A Monument to Humanism: Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters (1955–65) by Fry, Drew and Partners

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 343-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Holland ◽  
Iain Jackson

The architect Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) is widely recognized as one of the key protagonists in the development of Modernist architecture in Britain. Discussion of this role perhaps inevitably tends to focus on Fry's early involvement in the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group and his inter-war work, particularly his prestigious partnership with the Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius. Post-war, emphasis shifts to Fry's advancement of ‘Tropical Architecture’ in former British colonies with his wife and partner, the architect Jane Drew (1911–96). Despite a string of important commissions on home soil, their post-war work in Britain has been sidelined due to a historical narrative focused on the rise of ‘New Brutalism’. This article contributes to a reassessment of Fry, Drew and Partners’ work in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It uses the Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters (1955–65) in St Helens as a case study to examine post-war industrial patronage and how this affected the architectural approach of the project's lead designer, Maxwell Fry. In particular, it investigates his background in civic design at Charles Reilly's Liverpool School of Architecture. Furthermore, it examines Fry's reassessment of pre-war Modernist theory and practice during the mid-1950s and his response to the younger generation of MARS members, such as the Smithsons and Denys Lasdun.

Author(s):  
K. Lawle ◽  
A. Moscardini ◽  
I. Pavlenko ◽  
T. Vlasova

This paper develops a detailed case study of the Phillips Curve as it has evolved since Phillips classic work of 1958. An explicit narrative in the paper involves the evolution of the argument using economics and systems thinking, to develop underlying data generating models. These are shown to underpin the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment in economics. The paper considers the political exigencies relating to the Great inflation of the 1970s and the Great Recession post 2008 in terms of interpretations of the Philips curve. The paper hypothesises that economic ideas have meaningful significance within the context of historical eras with concomitant political imperatives whence such notions become somnolent once crises have abated. This This historical narrative is implicit in the latest research reflections on Philips curves. A particularly useful finding is the relevance of systems thinking and systems dynamics to the interpretation of issues relating to aggregation problems in macroeconomics involving inflation and unemployment causal relationships. The paper concludes that seemingly moribund the Philips curve is alive may have been hibernating. Identifying the Phillips curve requires a wide range of variability of non-aggregative data streams. This allows the negative slope of the curve to be revealed, else the Philips curve slope is pushed towards the vertical plane. Endogenous central banking and inflation targeting intensifies this effect which is evident from a systems thinking /dynamics perspective.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

Building on the picture of post-war Anglo-Danish documentary collaboration established in the previous chapter, this chapter examines three cases of international collaboration in which Dansk Kulturfilm and Ministeriernes Filmudvalg were involved in the late 1940s and 1950s. They Guide You Across (Ingolf Boisen, 1949) was commissioned to showcase Scandinavian cooperation in the realm of aviation (SAS) and was adopted by the newly-established United Nations Film Board. The complexities of this film’s production, funding and distribution are illustrative of the activities of the UN Film Board in its first years of operation. The second case study considers Alle mine Skibe (All My Ships, Theodor Christensen, 1951) as an example of a film commissioned and funded under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. This US initiative sponsored informational films across Europe, emphasising national solutions to post-war reconstruction. The third case study, Bent Barfod’s animated film Noget om Norden (Somethin’ about Scandinavia, 1956) explains Nordic cooperation for an international audience, but ironically exposed some gaps in inter-Nordic collaboration in the realm of film.


Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham

This chapter evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis. This section establishes connections between three sets of theoretical questions: the common practice of describing modernity and its wake in terms of a drive towards increasing complexity; the meaning and cultural legacy of phrases such as ‘military-industrial complex’ and sundry derivations in the political sphere; and the intricacies and ambiguities subtending the term ‘complex’ within psychoanalytic theory. As a concept that Freud both utilised and repudiated, the provocative power of the term ‘complex’ is linked to the way it thwarts various attempts at systemization (providing nonetheless an apparatus of sorts through which contemporary science, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Freud, Eisenhower, and post-war politics can be articulated to one another).


2021 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 106582
Author(s):  
Charles Roche ◽  
Martin Brueckner ◽  
Nawasio Walim ◽  
Howard Sindana ◽  
Eugene John

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou

The departure of the greater part of the Greek community from Egypt is one of the many sad stories of the post-war Mediterranean. This article focuses upon the reports of the Greek Consul-General in Alexandria, Byron Theodoropoulos, regarding the Egyptian ‘Socialist Laws’ of summer 1961, which gave the coup de grâce to the Greek community. It argues that the expulsion of the Greeks was part of a wider redistribution of power in the region. This episode, together with similar experiences in other parts of the Mediterranean, evidently cemented the determination of a younger generation of political leaders and diplomats to seek Greece's future in the cosmopolitan, post-nationalist West, rather than in a ‘Near East’ rife with nationalism and economic failure.


Author(s):  
Yi Zhang ◽  
Yingjiao Chen

With the acceleration of China's industrialized cities, economic construction and social development have caused considerable damage to the natural environment. Having a good living environment has become an urgent need of the Chinese people, who have already met their basic material needs. This paper mainly adopts the method of combining theoretical analysis with case study. From the perspective of theory and practice, this paper studies the following contents: the present situation of teaching development and reflection on the environmental design specialty in China, the characteristics of open teaching mode, combined with the setting of environmental design specialty curriculum system and the teaching conditions of related specialties in Chinese universities. This study takes the open teaching mode of ordinary colleges and universities as the research object, and takes a university in China as an example to study the open teaching mode.


GeoJournal ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Bičík ◽  
Vít Štěpánek
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  

Author(s):  
Lies Wesseling

This article probes the extent to which literary history and cultural history may mutuallyilluminate each other, without neglecting the poetic dimension of literary works. Thispoetic dimension is embedded within the genre repertoires that shape the production andreception of literary works. One should therefore take into close account that the literaryrepresentation of social conflict is always deflected by the prism of genre conventions.Focusing on the case study of the Dutch Gothic novel, I argue that Gothic tales provide aspecific take on the post-war modernization of the Netherlands. As such, they make avaluable contribution to historical debates about the periodization of the sixties andseventies, not in spite of, but because of their specific poetic properties. Thus, it is verywell possible to bring literary works to bear upon the discussion of historical issueswithout either infringing upon the relative autonomy of the literary system or neglectingthe specific expertise of literary studies as a discipline in its own rights.


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