Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism - Softcover

Sadler, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0750640839 ISBN 13: 9780750640831

Publisher: Routledge, 1999

Synopsis

Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in.

How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century, yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation, planning controls and bureaucracy.

Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects, planners and students of architecture, design, town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects, critics and historians, including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period.
List of contributors: Cedric Price, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, Ben Highmore, Yona Friedman, Paul Barker, Clara Greed, Barry Curtis, Colin Ward, Ian Horton, John Beck, Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles.

* A timely and provacative look at radical architecture
* Discusses political implicatinos of 'non-plan'
* Impressive combination of contributors all well known in their field

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Hughes teaches at Courtauld Institute of Art. Simon Sadler is a Postgraduate Researcher and Tutor, Department of Art History, The Open University.

Review

"...a lively and provocative read...'Non-Plan' is not just a valuable contribution to our understanding of the history of post-war planning; the way that it places architectural and planning ideas within a wider political discourse makes it a persuasive model for writing the architectural history of the late twentieth century."
Architect's Journal

"Everything you ever wanted to know about Non-Plan - and then some."
Architectural Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0750640839
• ISBN 13: 9780750640831
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Hughes Jonathan