Graeme shankland biography samples
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News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs
Morris was the Victorian Age's model of the Renaissance man. Arrested in 1885 for preaching socialism on a London street corner (he was head of the Hammersmith Socialist League and editor of its paper, The Commonweal, at the time), he was called before a magistrate and asked for identification. He modestly described himself upon publication (1868--70) as "Author of "The Earthly Paradise,' pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe." He might have added that he was also the head of Morris and Company, makers of fine furniture, carpets, wallpapers, stained glass, and other crafts; founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; and founder, as well as chief designer, for the Kelmscott Press, which set a standard for fine book design that has carried through to the present. His connection to design is significant. Morris and Company, for example, did much to revolutionize the art of house decoration and furni
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Graeme Shankland: a Sixties Architect-Planner and the Political Culture of the British Left
Graeme Shankland (1917–84) conforms in many ways to the popular image of a 1960s planner with his lyrical advocacy of inner city motorways and his suggestions of enormous programmes of renewal in ‘outworn’ Victorian city centres. As an advocate of the belief that ‘our problem in Britain is that it is our generation which must completely renew most of the older parts of our larger towns and cities’, Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly com
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Radical 1960s architecture and planning still echo in our cities
‘How many times in the last 10 years has one seen the same drawing: that spacious sun-baked piazza, the motor-cars tucked vaguely away somewhere, those fine flourishing trees, those outdoor restaurants, the whole thronged with Precinct People, a race of tall, long-headed men. Municipal Masai, who lounge about every architect’s drawing in a languor presumably induced bygd the commodiousness of their surroundings. I wonder how many local councils have been gulled into demolishing their town centres bygd such drawing board dreams.’
Alan Bennett’s weary 1967 comment, quoted bygd Otto Saumarez Smith in his thoughtful and nuanced new book Boom Cities: Architect-Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain, gives an indication of the breadth of plans for major interventions in 1960s British towns and cities. As Saumarez Smith notes, plans for the wholesale redevelopment of urb