Wednesday 13th March 2024, 1pm Reilly Room
This lecture is NOT hybrid, however it will be recorded.
Click here to book your place if you are an external visitor
Synopsis
The recently published Housing Atlas: Europe – 20th Century is the work of four eminent housing scholars from across Europe: Orsina Simona Pierini (Italy), Carmen Espegel (Spain), Dick van Gameren (The Netherlands) and Mark Swenarton (UK).
The project involved the selection, and re-drawing, of nearly 90 housing projects which charted the development of the architecture of housing in Europe in the 20c, resulting in a volume of 380 pages containing around 600 drawings.
The work was started just before the onset of the Covid pandemic, which meant that all team meetings had to take place online. Unusually for a transnational project, it was self-funded by the authors and their respective institutions.
The book was published by Lund Humphries.
In this talk Mark Swenarton will look back at the origins and ambitions of the project and discuss some of the issues that arose in carrying it out – as well as some of the revelations that it produced.
Biography
Mark Swenarton is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool. Over many decades, the architecture of 20c housing has been a focus of his research, with books including Homes fit for Heroes (1981/2018), Building the New Jerusalem (2008), Architecture and the Welfare State (2015) and Cook’s Camden (2017). He recently completed a three-year term as editor of Architectural History: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.