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I'm glad my grandparents have hooked you in. Things are about to take a turn for the worse, I'm afraid:
My day job is as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at @LivUniArch where I work on a project about civic centres in Britain in the twentieth century.
My day job is as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at @LivUniArch where I work on a project about civic centres in Britain in the twentieth century.
Civic Centre was a new expression in British architectural and political discourse in the C20. It emerged out of the City Beautiful Movement in the US. This is a perspective of Burnham's famous plan for Chicago.
Events like the World Columbian Expo in 1893 were major events in disseminating the Beaux-Arts inspired form of city making. Incidentally in the UK, @LivUniArch was a major centre from which these ideas spread
Another really important figure in all of this was William H Lever, Lord Leverhulme. We'll come back to him shortly. Originally from Bolton, he grew an international - Imperial - business in the form of Sunlight Soap.
The City Beautiful and the creation of Civic Centres was connected to developments in the US but also the continental tradition of Stadtbaukunst. Lots of this is timely because this was foundational to modern urban design
And at a moment in which debate is raging about monuments and memorialisation especially in relation to race, I think it’s important to point out. Often placement of statues etc was part of wider urban strategy. Hence preponderance of them in late c19/early c20
Statues are symbols but I’ve seen much said about their status as ‘history’, their need to go into museums etc.
Two things on that:
Two things on that:
Museums, like cities, are not unproblematic - they haven’t been entirely ‘decolonised’ either. See @profdanhicks 's extraordinary project #MuseumsUnlocked. Re-placing torn down monuments in those institutions doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
The City, the Museum, the Exhibition - these were all tools of and strategies in nation- and empire-making. They worked - work? - together, I think; symbiotically and that’s important
As a rule of thumb, I also think seeing the connections between things, rather than necessarily focussing on individual monuments is a better approach; statuary and the placement of memorials were often as a result of particular (holistic) strategies of urban design.
In the case of the UK and London in particular this was also about creating a fittingly Imperial Metropolis.
The Town Planning Review was produced by the @LivUniArch ‘s department of Civic Design and openly discussed these strategies. Stanley Adshead wrote a series on the ‘Decoration and Furnishing of the City’, for instance:
The city ‘needs decorating and furnishing, not only with objects purely utilitarian, but also, like the ornate apartment of the well-to-do, with objets de vertu - monumental arches, sculpture, columns...things of beauty, of historic interest and such as are inspiring to the crowd
‘We must bear in mind that all objects in the street - utilitarian or otherwise - are things to be seen - parts of an organic whole, each having their respective part and place.’
‘Greatness of effect is to be obtained in the city by standardising design, by the repetition of pedestals...and of all those incidents which, like sentinels as we pass along the streets, help so wonderfully to give rhythm to the otherwise disconnected interests in a town.’
Statues specifically were symbols of ‘the culture of a great modern civilisation. The successful placing of monuments, and especially of the smaller ones, calls for a sense of appropriateness, possessed only by the artist.’
‘The most important of all monuments is that which commemorates an epoch-making event which is of national and of common interest, and which is erected to keep alive.’
So just as the American Confederate Monuments controversy is bound up with the US Progressive Movement and City Beautiful, so too is
I don’t want to be misunderstood: the removal of explicitly racist and Imperialist monuments is a good thing. I think the strategy needs to go further and deeper. Later I’ll try + talk about how I see it as deeply connected to our whole system of listing and preservationism.
