Abstract
Anarchist modes of ‘doing architecture’ may seem, at first, a seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy. How can something as regulated, controlled, planned and expensive to execute as the building of buildings possibly take place in an anarchist mode? Our attitude to architecture has developed alongside the professionalisation of the ‘building buildings’. The architecture where anarchist practices are most evident is the building of shelter. There is a complex history of people in Britain building their own homes, using ancient lore to enable them to own these homes. These stories serve to illustrate the alternative history of ‘building buildings’. Additionally, the more contemporary history of residents occupying their homes, resisting plans for ‘regeneration’, provides templates of anarchist practices existing in architecture. The 1970s are a key period when practices of resistance to architect’s hegemony emerged. Examples such as the Architects’ Revolutionary Council (ARC) tell the story of a rebellion of professionals against the profession. The development of a new anarchist vernacular of housing architecture, in particular, will not emerge, if: ‘…we insist that every last structure has got to be blessed by the magic of the architect’.
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Notes
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M. McLeod, “Architecture or Revolution”: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change. Art Journal, 43:2, “Revising Modernist History: The Architecture of the 1920s and 1930s” (Summer, 1983), 132–147.
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- 4.
T. Clay, ‘The Liverpool Co-ops’, Architects’ Journal, 168:27 (5 July 1978), 37–38.
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G. Mills and P. Maloney, ‘ARC: its history and its present aims’, Building Design, 297 (1976), 9.
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- 10.
B. Anson, I’ll Fight You For It: Behind the struggle for Covent Garden (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 119.
- 11.
C. Ward (1966) Anarchism as a Theory of Organization, 7. (https://www.panarchy.org/ward/organization.1966.html). Accessed 22/02/2017.
- 12.
Ibid., 10.
- 13.
M. Coates, ‘To Hell with Architecture: An Architecture of Anarchism’, Anarchist Studies 23:2 (2015), 47–67.
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C. Ward (1976), Op cit. p. 87. Housing: An Anarchist Approach (London: Freedom Press, 1976).
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C. Ward, When We Build Again: Let’s have housing that works! (London: Pluto Press 1985), 89.
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- 17.
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- 21.
Habraken, Supports, 13.
- 22.
Ibid., 15.
- 23.
C. Ward, Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2002), 41.
- 24.
Ibid., 43.
- 25.
H. Phelps in Ibid., 84.
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A. Karpf, ‘The Pressure Groups’, Architects’ Journal, 166:42 (19 October 1977), 728.
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A. Karpf, ‘Pressure Groups’, 730–732.
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G. Mills and P. Maloney, ‘ARC’.
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B. Anson, I’ll Fight You For It, 264.
- 32.
Ibid., xiii.
- 33.
Ibid., 22.
- 34.
Ibid., 119.
- 35.
Ibid., 21.
- 36.
A. Karpf, ‘Pressure Groups’, 730–731.
- 37.
E. Bottoms, ‘If Crime Doesn’t Pay: The Architects’ Revolutionary Council’, Architecture, 5 (Winter 2007/08), 14–19.
- 38.
G. Mills and P. Maloney, ‘ARC’.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
C. Ward, A very short introduction to anarchism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 41.
A. Karpf, ‘Pressure Groups’, 730.
- 42.
Ibid., 731.
- 43.
L. Hellman, ‘Louis Hellman’s stories’, Architects’ Journal (https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/louis-hellman/317.contributor). Accessed 27/08/2017.
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B. Anson, Letter to Bridgtown Residents’ Action Group from Brian Anson, December 1977. ARC archive, Peter Maloney.
- 45.
P. Maloney, in conversation with the author, Bloomsbury, London, 15 May 2013.
- 46.
D. Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 365.
- 47.
Ibid.
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Coates, M. (2019). The City, Urban Planning and Architecture. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_30
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