Description
Book SynopsisNon-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.
Trade 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
Table of ContentsCedric Price's Non-Plan diary; Function follows form; The Heart of the city: C.I.A.M. 8; Recovery & re-appropriation in Lefebvre & Constant; Pervasion of the picturesque: English architectural aesthetics & legislation; The Indeterminate building; Buckminster Fuller & the politics of shelter; Off the map; Open ends: The social visions of 1960s non-planning; Thinking the Unthinkable; New Right/New Left: An alternative experiment in freedom; Anarchy & architecture: A personal record; The death of the planner? Paris circa 1968; After Non-Plan: retrenchment & reassertion; Can man plan? Can woman plan better?; Living lightly on the earth; Empowering the self-builder; Towards an unoriginal architecture; Inflatable man; Index.
