Vulgar modernism: J.M. Richards, modernism and the vernacular in British architecture
Kelly, Jessica (2016) Vulgar modernism: J.M. Richards, modernism and the vernacular in British architecture. Architectural History, 58. pp. 229-259. ISSN 0066-622X
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In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of the Architectural Review (AR) and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitled The Castles on the Ground (Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reason The Castles on the Ground is most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.
Jessica Kelly is Lecturer in Context and Theory of Design at the University for the Creative Arts. She studied Design History at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, with a dissertation on interwar hospital architecture in Britain and went on to complete her PhD at Middlesex University on the career of J. M. Richards as editor of the Architectural Review. She has also taught at London Metropolitan University, the University of Hertfordshire and London South Bank University. She has written for the Architectural Review and is currently contributing to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design on the subjects of ‘Design Dissemination’ and ‘Design in Britain’.
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