Mark Crinson

Urban memory : history and amnesia in the modern city

Nine previously unpublished essays form an interdisciplinary assessment of urban memory in the modern city, analysing this burgeoning area of interest from the perspectives of sociology, architectural and art history, psychoanalysis, culture and critical theory. Featuring a wealth of illustrations, images, maps and specially commissioned artwork, this work applies a critical and creative approach to existing theories of urban memory, and examines how these ideas are actualised in the forms of the built environment in the modernist and post-industrial city. A particular area of focus is post-industrial Manchester, but the book also includes studies of current-day Singapore, New York after 9/11, modern museums in industrial gallery spaces, the writings of Paul Auster and W.G. Sebald, memorials built in concrete, and contemporary art.

Abadan: planning and architecture under the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

Industry and urbanization were brought to south-west Iran when large quantities of oil were struck there in the early years of this century. This paper explores the development of Abadan from these beginnings to the 1950s, and particularly the housing and planning forms adopted by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its architect James M. Wilson. Abadan was in effect a colonial company town whose early development combined spacious bungalow compounds for British expatriate workers, barracklike lines of huts for labour recruited locally and from India, and a rapidly overcrowded ‘native town’ under local municipal control. The Company used Wilson’s expertise in an attempt to answer the physical problems created by the growth of Abadan between the wars and to deflect pressure exerted both by Iranian nationalists and the British government. In the garden suburb of Bawarda he created a model solution that used planning and housing form to represent ethnic and social harmony under the discreet paternal benevolenc...

Imperial Story-lands: Architecture and display at the Imperial and Commonwealth Institutes

This article uses two buildings in London – the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, and the Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park – to examine an apparent parallelism in British architecture, in the history of museums, and in the political movement from empire to commonwealth in twentieth-century Britain. The Imperial Institute was created at the crest of imperial confidence and its galleries displayed a global circuit of commodities (an ‘index collection’) intended to improve trade and help develop resources within the empire. In the 1920s this approach was re-routed in favour of the telling of an exhibitionary narrative (an ‘empire story-land’). In the 1950s the Imperial Institute was demolished, in part due to a perceived loss of function, in part to a disillusionment with its architecture. The latter, it is contended, also affected site planning in the museums area of South Kensington. Replacing the Imperial Institute and moving its collections to a new site, the Commonwealth Institute was designed with the belief that architectural form and urban space might be reconceived so as to signify post-imperialism. The article argues that whilst the Imperial Institute manifests a conflict between the roles of empire builder and empire spectator, the Commonwealth Institute presents a seeming image of multi-culturalism – a display of equals – whilst constructing the visitor as a ‘British’ subject, outside the field of visuality.

Singapore's moment: Critical regionalism, its colonial roots and profound aftermath

Kenneth Framptons version of the theory of critical regionalism turns on a dialectics between ‘universal civilisation’ and ‘national culture’ while relegating the political circumstances of his chosen architecture merely to a form of negation. Yet Framptons source for this opposition, Paul Ricoeur, was writing directly about the cultural problems faced by anti-colonial liberation movements. This article returns critical regionalism to the immediately post-colonial moment of Singapore in the early 1960s. It explores the Singapore Conference Hall and Trade Union House (Malayan Architects Co-Partnership, 1962–1965) as an exemplary building of that period. Between colonialism and the rapid modernisation that would be unleashed on Singapore in the later 1960s, the building balanced particular forms of the regional with the universal forms of rationalism that modernism had come to represent. Bound up with this balance was another delicate negotiation. The building was the product and embodiment of the brief alliance between organised labour and the government of Lee Kuan Yews Peoples Action Party. The article suggests that a better understanding of the building within these circumstances not only helps to give political, and specifically post-colonial, resonance to theories of critical regionalism, it also provides a counter-balance to Rem Koolhaass dismissal of this period in Singapores urban development.

Pictorialism and industry: Alvin Langdon Coburn in Manchester

In the early 1920s, Alvin Langdon Coburn made a series of photographs in the city of Manchester, England. This little known work was commissioned by local industrialists, elected officials and a gentlemans club. Coburns photographs illustrated the sponsors promotional books and brochures. These photographs of the city open up a number of issues which are addressed in this essay: the attraction of pictorialist photography to Manchesters industrialists and leaders, the integrity of an artists commercial work, notions of worker-employee relations, and the connection between the use of photography and the changing economic fortunes of Manchester.

Photography and the industrial city: Manchester and Salford, ancient and modern

Abstract The photograph of ‘The River Irwell from Blackfriars Bridge’ (figure 1) seems emblematic over and above what it might represent. It appears to be solidly, even reassuringly balanced as if there is nothing arbitrary about the scene, and the lack of near movement helps the sense of gravity and quietness. The city appears to look back at us as an epitome of itself. When the photographer James Mudd chose this view, midway across a river and looking along the river so that it fills the foreground towards a bridge, he made the scene appear as if it were arranged around an imagined equivalence between two points: the point from which the picture is taken, and another point somewhere on that far bridge. Yet there, where that other point should be are the stone orbs that mark the mid-point of the bridges parapets, a mirror image reminding us of the parapet beside which our own lens must be located. It is as if a vanishing point, denied by the sudden bend of the river leftwards just beyond the bridge, has been bracketed for future reference. Below this mid-point is a flattened oval created by the arch of the bridge and its reflection in the stilled water. That oval is like a frame or lens in which can be imagined a summary of the image as a whole: darker and more solid geometries on the left giving way to diffuse reflections and misty forms that fill the rest of the oval. (It even has its own cross-hairs in the waterline crossing the vertical drain-shadow.) Beneath our equivalent position on the far bridge, then, there is a metaphoric mirroring of the camera eye that has opened onto the scene before us.

Eye Wandering the Ceiling: Ornament and New Brutalism

Eduardo Paolozzi’s ceiling paper (1952) for the office of the engineer Ronald Jenkins suggests the significance of ornament to New Brutalism and, indeed, how New Brutalist concern with visual form linked categories of art, architecture, and design. This article argues that examination of the ceiling paper exposes not just New Brutalist re-working of an older modernist problematic, but also points to a broader range of New Brutalist works concerned with the ceiling, or the zone above our heads, both for its physiological and psychological implications. There were different positions on ornament within the Independent Group: some (Richard Hamilton) which seemed to suggest that ornamental strategies offered a way of articulating science and art together as common enterprises; others (Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson) which played on ornamental motifs and on ornament’s recursive logic. Key to the latter is the psycho-analysis of perception developed contemporaneously by Anton Ehrenzweig. Ehrenzweig provided a way of understanding ornament in anti-gestalt terms but also in terms of its physical relation to the embodied viewer.