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Context | Review
CALL TO BATTLE
World War II, when we all so famously pulled together, enlisted architects too in many ways. Nick Bullock adjusts his sights
WITH ITS SNAPPY TITLE, wealth of illustrations and range of coverage, Architecture in Uniform is a fascinating book. Its ambition is to document the terms in which designers, architects and planners were engaged by all the combatant nations to further the war effort. The titanic scale of this enterprise is set by the war itself, stretching from Europe, across the Atlantic and North America to the Pacific. The book covers a range of design assignments from the moulded plywood splints and stretchers designed by Charles and Ray Eames all the way up to the visions of unlimited expansion of the Third Reich eastwards into Russia drawn up by the likes of Konrad Meyer working on the Generalplan Ost. Chapters grouped into different areas of endeavour, irrespective of nationality, makes interesting and occasionally provocative juxtapositions: in one the reader passes seamlessly from an account of the construction of the Pentagon to one on Auschwitz. The book first introduces architects forced to don uniform: Albert Speer stares
EDITORS’ SELECTION
Insular Insight Lars Müller and Akiko Miki Lars Müller Publishers £29.25 Müller’s huge architecture and art project has colonised Japan’s islands over 20 years. Here, world class artists and architects contribute to an understanding of the local and contemporary condition – all the more poignant in light of the tsunami. CK
Room for Diplomacy Mark Bertram, Spire Books £45 A history of planning and procuring the buildings that serve Britain abroad. What it lacks in character it makes up for in detail that must have taken months of combing through minutes, as well as the author Mark Bertram’s own experience with the diplomatic estate. EY
Palaces for Pigs: animal architecture and other beastly buildings Lucinda Lambton English Heritage, £25.00. Plenty of animal-related follies here, but no zoo buildings or modernism (so no Lubetkin) and the photographic reproduction is remarkably poor. A bit of a dog, really. HP
WWW.RIBAJOURNAL.COM : SEPTEMBER 2011
out of the frontispiece with Bruno Zevi. Titles are at once predictable, suggesting familiar fields of architectural activity – ‘Architects and Cities Go Off to War’, ‘Mobility and Prefabrication’ – and cover areas where architects might seem to be trespassing. But why should architects not be involved with the visual representation of statistical information or the flow of battle, or confusing the eye with camouflage? Leslie Martin, later Professor of Architecture at Cambridge,
was employed by the LMS railway company first to paint a mural to camouflage its works at Stony Stratford and later to devise a system of modular prefabrication for temporary stations. Some ideas were just silly.
Think of Buckminster Fuller’s wrong-headed proposals for round, corrugated steel grain silos as a basis for the mass-production of emergency housing. But what emerges from Cohen’s account is the sheer fertility of invention, for example, the extraordinary success of the
Architectural gigantism in wartime was not confined to the Third Reich: the US built the Pentagon in 1941-43.
Mulberry harbours and the crucial logistic contribution that they made to the Normandy landings. Cohen’s encyclopaedic approach necessarily restricts his ability to probe beneath the surface. Chapters that seek to document areas such as town planning for reconstruction can read a little breathlessly. Perhaps too, the boundary between architects’ work and design more generally is blurred: the Eames’ work is included but the Jeep is not. But such questions of balance cannot detract from the energy and intelligence with which this huge field is brought to life. If necessity is the mother of invention, war, as Cohen shows so handsomely, is an extraordinary forcing ground for ingenuity and design. n
Nick Bullock is reader in architectural and planning history at the University of Cambridge
ARCHITECTURE IN UNIFORM, DESIGNING AND BUILDING FOR THE SECOND WORLD WAR Jean-Louis Cohen
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Editions-Hazam, £40
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