DSD :: Colloquia, Conferences & Workshops

‘Revisions: Reconsidering Post-war Architecture and Culture’
a colloquium organised by the Delft School of Design and the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft

2 March 2010 | 14.30-16.30 | DSD | Faculty of Architecture, Julianalaan 132, Delft

In recent years design concepts, projects and buildings that were conceived in the first three decades after 1945 have attracted an increased interest of architectural historians and academic writers. At TU Delft this attention has been directed both towards individual architects, but also to the architectural experiments of Team X, as the most international and prominent ‘movement' within the architectural culture of the 1960s and early 70s.

How can this interest be explained? Are architects and historians trying to re-activate 'the' modern agenda for the contemporary situation? Is there an element of nostalgia for a historically unique period of sustained economic growth and increased social mobility, and the arrangements of the post-war welfare state and its architecture? Are these research projects intended as operative criticism, or historiography? What effect does this research activity have for current architectural education?

The massive housing and public building programmes of the post-war period continue to have a large impact on European cities. Today architects have to engage daily with buildings and neighbourhoods conceived and realised during the 1950s and 1960s: cultural buildings, housing estates, universities or shopping centres, almost without exception constructed employing industrialised building technologies.

Another reason for the renewed research interest might be the central and wide-ranging role of architecture and architects in the post-war period. Architects were given a key position in the development of the wider project of the welfare state. This particular condition resulted often in innovative -sometimes even radical - architectural and planning. Against this background, the study of the role of post-war architectures, as well as the broader debates that informed them, should have critical reverberations within the contemporary cultural and architectural debate.

Finally, examinations of the post-war period and its architecture could be seen as an act of recovering some of the socially engaged ideas that characterised the first three decades after 1945. Against the background of the gradual erosion of the institutional infrastructure of the post-war welfare state and the optimistic social vision that once informed it, a critical evaluation of the cultural objectives and social strategies might offer a reminder of the necessity of Utopian ideas for a civilised society.

This colloquium examines the motivations and impetuses of the interest in the architecture and urbanism of the post-war period. It will question the perspectives, role and importance of the research on post-war architecture and culture, and on architectural education.

The event will be introduced by Arie Graafland, head of the DSD, and Tom Avermaete, head of the research programme of the Department of Architecture.

Participants in the discussion (moderated by Christoph Grafe)
Adrian Forty, Christine Boyer, Jean Louis Cohen, Tony Fretton, Simone Hain, Wouter Davidts and Dick van Gameren

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People's Palaces - Architecture, Culture and Democracy in two cultural centres in post-war Europe

In the aftermath of World War II and particularly in the period from 1958 to 1979, the ‘cultural centre' became one of the main ingredients of state intervention in the field of culture in many European countries. In Eastern Europe cultural centres or cultural houses were, at least in many cases, part of a concept of a socially ‘embedded' culture of the working class, and therefore often (but not always) associated with existing factories or workers organisations. By contrast, the appearance of buildings housing various forms of cultural expression in those countries which found themselves in the western part of the continent, and especially those which were early adopters of the welfare state model, was particularly marked, since it raised a series of questions about the nature and the role of culture vis-à-vis civil society, existing social distinctions and the commercial cultural industries.

The book examines the emergence of cultural policies in the twentieth century and the creation of an extensive institutional infrastructure for state-sponsored cultural provision after 1945. Having set out the ideas behind the identification of culture as one of the core responsibilities of the post-war welfare state, it discusses the fundamental shift in the objectives of cultural policies and the interpenetration of politics and culture in the late 1960s in detail. This includes the effect of theoretical definitions of the public sphere within a liberal democracy as well as the significance of ideas developed by the New Left and ‘neo-avant-garde' artistic practices for new institutional concepts during the 1960s and 1970s.

The thesis focuses on two particular building projects, the South Bank in London and the Kulturhus in Stockholm. It examines the individual histories of the conception and realisation of these buildings, which were planned and built between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, and entails an analysis of their designs. Discussions of the main actors, local politicians or art administrators and the architects operating from within their particular architectural cultures are included to provide an understanding of the ideas informing the design. Each case study concludes with examinations of the realities of day-to-day use after the building had been completed and the critical reception of the projects.

Christoph Grafe

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‘Revisions: Reconsidering Post-war Architecture and Culture’

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