Frederic Osborn, kingpin by the 1940s of the Town and Country Planning Association and an indefatigable propagandist as well as administrator. ‘It is not a passion for order, or even for harmony (desirable as they are in measure) that has produced the demand for town planning,’ he wrote shortly before the end of the war. ‘The thing that has produced the dynamic for planning – the really big and fundamental thing that is wrong with our cities – is congestion: too many buildings and too many people in too little space.’ 11 Osborn, though just about willing to concede that suburbanites might actually enjoy living in the suburbs, never really faced foursquare the possibility that life in a high-density, imperfectly planned city might have its positive attractions. But unlike many planners, he was well aware that planning did not automatically fit the crooked timber of humanity.
The other camp comprised architects as much as town planners, with many (but not all) looking to the alternative utopia set out in the pronouncements and example of the charismatic French architect Le Corbusier. His La Ville radieuse had been translated in 1929 and Vers une architecture in 1931; in them he demonstrated his belief in the future of great cities – but great cities entirely transformed along ultra-modern lines. ‘Men can be paltry,’ he declared, ‘but the thing we call Man is great . . . What gives our dreams their daring is that they can be realized.’ There were also his four famous, increasingly verbless propositions: ‘Architecture has for its first duty that of bringing about a revision of values. We must create the mass production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass production houses. The spirit of living in mass production houses.’
Le Corbusier’s English followers had established the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group in 1933, with the young Maxwell Fry as one of its most active members. ‘Courts and alleys are swept away’ ran part of the caption to the visual plan of Fry’s ideal city published in the Picture Post special issue in 1941. ‘New flats stand in a park.’ These high-minded, modern-minded, well-intentioned men – who for a mixture of pragmatic and more or less socialist reasons tended to look to public housing (as yet the Cinderella of the British housing stock) as the likeliest opportunity for making an impact – took few prisoners in either their drawings or their writings. Another such individual with high ambitions and limited tolerance was Ernö Goldfinger: born in Hungary in 1902, a student in Paris until moving to England in 1933, a larger-than-life presence with a frightening temper. Writing in 1942 in the Architectural Review (one of modernism’s strongholds), he gave a hostile appraisal of a clutch of publications in Faber and Faber’s ‘Rebuilding Britain’ series, masterminded by Osborn and including Osborn’s own Overture to Planning . After noting that all the publications ‘state as axiomatic truths the one-sided arguments of the Garden City Movement’, Goldfinger went on: ‘The problem before the re-planners of the country can be neatly and precisely defined by saying that it is to create a frame for human life , liberated as far as possible from the drudgery of material need. Modern technology enables this to be done. But this aim will not be furthered by the introduction of sentimentality.’ Justifying this charge by picking out phrases from Osborn’s pamphlet like ‘values of our civilisation’ and ‘sacred fires’, Goldfinger then put his modernist cards on the table:
In all these publications the problem of the size of cities is treated again and again with an unrealistic and sentimental bias. The tendency to industrial concentration is brushed aside as one of the evil consequences of modern ways and not as it should be treated, as one of the basic means of efficient production . . . All the authors seem to be smitten by a kind of
The other camp comprised architects as much as town planners, with many (but not all) looking to the alternative utopia set out in the pronouncements and example of the charismatic French architect Le Corbusier. His La Ville radieuse had been translated in 1929 and Vers une architecture in 1931; in them he demonstrated his belief in the future of great cities – but great cities entirely transformed along ultra-modern lines. ‘Men can be paltry,’ he declared, ‘but the thing we call Man is great . . . What gives our dreams their daring is that they can be realized.’ There were also his four famous, increasingly verbless propositions: ‘Architecture has for its first duty that of bringing about a revision of values. We must create the mass production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass production houses. The spirit of living in mass production houses.’
Le Corbusier’s English followers had established the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group in 1933, with the young Maxwell Fry as one of its most active members. ‘Courts and alleys are swept away’ ran part of the caption to the visual plan of Fry’s ideal city published in the Picture Post special issue in 1941. ‘New flats stand in a park.’ These high-minded, modern-minded, well-intentioned men – who for a mixture of pragmatic and more or less socialist reasons tended to look to public housing (as yet the Cinderella of the British housing stock) as the likeliest opportunity for making an impact – took few prisoners in either their drawings or their writings. Another such individual with high ambitions and limited tolerance was Ernö Goldfinger: born in Hungary in 1902, a student in Paris until moving to England in 1933, a larger-than-life presence with a frightening temper. Writing in 1942 in the Architectural Review (one of modernism’s strongholds), he gave a hostile appraisal of a clutch of publications in Faber and Faber’s ‘Rebuilding Britain’ series, masterminded by Osborn and including Osborn’s own Overture to Planning . After noting that all the publications ‘state as axiomatic truths the one-sided arguments of the Garden City Movement’, Goldfinger went on: ‘The problem before the re-planners of the country can be neatly and precisely defined by saying that it is to create a frame for human life , liberated as far as possible from the drudgery of material need. Modern technology enables this to be done. But this aim will not be furthered by the introduction of sentimentality.’ Justifying this charge by picking out phrases from Osborn’s pamphlet like ‘values of our civilisation’ and ‘sacred fires’, Goldfinger then put his modernist cards on the table:
In all these publications the problem of the size of cities is treated again and again with an unrealistic and sentimental bias. The tendency to industrial concentration is brushed aside as one of the evil consequences of modern ways and not as it should be treated, as one of the basic means of efficient production . . . All the authors seem to be smitten by a kind of
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