The Architectural Review and the Emergence of Townscape:

Though not directly captured by the camera, the lion's gaze is captivating, drawing us to the heart of this "bricolage.” Salvaged from the blitz, the stuffed lion was one of the dearest pieces of The Bride of Denmark, the pub at the basement of The Architectural Press’s offices at 9-13 Queen Anne’s Gate in London; the other probably being the mirror which carried the signatures of famous architects inscribed by a diamond stylus when they visited AR. H de C Hastings, the proprietor and chief editor of the magazine, would bring paraphernalia like the lion from abandoned bomb sites after his walks through the city, giving them a new life in “The Bride.”

Hastings, in control from 1927 to 1973, transformed AR after 1946 into a more explicitly campaigning vehicle. One of AR's most prominent campaigns was "Townscape," conceived in the early 1940s and discontinued after Hastings's tenure. The urban design idiom that resulted from this campaign, primarily associated with Gordon Cullen, AR's assistant art editor from 1946 to 1958, advocated for a piecemeal approach to urbanism, emphasizing understanding a place's "character" through its history and culture. Cullen compiled and edited the Townscape series into the famous book of the same title published by The Architectural Press. Highly criticized at the time of its inception due to its nationalist biases and overt historicist references, the discourse accompanying Townscape ‘s conception is remarkable for its instrumentalization of British history and Englishness. However, this discourse's authors were inspired not simply by the early nineteenth-century theoretical debate on the picturesque and the English garden but also by the political atmosphere surrounding this debate and the emerging field of cultural studies after the war.

This talk aims to expose and discuss the layering of discourse that contributed to the emergence of Townscape, or rather the debris from which architectural history has salvaged it. A highly syncretic enterprise, Townscape invites us to question when we should start discussing postmodernism in architecture or whether we can, at all.

Erdem Erten was trained as an architect at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. He completed his PhD in the History Theory Criticism program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research interests include the theorization of culture and its impact on modern architecture in the post-war period, architectural journalism, the avant-garde in architecture, neo-romanticism, postmodernism, and globalization. He was a guest critic in several architectural schools worldwide and a jury member in architectural competitions and research committees. He co-edited “Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape” (Routledge, 2015) together with John Pendlebury and Peter Larkham and authored several articles on architectural history in the period after World War II. His curatorial proposal, "Emergent Vernacularisms" prepared in collaboration with Evren Başbuğ for the National Architecture Pavillion of Turkey in the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2020, was shortlisted among the five finalists. He is currently teaching architectural design and architectural history and theory at the undergraduate and graduate level as a Professor of the Department of Architecture at Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey.