damage that we had
witnessed in Europe, or all the population
movements or any of those traumatic wartime
anxieties. Partly as a result, in America there
was never that continuity between social,
cultural and political ideas, or the goals we had
in Europe. Instead, American capitalism was
a given, and an alternative position could only
express itself through anti-establishment
thinking that was subversive without being
fundamentally critical or engaged. Americans
don’t get the idea of architecture as a socially
responsive goal. They just don’t. Instead,
architecture is celebrated as something which
is basically a monument or series of isolated
monuments, and in its suburbanisation, like
Wright’s Broadacre City, totally removes itself
from an engagement with the city. This for me
was an architecture that simply adjusted itself
to capitalism rather than fundamentally
reshaping it. And at the AA, Alvin was typical of
this kind of thinking.
by upper walkways in another development we were becoming the geriatrics, and the rather MS  By that time in the late 1960s you must
then still to be built the other side of the road. special geriatrics who had been the initiators. have also been dealing with Alvin through your
With this plan in place, I managed to get the A three-storey house with a circular staircase role on the AA Council.
council to finance my own elevated walkway was also perhaps not the best plan for two NB  After teaching at the AA I joined the
running the length of the Fleet Road scheme, elderly people. So we sat around talking about council, and went on to become vice president.
not simply as something contained within the where the hell we could go. Janet said the This was when the idea of merging with
estate but as part of a public route. The alleys scheme she really liked best was Fleet Road. Imperial was the only real agenda. It was clearly
would then flow perpendicularly directly into A week or so earlier I’d been speaking to one of a moment of crisis. I was totally opposed to the
this route, with a bloody great urban element – the Fleet Road residents about its architectural idea and would rather have seen the AA elimi-
a ramp and stairs – at one end to access it. ideas, and so I phoned her and asked if she nated than join up with Imperial, because I,
The whole thing was in this way a continuous knew of any flats for sale. She said yes, the one like everybody else, had thrived precisely
diagram, with alleys flowing into routes which next door. And so within 15 minutes I was on because of the school’s independence. Later
would then cross not only this estate but whole my bicycle racing to the estate agent. We put in of course, Alvin arrived into the vacuum that
swathes of north London. The only problem an offer and eventually got the flat. It was one had developed when the Imperial idea was
was that later, when the planners developed of those major events in life. rejected. He had left the AA a few years earlier
the designs for the adjacent scheme the other TW  Consistent with the way your work and was running a school in Chicago. He had
side of Southampton Road, they completely constantly alternates between the worlds actually invited me to teach in Chicago – not
forgot about the bridge. They were absolutely of practice and education, can we quickly break because he agreed with what I was doing, but
confounded when I pointed this out to them. from Fleet Road and return to your teaching, because he wanted a discourse, he wanted an
In the end, they could only recover by putting because as Fleet Road was being completed argument. In this sense, he was a very demand-
in foundations and substructure for this bridge, you were also then teaching and involved back ing man. You could see the same thing in the
but of course it never happened. So all the at the AA. unit structure he introduced into the AA.
stuff you see at the end of my scheme – the NB  I had moved back to the AA after Each had its own specific cultural, social and
ramps and stairways which I actually like – teaching at Regent Street Polytechnic, but that aesthetic identity – and he kept changing them
were just one part of a much bigger piece of whole period at the AA was dominated by the around all the time, never getting stuck with
planning infrastructure at the scale of a new drama with Imperial College, and with Alvin one group or aspect.
idea of the city. Boyarsky arriving, leaving and then coming TW  But before Alvin could change the AA’s
TW  You designed Fleet Road while still back again. Alvin and I were friends, but just as teaching model, the AA first had to survive the
living in Winscombe Street, but we’re now all with Stirling, we had certain fundamental Imperial merger.
sitting together in your Fleet Road living room, divergences of opinion. For me, his ideas about NB  The saga with Imperial all got very
which has become your home. When did this architecture were never goal-directed enough. complicated. And Alvin would only come back
move happen? At the AA, the imperative to produce a building if the goddam council could be curtailed – he
NB  We moved much later – only six years or suddenly got lost. Of course, this was the period
so ago. Janet and I confided in each other that that saw the emergence of Cedric Price,
The Southampton Road facade
we were both feeling ever so slightly uncomfort- Archigram and Peter Cook, Daniel Libeskind, of the Fleet Road estate
able in Winscombe Street. We loved it, of Rem Koolhaas and Charles Jencks as a total © Martin Charles/RIBA Library
course, and we also loved our neighbours, but social/cultural phenomenon – never my cup of Photographs Collection

84 aa files 67
detested the council and wanted to run things delighted to join us. I then had the terrible off. I returned to the restaurant and explained
his own way. What was funny, though, was that dilemma of who else to invite. that Monsieur Le Corbusier had lost his coat.
in the discussions he would just speak with me. MS  ‘Guess who’s coming to lunch?’ The maître d’ said, ‘That’s funny, two coats
We’d meet and talk and go out for dinners, just NB  Oh god, it was tough, what a decision! gone in the same day!’ I said, ‘I might be able
as old friends, but then the serious talk would In the end there was a few of us including to help with one of them’. In the end, both coats
start and he’d become unbelievably ghastly. And Patrick Hodgkinson, Ken Frampton, David were returned to their rightful owners.
of course, in the end, he did become chairman Gray, John Miller, Adrian Gale and others.
of the school. At that time Patrick had this wonderful old
MS  But there was some overlap between open-top car – a Bayliss-Thomas – and we
Alvin’s early years at the AA and your own picked up Le Corbusier from the Berkeley
teaching? Hotel, with Patrick driving like a demon
NB  I taught a unit for a brief period with through the streets of London. Corb just sat
David Gray, running a programme that looked in the back seat, trying to keep his hat from
at English modernism. We all knew about the blowing off while exclaiming, ‘Oh la jeunesse,
heroic stuff, and our way around Corb, Aalto, oh la jeunesse’. We took him to a nice little Greek
Gropius and all the others, but we also knew restaurant just off the Euston Road. On arrival,
pretty bloody well that we didn’t want to work Adrian Gale offered him a cigarette (‘Fumez-
that way. Of course, we still subscribed to the vous, maître’?). He was absolutely lovely with us,
idea of the free plan and the technologies and very sweet and never difficult or patronising. TW  Despite your obvious fondness for Le
certain aesthetics of modernism, but at the I remember taking a satchel with me, with a pad Corbusier can you just talk a little more about
same time we didn’t want to simply replicate the of paper and some pencils. After our food we your gradual rejection of certain of his core
model designs of the interwar years, including all talked about architecture, mostly in French, urban ideas, not just with your teaching but
those by Corb. and he produced all these funny little drawings later with your work on Fleet Road and Alexan-
to explain his ideas. Given that I’d organised dra Road? This rejection goes back to your AA
[Huge clap of thunder outside] the whole thing I made damn sure I was sitting days, no?
next to him. And of course, I kept the drawings. NB  To a certain degree, yes, but at the AA
MS  That was Corb, Neave, he must have I still have them now – seven or eight sheets in my fourth year I was still doing slab-block
heard you! of sketches. After a few hours we were feeling housing. Increasingly, though, we started
NB  Sorry Corb. terribly worried about him being late for his to look at other things which became equally
TW  Did you ever meet him? next appointment at the RIBA, but he just important (Aalto, etc), and especially at
NB  Indeed I did. I met him in 1953 when he wanted to stay and talk. Eventually he got up to an English typology. I remember, for instance,
came to London to receive his RIBA gold medal. go and went over to the coat rack to get his sitting with Patrick (way ahead of me) and
I was still studying at the AA at the time, and hat and coat. But his coat had gone. I thought, studying how the London Inns of Court worked
as soon as I heard about the award I wrote to ‘Jesus Christ, now what are we going to do?’ But – where you had a continuous architecture
him (‘Cher maître’), asking if he would have time Corb just walked along the line of other coats, of different enclosures producing different
to meet with a small group of architectural feeling their fabric and checking their cuffs and hierarchies and sequences of spaces. Within
students over lunch. A week later I got a letter shape and picked out the one he liked best. those spaces you also had special areas, like
from his secretary saying that he would be We then shot back to the RIBA and dropped him chapels and meeting rooms, also part of the
same institution. This seemed exactly like the
way the Oxbridge colleges were organised,
and also used the same typologies implemented
by the great English architects in Bath, Win-
chester, Leamington, Bristol, Brighton, etc.
Patrick and John Miller and David Gray and
I would talk about this all the time – how to find
a way to accommodate an English culture and
sensibility into all our ideas about modernism.
So of course we took on the complex of modern-
ist ideas, including building techniques,
function and the free plan releasing the lives
of its occupants, so that for housing they were
no longer defined by the social strata of the
parlour, the living room and front hall, but we
also wanted to challenge and infuse into
modernism elements of the English cities and
culture around us.

Above: Fleet Road, ramps and staircase linking

to the elevated walkway, c 1975

Fleet Road, rear terrace of block 1, looking west

© Martin Charles/RIBA Library
Photographs Collection

aa files 67 85
 a big issue with the planners whether to save to go to Princeton for a semester and I can then
the site and restore all the buildings or use the time to design deeply while I’m there?’
demolish the whole thing and start again. Generous man that he was, he said yes, and so
In the end, they realised that it represented part I bundled myself onto an airplane with great
of an area stretching right into central London, rolls of drawings under my arm. The students
and by redeveloping it they could achieve set their own programme and so all I had to do
considerable housing gain at a time when there was tutor them, and the rest of the time I spoke
was a desperate need for social housing. The to Alan Colquhoun and all the people there
brief was for a site of 16 acres, for housing to about Alexandra Road and designed the thing.
the highest zoned density, a school, community TW  So some of this pioneering social
centre, shops, pub, building department housing scheme in north London was actually
depot, etc, and a four-acre ‘public open space’, designed in a little suburban Ivy League campus
two acres of which were incorporated within in New Jersey?
the housing open space so as not to lose NB  That’s right! And just imagine all the
housing numbers and gain density. It included components I had to deal with – 520 new
the integration of the adjoining Boundary dwellings and the absorption of 180 existing
Road Estate and the later addition of a youth ones, a site bounded on one side by the Euston
club and play centre. The community centre main line, open public space for a whole
was backed by Camden’s mayor – Bill Budd, neighbourhood, underground garage, extra
about 5’ 2”, quite stocky and a lovely man, storage, a special school, laundromat, shops,
resident of Boundary Road – and was to be used community centre, building department depot
to integrate the new and existing communities. and a youth club. I added the last of these
For a young architect who was not yet 40 years before I was even asked – I just thought it was
old it was just an amazing challenge. essential. With Neil Kenworthy, my genius of
MS  The result is incredibly striking, a quantity surveyor, we had called it ‘service
TW  Did that feel slightly heretical? but would you describe it as beautiful? centre annexe’ and no one had questioned it.
NB  No, it felt like a huge relief. Because one NB  I think so, yes. I hope it is seen as A week or so later I received a telephone call and
looked with awe and amazement at the glory of a whole, as one continuous figure framing and was asked, apologetically as it was so late in the
Le Corbusier’s buildings and with horror at his integrating the open space in the traditional day, if I could also squeeze in a youth club. I said
Ville Radieuse. And this is what I tried to do with way, delivered by a complex section. It took I knew where there might be a corner for it. The
my own work, and particularly at Fleet Road a long time. The central joining area, the school notion of integration that dictated the interlock-
and at Alexandra Road: to take on all the aspects and community centre, boiler house, parking, ing of all these components was the core of
of modernism that you see in Corb’s buildings etc, came last, and was actually designed while the Alexandra Road ideas system. And so the
and projects and first urban blocks – where I was at Princeton. I’d had an invitation from housing blocks frame the open public space,
the block meets the street, and where you have Robert Maxwell to teach there, and so I went into which the walkways also join, across the
cars and people and a front door and a garden to see Sydney Cook and said, ‘Look, this needs front face of the community centre, which looks
behind – and to reject the later urban block a lot of my care and attention, and I will have to down the public space and connects the
he developed, where everything faces inwards, do it quietly and on my own. Will you allow me pre-existing LCC estate with the new Alexandra
the social street no longer exists and inner
spaces are related only through a sequence of
underground walkways.
MS  But as much as it was the manifestation
of your own, synthetic ideas of an English mo-
dernism, a project like Alexandra Road, which
you worked on with Camden council immedi-
ately after the completion of Fleet Road, was
also an absolutely classic architectural product
of the welfare state. In that sense it didn’t follow
Corb. It was actually addressing the city through
the provision of housing, social services and all
of that.
NB  Absolutely right. It was the most remar-
kable brief for a site that was then Victorian
villa housing in decay, a mess. It was actually

Above: Neave Brown, axonometric drawing

of two-, three- and four-person units,
Alexandra Road, 1978

Alexandra Road, rear elevation of

block A backing onto the Euston main line
© Martin Charles/RIBA Library
Photographs Collection

86 aa files 67
Road estate; the community centre is connected
to the kitchen and the hall of the school below;
the classrooms themselves were two long wings
ending with the biggest part of the playground,
which opens directly into the youth club so that
the kids in the club could use the playground
and help out with the children in the school;
and the school’s gardens connect into the main
public space; and the back walls of the school
form the main walls that support the entrance
walkway and the ramps for the housing. As
much as holding the whole scheme together,
all of this integration was also a huge economy
because most of the cost of the public stuff
– walls, spaces, ramps, etc – was paid for by the
joining up and overlapping of the accommoda-
tion, especially the school, and without anyone
knowing.
MS  Given this spatial complexity did you
also use models as part of the design process?
NB  No, I never worked with models.
I only did sketches and drawings. Endlessly.
Constantly trying to figure it all out, which for
so long meant going to bed feeling very
unhappy, but then getting up the next day and
going back to it. Pencil and ink sketches, and TW  But of course, the stress, and euphoria, What didn’t help was that they first went to visit
drawing to scale. I remember as a student the involved in designing the scheme turned out to Alexandra Road when the building was incom-
only thing I had a problem with on an architec- be nothing compared to the conflict it gener- plete and the site was in a bit of a state – we had
tural drawing was the lettering – I’m dyslexic ated during its construction. these Irish builders who were wonderfully good,
and so I could never write, until David Gray, NB  Oh god, it was terrible. The planning but like a lot of builders they always left the site
who I shared a flat with, more or less took me officer and Camden’s new director of housing really messy. But of course, the real reason
by the ear and taught me how to letter. The way did all they possibly could to stop it. It got really Livingstone and the rest hated it was that they
he did it was to move it into a different part of bad. In response we set up our own informal thought they would never be able to justify it
my brain, and so instead of being handwriting, Alexandra Road Committee, which included politically. Remember that historically this was
I looked at it as making objects in sequence. me, the consultants, the proposed head of the a resolutely right-wing area at the top end of St
So I basically drew letters, and from then on new school, Bill Budd, some medical people, John’s Wood. So while the site was bordered by
I could letter just fine. a couple of young men from the housing all these barristers and lawyers in their detached
MS  And when you’d done it, when the department who liked the scheme and a few eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses,
design was complete, was there a sense of others. With this committee we had meetings Alexandra Road represented a working-class
euphoria or relief? with the local police, we also involved the local enclave and Livingstone was desperate to
NB  Oh, Christ yes! Huge pleasure. Massive vicar and we showed drawings of the scheme maintain their Labour vote. Because of this the
pleasure. Indecent pleasure. and discussed it in local pubs and all kinds of borough took against the scheme hard. And
TW  As a kind of Eureka? community places, all to counter the objections the leader of this opposition and chief instigator
NB  Eureka is an instant. It wasn’t like that that were then developing, particularly from of all objections seemed to be Ken Livingstone.
because the solution only arrives here and there Ken Livingstone. Of course, in the end we did manage to finish it,
as you progressively sort it out. It’s a cumulative TW  What was Livingstone’s objection to it? but we did this in what felt like highly politi-
moment. But of course once you resolve the NB  Livingstone was then newly elected cised opposition.
design this only gives you the proposition as chair of Camden’s Housing Committee and MS  What about the tenants, or rather the
and the order and the organisation. You then was deeply influenced by the new director of future tenants?
have to get into the design of the elements – housing, who hated it. They all thought it would NB  The politicians were scared they
stairs (I love staircases), walls, windows, be a catastrophe – social, political, financial wouldn’t like it and would refuse to live there,
rooflights, profiles and all the detail. It’s – and that nobody would ever want to live there. and the tenants were hearing all sorts of
a seamless process. Detailing in a way is not rumours. At the time there was this economic
‘doing it afterwards’, but – and this is me being crisis when costs were escalating enormously
pretentious – is more like the grace notes – something that we, the architects, had no
of a Mozart. It’s continuous. control over – and so many of them were led to
see it as a hugely expensive scheme whose
construction lurched from one crisis to another,
Above: Alexandra Road, south elevation of block B ending up with housing that nobody would ever
© Martin Charles/RIBA Library
want to live in. Livingstone’s group was
Photographs Collection
desperate to distance themselves from Alexan-
Aerial view looking east over the dra Road and not be blamed for it and so they
Alexandra Road park and estate, c 1980 launched a public enquiry on the building

aa files 67 87
 Neave Brown, cross-section through
the entirety of the Alexandra Road estate, 1972
© Neave Brown
before it was even finished. Politics works like
that. Luckily, though, and partly through the
efforts of our own informal Alexandra Road
Committee, construction continued and
the project was finally completed. With the site
cleared, and the trees planted and the walls
cleaned it suddenly looked beautiful. Marvel-
lous. And you know what? People immediately
queued up to live there, and those that got
in loved it from day one. The council was
more than slightly disorientated by that. The
only thing they could then do was to bury the
public enquiry.
TW  They never admitted they had been
wrong about Alexandra Road?
NB  Good god no. The whole thing was
pretty bloody awful. Years and years of work
culminated in this miserably unhappy period
of conflict. Furthermore it ended my career. The
irony is that when I started Alexandra Road
and talked to Sydney Cook he said, ‘If you build
this building you’ll never have a problem’. But
then when I had built it I found myself in the
middle of a public enquiry that was desperately
looking for a scapegoat, and who else can be the
scapegoat but the architect? And so I left exhibitions, not long after the completion of biggest car park in the country. Unlike any-
Camden physically and emotionally exhausted. Alexandra Road, that I got a call from Herman where else in Holland there was a dip in the site
Of course my friends all offered their support. Hertzberger, who invited me to Amsterdam to and so I saw the idea of bringing in vehicles at
I remember Jim Stirling calling me up and saying give a talk and take part in some student this point by going down half a storey, creating
he’d like me to take his whole office around seminars. By then Alexandra Road was hitting a vast underground car park beneath the whole
Alexandra Road. The all-day tour ended back at the architectural journals all over Europe and building, with apartments, hotel, hostel and
his house with a garden party. After everyone was generating a hell of a lot of attention. And shops above. We arranged the apartments in
had gone I remember sitting there with Jim and so I went, had all these meetings and interesting low-rise blocks at the sea end, and in high-rise
Mary and they were asking me what I was going conversations not only with Hertzberger but towers further inland among the dunes,
to do next. I said, ‘I’m going into private with Alvaro Siza who was also there, even demarcating the edge of the city. I thought of it
practice’. Jim said I was an idiot, because any organised an exhibition of my work in Amster- later as like medieval towers. Connecting both
architect who was the victim of a public enquiry dam, and generally had a very nice time. What ends was a covered walkway that acted as a kind
wouldn’t get another job in England for ten I didn’t know was that Hertzberger was using of central, formalised spine, running the length
years at least, and probably never. That’s when it this meeting as a way to select an architect for of the scheme and connecting every front door.
all dawned on me, and Jim was right, I never did a big scheme called Zwolsestraat in the Hague. MS  But you resigned from the job before
work again in England. Only later did I realise it had come down to me completion.
and Siza and because of my experience with NB  It was another project that ended badly.
Alexandra Road I got the job. We had started with a mayor who was young,
MS  And you did the Zwolsestraat project creative, but also a little aggressive. Having had
with David Porter? the problem with the enquiry on Alexandra
NB  Yes. We set up a firm together. David Road I said if I commit myself to this I want to
had been my assistant when I did Fleet Road make sure I have the support to do it all the way
and we designed the scheme as a mixed-use through to the end. He gave me his assurances,
development. It was another huge brief that but then later the mayor left, the contractor
had been worked on by various different changed and mistakes were made with financ-
people. As a result, all of the buildings were ing which meant that we were suddenly asked
separated out into lots of little lumps. And to change and compromise the design. David
so one of the main problems was integrating and I fought like demons to keep it all as we had
everything back together again. The other envisioned it but in the end we lost out. And so
TW  But you did work again in England, even problem was the car parking. They wanted the we resigned. There was a lot of criticism about
if this was only on some small exhibitions for this – as if we had walked out on them – but I
the Arts Council. still feel it was the right thing to do.
NB  Yes, I did design the ‘Thirties British Art Above: View looking west along MS  Despite this setback you continued
and Design’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery the pedestrian street between blocks A and B to attract work in Europe, notably the Italian
© Martin Charles/RIBA Library
in 1978, and ten years later I did the ‘Le Corbus- project in Bergamo.
Photographs Collection
ier: Architect of the Century’ show, also at the NB  I actually did five projects in Bergamo
Hayward. But there was no other English work. Alexandra Road, west-facing elevation – a cluster of developments just outside the city
And it was after I had done the first of these of block A, c 1978 – only one of which was built, with my friend

90 aa files 67
Armando Malvestiti. Like all of my work I got it then formulate their own reasons for making
just by flying blind. I’ve basically flown blind my their choice. And as with all of my own work,
whole life. And my last project was back in nothing that they produced was to be a one-off,
Holland, in Eindhoven. but something that integrates and contributes
MS  Eindhoven was yet another big scheme, to a bigger whole.
city centre site, placing a large housing develop- MS  And just to conclude this whole story,
ment into an existing, sensitive urban location. after Karlsruhe and after Eindhoven you retired
Did it seem as if it was all the issues with as an architect and did the one thing, more
Alexandra Road all over again? than 50 years later, you had first wanted to do
NB  Eindhoven came about through Jo – you enrolled at art school.
Coenen, who was the Dutch state architect, and NB  Yes, almost overnight I stopped being
who I had met earlier through the Zwolsestraat an architect. My subscription to Architecture
job. Jo had actually already designed a large Today ran out and I never renewed it. Same with
urban layout scheme for much of central my RIBA membership. I also stopped giving
Eindhoven, incorporating a pedestrian street talks and lectures and taking part in crits. And
with commercial building and housing along- in its place I became a student again, enrolling
side it. But he wanted at its centre a new in the foundation programme at the City
mixed-use project, combining housing, offices and Guilds of London Art School. Of course, we
and shops. He called this a ‘green terraced all know those architects who finish their career
medina’ – what the residents still call it today. and then end up doing watercolours of the
And because of his familiarity with Alexandra corners of renaissance palaces. I absolutely
Road, he invited me to design this new medina. didn’t want to do that. And so I found myself in
The scheme itself was an incredible struggle my 70s hanging out with all these kids in their
of geometry, being a staggered section, with teens and early 20s. I had a fantastic time.
shopping and offices underneath, and We’d all be mucking in together, on our hands
changing in scale so as to integrate both faces said that this would be fine. So I ended up and knees working with plaster of Paris and
– the old city scale and the new urban core. doing two years like that and a further year as bits of coloured paper – basically all the kinds
And so yes, this was a continuation from a consultant professor. of things you’d do in a first year. I finished the
Alexandra Road. You don’t change ideas. But you MS  And what exactly did you do there? three-year course and got my degree. I’m not
do develop them. I couldn’t have done Eind- NB  I was in charge of all the design teach- really a very good artist, but I’m no longer
hoven without having done Alexandra Road, and ing. Of course there were lots of other good an architect. The two are totally different. For
I couldn’t have done Alexandra Road without people there, and I brought in friends like John all the other students around me it was the
first doing Fleet Road and Winscombe Street. Miller for crits, but I would set all the design beginning of their professional lives and they
MS  It was also through Jo Coenen of course briefs. We mostly used local sites around had absolutely no idea about the future.
that you got the last of your academic appoint- Karlsruhe, with overlapping programmes that For me, I was filled with a very powerful idea
ments, as professor at Karlsruhe. the students could choose from. Of course, of a past and a simple desire to muddle myself
NB  That was after the collapse of the one of the interesting things about providing into some other way of doing things. Flying
Zwolsestraat job, when Jo was professor at different choices for the students is that they blind once again.
Karlsruhe but before he had to give it up to
take up the state architect role. He was
desperate for me to take over his academic
position, and even arranged an interview
before asking me. And so I caught the train
to Karlsruhe thinking to myself the whole time
that I couldn’t possibly accept this position.
When I got there I found that Jo had already
pinned up on the walls all my preliminary
drawings for the Eindhoven project, but still,
I had to explain to them that I would never have
the time to commit to a full-time teaching
job. They simply asked how much time I could
spare. Off the cuff I said it couldn’t be more
than three days every two weeks. They all went
into a little huddle, whispering away to them-
selves, and then came back around the table

Above: View looking west along the pedestrian

street between blocks A and B, c 1978

View from the community centre towards block A

© Martin Charles/RIBA Library
Photographs Collection

aa files 67 91
Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an artist and teacher born and
brought up in Westphalia, Germany and who later studied
Contributors Christine Hawley studied at the AA and is currently professor
of architectural design at the Bartlett, UCL, where she also
art in Munich and from 1920 at the Bauhaus in Weimar. acted as head, 1993–99 and dean, 1999–2009. She has had
After graduating he was asked by Walter Gropius to continue a number of visiting professorships in the US, Europe,
on at the school as a teacher, later promoted to professor. Australia and Asia and her work has been built in Japan,
In 1933 he and his wife Anni left Germany for the US, and Germany and the UK – the most notable being housing
through the influence of Philip Johnson he secured a job as François Charbonnet is co-founder along with Patrick Heiz in Gifu, Japan and in Berlin for the IBA. Her work has been
head of a new art school, Black Mountain College, in North of the architecture studio Made in Sàrl, based in Geneva. exhibited and published internationally, most recently
Carolina, where his students included Robert Rauschenberg After graduating from the ETH Zurich with a thesis in ‘Dirty, Dangerous, Delicate Drawings’ at the Danish
and Cy Twombly. In 1950 he moved again to Yale as head supervised by Hans Kollhoff, he collaborated with Herzog Architecture Centre, Copenhagen and her work will be
of the department of design, where he taught until his & de Meuron and then OMA before setting up his own office published in the forthcoming book, Transitions: Concepts +
retirement in 1958. He continued to paint and write, and in in 2003 with Patrick Heiz. In addition to his work in practice Drawings + Buildings. She was awarded a CBE in 2008.
1963 he published his famous treatise on colour, Interaction he is a frequent lecturer and has been a visiting professor at
with Colour, which is still in print today. the EPF Lausanne (2010–11) and the ETH Zurich (2011–13). Mari Lending is professor in architectural history and theory
at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and founding
Richard Anderson is lecturer in architectural history at the Alan Colquhoun (1921–2012) was an architect, teacher and member of OCCAS (the Oslo Centre of Critical Architectural
University of Edinburgh where he is currently completing critic who studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the AA Studies). She is currently working on the book, Monuments
a survey of Russia’s modern architecture. His writing has before working for Lyons, Israel & Ellis and the LCC in the in Flux: Plaster Casts as Mass Medium.
appeared in Future Anterior, Grey Room, Log and in the book 1950s. In 1961 he set up a partnership with the architect
In Search of a Forgotten Architect: Stefan Sebök 1901–1941 John Miller which produced a succession of well-known Will McLean is the joint coordinator of technical studies in
(2012). He is also co-author, with Kristin Romberg, of buildings including the Royal Holloway College chemistry the faculty of architecture at the University of Westminster.
Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union, building, Forest Gate school and the refurbishment of He has co-authored three books with Pete Silver, most
1919–1935 (2005) and editor and principal translator of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. At the same time Colquhoun recently Structures in Action: Structural Engineering for
Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Metropolisarchitecture and Selected worked academically as an architectural historian, visiting Architects, to be published by Laurence King in February
Essays (2012). the US as a guest professor at Princeton University as early 2014. In 2008 he established Bibliotheque McLean,
as 1966 before taking up a full professorship there in 1981 an independent publisher of architecture books. The first
Elisabetta Andreoli studied the history of modern art and until his eventual retirement in 2001. Among his numerous publication was Quik Build: Adam Kalkin’s ABC of Container
the history of modern architecture and has worked at writings on architecture he is perhaps best known for his Architecture (2008), and forthcoming publications
Westminster University and the AA. She has also produced Essays in Architectural Criticism (1985). include Building with Air by Dante Bini (2014) and a reprint
documentaries on the politics of Latin America and is the of Experiments in Gothic Structure by Robert Mark (2014).
author of Brazil’s Modern Architecture (2005), with Adrian Mark Cousins is a filmmaker, writer and curator. His films,
Forty, and Bolivia Contemporánea (2012). She divides her time The Story of Film: An Odyssey, The First Movie, Here be Paul Martin is an artist and curator and lives in London.
between La Paz and London. Dragons, What is this Film Called Love and A Story of Children
and Film, have played in Cannes, MoMa in New York and Irena Murray is an architectural historian, senior research
Samantha Briggs is a PhD candidate in English at the all around the world. His books include Imagining Reality: fellow at the Royal Institute of British Architects and
University of Exeter where she also teaches. Her thesis, The Faber book of Documentary, Watching Real People is currently teaching architectural history in Brno, Czech
‘Architecture and Hardy’, examines an engagement with Elsewhere and The Story of Film. Cousins also co-curates Republic. Her research focuses on modernism, transna-
the built environment in the fiction of Thomas Hardy. events with Tilda Swinton, has won the Prix Italia, Traverse tional architecture and issues associated with the language
City’s Visionary Award and is honorary professor of film at of architecture. She is the co-editor of Le Corbusier and
Timothy Brittain-Catlin taught the history of architecture at the University of Glasgow. Britain (2008) and, with Peter Carl, co-curated the 2009
the AA from 2001–07 and is now senior lecturer at the Kent exhibition ‘The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier
School of Architecture, University of Kent. His Bleak Houses: Wayne Daly is a graphic designer at the Architectural and Baghdad’.
Disappointment and Failure in Architecture will be published Association and co-founder of the AA’s imprint Bedford
by MIT Press in April 2014. Press. He recently established the micro-press Precinct, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is an associate professor at Yale School
publishing books which focus on music criticism, including of Architecture, where she teaches design, history and
Neave Brown trained at the AA in the early 1950s alongside a recent essay by Adam Harper on the work of American theory of architecture and directs the Masters of Environ-
Patrick Hodgkinson, David Gray, Adrian Gale, John Miller musician John Maus and an updated translation of mental Design programme. She is the author of three books
and Kenneth Frampton, and after working for Lyons, Israel Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music. He has – Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary
& Ellis and a brief stint in private practice he was employed written for The National Grid and A Circular, and has guest Austrian Architecture (1996), Alvar Aalto: Architecture,
under Sydney Cook in the architecture department of lectured at London College of Communication, Werkplaats Modernity and Geopolitics (2009) and Kevin Roche: Architecture
Camden council, producing two ground-breaking social Typografie and the American University of Beirut. as Environment (2011) – and a co-editor of Eero Saarinen:
housing schemes at Fleet Road and Alexandra Road. Shaping the Future (2006).
He has also combined his architectural work with teaching Henderson Downing is researching psychogeography
in the UK, Europe and the US. and urbanism at Birkbeck, University of London and Alex Schweder is a New York-based artist who has described
is a visiting lecturer in the department of culture, writing his work as ‘performance architecture’ since his Rome
Peter Carl trained at Princeton, subsequently working and performance at London South Bank University. Prize Fellowship in 2006. This work has been exhibited
in Michael Graves’s office for two years. After a further internationally, including at Tate Britain, Tel Aviv Museum
two years in Rome, and two more at the University of Andrea Fredericksen is the former Samuel H Kress Fellow at of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the
Kentucky, he spent three decades teaching at Cambridge Tate Britain where she catalogued J M W Turner’s diagrams 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Schweder is an associate
University before taking up his present position, directing for his Royal Academy lectures. Her research informed  professor of architecture at Pratt Institute and has
the PhD programme in architecture for the CASS Faculty ‘J M W Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours’, previously taught at the Southern California Institute of
of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan an ongoing project to provide a comprehensive, online Architecture, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the AA.
University. He publishes erratically on issues pertaining inventory of the Turner Bequest. She is currently curator at He is also currently a doctoral candidate in the architecture
to history and philosophy of architecture and the city, UCL Art Museum, University College London, facilitating department at the University of Cambridge.
most recently in the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale object-based teaching and learning.
reader, Common Ground. Mark Swenarton is an architectural historian and critic and
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet. is currently James Stirling Professor of Architecture at the
Mario Carpo is associate professor of architectural history Born in a small village just east of Dorchester, his father University of Liverpool. He was formerly head of the Oxford
at the school of architecture of Paris La Villette and Vincent worked as a stonemason and builder, and age 16 Hardy Brookes school of architecture and was co-founder of
Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect. He later studied the monthly review Architecture Today. He is the author
Yale School of Architecture. His latest books are The Digital at King’s College, London, winning prizes for his of Homes fit for Heroes (1981) and Building the New Jerusalem
Turn in Architecture, 1992–2012, An AD Reader (2012) and The architectural renderings from the RIBA and the AA, before (2008) and is currently midway through researching a book
Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011).  establishing himself as a writer. Despite this change of on Cook’s Camden.
career, he still managed to design and build his own home
Pierre Chabard is an architect, historian and critic, at Max Gate in Dorchester, from where he wrote Tess of the Elizabeth Wilson is the author of a number of non-fiction
and associate professor at the Paris La Villette school d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, and where he died in 1928. works on dress and other aspects of cultural history,
of architecture. He is a founding member of Criticat, including Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (1985),
a French journal of architectural criticism, and with The Sphinx in the City (1991), Bohemians: The Glamorous
Marilena Kourniati recently published Raisons d’écrire: Outcasts (2000) and Love Game: A History of Tennis from
livres d’architectes (1945–1999). He is currently working Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon, which will be
on a museological history of architectural production published in 2014. She has also published three crime 
in the 1970s and 80s. novels set in the 1940s, The Twilight Hour (2006), War Damage
(2009) and most recently The Girl in Berlin (2013).