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22

Context | Perspective

SO MUCH TO DO 50 YEARS AGO

RIBA Journal, September 1961. It’s the Union of International Architects’ annual conference in London, but it looks like more is going on at the official visit to Frederick Gibberd’s recently completed Harlow New Town

GUIDED BY Frederick Gibberd, we see the Anglican Church, the Law Courts, the main shopping centre, office buildings, a library and one group of housing. We pause for lunch at the ‘Harlequin’, which we enter under a vast yellow sign saying ‘BINGO tonight’. Inside, drawn pink curtains cut out the view of the trees, but to compensate for this, on peach walls newly drawn, twice-life-size young ladies leer at us through the roses between their teeth. The gin is warm. The lunch is brisk and at our table Frederick Gibberd, who has from time to time sketched freely on the pavements, is supplanted by Ralph Erskine, who draws equally freely on the table cloth, to the waitresses’ wide-eyed amazement. The tour continues to more housing, the trading estate, the baths, the station, the Catholic church, and we harass our guides and drivers by insisting on stops where none are planned and on minor detours where coaches obviously should not go. We wreck the timetable utterly. Over tea we try to assess our reactions. We are impressed – particularly by the gimmick- free quality of the work; by the way in which the buildings of stock brick are weathering and beginning to ‘belong’, by the sensitive handling of landscape and by the way in

100 YEARS AGO

RIBA Journal, September 1911. An irate member argues for a prototypical form of defects liability to reduce architects’ exposure in contract, 28 years before it was introduced

SIR- the case of Leicester Board of Guardians v. J.E. Trollop, reported in your issue of March past, gives rise to serious thought for all architects. Apparently, the ruling in this case means that architects can be held responsible for all time for defects which may occur in any building they have designed, even when it is clear that the

Imaginative ways with space, managing liability, and architects out on the town

25 YEARS AGO

The Architect, September 1986. Martin Pawley

investigates the inexorable rise of ‘Interiors’ as a discipline

The moving sidewalk: Frederick

Gibberd makes his point on the pavement.

which planting and gardens are maturing. We are delighted that shopkeepers’ reluctance to have their shops in pedestrian precincts is vanishing. And there is too much space. These distances are for car and bicycle, not pedestrians, and this is great hindrance to the creation of real urban environment. It has been an immensely worthwhile journey.

defect was caused by gross neglect and bad workmanship by the builder; and further, that having granted the ‘final certificate’ the architect, or employer, has no claim whatever against the builder, even if the deceit was deliberately committed. Anyone who has experience in building knows that the architect must trust the builder to a certain extent; and that if the builder really intends to scamp and cheat the architect, there are hundreds of ways in which they can do so with very small risk of it being detected. The RIBA form of contract was

never intended to put architects into this position. It is therefore high time that counsel’s opinion be obtained by the profession with a view to so altering the wording of the of the contract, the ‘final certificate’, or both as to allow the architect or employer to come down on the builder for defective workmanship or materials, even if discovered after the ‘final certificate’, has been granted.

We are every day putting ourselves to unlimited risks for sake of a small and hard-earned fee. The sooner we get into a stronger legal position the better.

WHATEVER ELSE it is, space is indubitably not a conversation piece. Even the congenitally garrulous fall silent when they see the sea, and a generation of space persons has disappointed the world with the banality of its observations from orbit and beyond. Modern apartments consist largely of space – which still sometimes appear in House and Garden – and suffer from the same teleprompt failure syndrome. They look rather like cars without instruments. The answer then is simple but expensive. A truly spacious modern interior, like a truly modern building, should bulge with information, from lifts that say ‘Hello’, and report the FT Index, to electronically controlled furniture that monitors your heartbeat. But matters should not stop there. The apparently empty volumes must learn to fight for their existence in a world of rising property values. While space has no value, Broadbent’s Law guarantees that it will continue to be collapsed into clutter to make room for more units: but if you can make it functional without losing it, there is a chance of survival in the marketplace. The least developed area here is sound and vision, both of which could be redesigned to require domestic space in much the same way as they required commercial space in the age of cinema. For a start, holograms can fill a void without actually destroying it. If architects started turning out that sort of stuff they would stop the cheese and twiglets art-historical set dead in their tracks. It’s worth a try.

WWW.RIBAJOURNAL.COM : SEPTEMBER 2011

RIBA LIBRARY PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION

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