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BARTLETT ARCHIVE
(Above) Reyner Banham in his office in Wates House, 1976 (Left) student Ana Seroa da Motta in the anechoic chamber at Wates House, c1981 Modernism began to appear. Just as Llewelyn-Davies and some of his protégés were hardening their view of architecture around scientific or quasi-scientific research, some voices – even at The Bartlett – were beginning to dissent. One was that of Richard MacCormac, a student between 1963 and 1965, after completing his undergraduate degree at Cambridge, who was alarmed by the implications of the Fabian tract Architecture: Art or Social Service? Only Robert Maxwell among the staff showed any sympathy, but many students believed the school had lost touch with creative design. After repressing a 1968 student insurgency led by Robin Nicholson (later to chair the Construction Industry Council and play a leading role in Edward Cullinan’s practice), the following year Llewelyn-Davies moved from chair of architecture to chair of planning. He replaced William Holford who had had a huge part in creating the post-war planning system. Although many expected Maxwell to be the new professor, the position went to Newton Watson; he shared Llewelyn-Davies’ commitment to science, though not his charisma or connections. With John Musgrove – another building scientist – as dean, the
senior leadership of The Bartlett began to lose touch with new directions in architecture coming from revisions to Modernism and from sources as diverse as Robert Venturi, Archigram and graduates of Alvin Boyarsky’s AA, such as Bernard Tschumi (who spent a year as a master’s student at The Bartlett in 1970) and Rem Koolhaas. In these conditions research continued to grow and provided opportunities for talented academics to advance their fields. Peter Cowan pioneered research in housing. Bill Hillier moved from the RIBA to set up an academic unit that developed space syntax. Banham’s successors as architectural historians, Adrian Forty and Mark Swenarton, established a highly successful postgraduate programme in the early 1980s. All benefited from the college’s structure, which allowed for taught Master’s programmes and individual research leading to PhDs. The situation worsened when Duccio Turin died in a car crash in 1976. Appointed by Llewelyn-Davies as professor of building, he had been one of few people who could conceptualise an intellectual and academically coherent relationship between construction, making and architecture. Steven Groák, an Oxford graduate in