 Rydyn ni'n go i wneud. Ie, fel ydych chi'n mynd i weld i'r fflynedd am y gyffredin ein Lleinffolan. Rydyn ni'n go i weld i'n fflynedd, a bwynt i'n gydag i fi arryf a gwirio am hwn y wneud eithaf y Proses Ref, fel yutteringaeth, mae'n rhai'r tympau o'r traig neu rhaid i fi gwrs arall yw gweithio leiddeol. i'r rhaid i chi, i dweud ar y teulu ddechrau chi i gydag ynghylch am fwyloi'r cychwynol. We have a lot of people joining online as well so hello. But before I actually start introducing the event I have to run you through some housekeeping. So bear with me. There are no fire drills scheduled for the duration of this event so if the fire alarm sounds, please leave your belongings behind and calmly begin to evacuate the building. Your nearest fire exits on the ground floor to either front doors of the centre. Please assemble outside 28 Bedford Square. To the right is We Leave The Building and Do Not Leave The Area or Attempt To Return to the centre, until you've been advised it is safe to do so by a member of the PMC staff. That's all. So now to properly welcome you. ydyn nhw'n hyd i ydyn nhw'n siŵng iawn cerddwysgol semenul Cymroedd Llyfriddiaeth anodd, yng Nghymru Senedd Pwyswyr Britain 1945-65. Yna gweithio, mae'r Gymru erbyn yn cyd-air amserol ac wrth heto'n gwirionedd y plan byd ginger, Alistair Cardwri and Matthew Wells. Elaine is an architectural historian with Historic England and author of Space Hope and Brutalism. She is co-editor of C20 Society Journal 20th Century Architecture and a related series of biographies. She's currently working on writing on new types of brutalism and the architect Rath Asfa. I'll hand over to Elaine at the moment and she'll introduce Alistair and Matthew and the session. Over to Elaine. Thank you. I'm going to get beaten up, but the door's going to be the star of the show, isn't it? We're not careful. Thanks so much for coming. I'm going to introduce both speakers together and then you can go on. Is that all out of you too? Alistair, on my immediate left, recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship here at the Paul Mellon Centre on private rented housing in post-war London. There's an article on that coming out in 20th century British history on rent tribunals. It's very interesting to see how that flows into his topic on squatting tonight. Then we're going to hear from Matthew Wells, who's a lecturer at the University of Manchester. He did a PhD on 19th century London, a book in the autumn. There we go. On the architectural model in London during the long 19th century. Currently, researching 1960s office buildings is part of a project following years of ETH in Zurich. There's a chapter in the book coming out on that. First, Alistair, I shall let you fly away on your topic. Thank you, Elaine, and thank you so much to the PMC for having me here tonight. It's really for the really valuable time as a postdoctoral fellow here, which basically resulted in this and some other things. I'm going to set myself a timer. I'm going to be talking about this movement. I'm going to be talking about this often forgotten mass squatting movement that took place in 1946. It basically doesn't appear, as far as I'm aware, in cultural histories, visual culture, architectural history of the period. Although there is some social history on it. What it involved was tens of thousands of people across the country taking over empty army camps, many of which were later regularised and services provided by councils. In London, the movement took a more militant turn in a way where several blocks of luxury flats were taken over. There was Communist Party leadership involved in this, particularly also some Labour activists mostly outside of the London scene. The initial sympathetic response in the press and even from the government to the camp squatters turned much more aggressively quite quickly against the so-called luxury squats. I'm not going to be talking about the policies of the Labour Party or the Communist Party or really whether, to what extent this had an impact on changing the course of British housing history. For the record, I think it did. What I want to talk about really is its cultural significance in wider terms. The memories and images that it reactivated or re-inscribed in a kind of jagged historical continuum. So I call this talk, The World Turned Outside In, borrowing by implication rather than quotation from something that the philosopher and critic Richard Volheim wrote. In a 1962 issue of the Left Liberal and quite unknown to him, CIA-funded literary magazine encounter, he wrote of how late 19th century Paris had witnessed a great turning inside out of life, so that the walls within which the citizen carried on his existence were no longer the inner walls of houses, but the outer walls of those same houses enclosing places and boulevards. Volheim's invoking of Paris and the painterly techniques of Impressionism provides the dialectical counterpoint to a set of observations guided by the novels of Colin McInnes about his own early 60s London. Those observations preserve all the startling freshness of a first encounter with the modern, and yet according to Volheim's own description, if not his explicit formulations, they turn on a movement of repetition and rehabilitation, exactly the inverse of the Parisian one, a folding inwards of over extended subjectivities of de-territorialised energies back inside the domestic, or at least domestically scaled interior, and through that movement a remaking of the interior itself. He provides this wonderful description here where he says, Sorry, I'm rushing through some of these quotes. It was Thomas Crowe's recent book, The Hidden Modern Modern Art, published by the PMC, that first drew my attention to this wonderful essay by Volheim. But it was an article from 1946 by Tom Harrison, one of the founders of mass observation, that sounded the resonance with an earlier, often forgotten post war moment, the one I'm talking about. Recently demog from two years in Borneo, Harrison wrote that, amid the fine renaissance of red tape, in which the struggle to live is almost wholly domestic and the significance of the atom bomb almost entirely repressed, the squatters, he says, were a wonderful relief, something outside ourselves, which was dramatically domestic. The squatters Harrison referred to, capitalising them as if to seal their fame, were those 40,000 plus people, many of the next servicemen and women who, in the summer and early autumn of 1946, had taken over around a thousand empty army camps across the country, and in London at least five blocks of high class luxury flats in one hotel. The latter became known as the luxury squats, in a slightly sneering recognition from the press and will be my main subject. This is Harrison again, he writes. He laments really, after Australia, Manila, a Sarawak longhouse, or the easy friendship of soldiers, it is horrid to stand solitary in a city pub or face your fellows in the train speechless, almost ashamed. One longs to reach out and talk a little to an elderly gentleman with the checked waistcoat reading Kafka, to strike up an unambitious interstation intimacy with a nice dumb looking blonde. How else can we have a plum dumbness? Each day the passes want orientally acquired easiness and directness of manners shrink back a little farther, in the unsatisfied apparatus of a civilised ego. It is so much more comfortable to live all around one, to push out and pull back the suitopedia of contact and conflict, of interchanged argument and fun wherever one goes, instead of living in the restricted circle of private Western experience. The wartime baptism of oriental uncivilisation couches the casual dehumanisation of the dumb looking blonde in a narrative of masculine adventure that Harrison strains to reject elsewhere. But the juxtaposition of the 1946 squatting moment is not by chance. The fact is, many of those taking part had just returned from service overseas. And it's unsurprising to see Harrison's remarks find a resonance in a cartoon appearing in the trenchantly anti-stalinist ILP newspaper Socialist Leader. Wartime memories of overseas burnish the image of the camp squatters with the warm glow of pride and service and collective sacrifice. But this is juxtaposed in a thoroughly gendered way with the image of the luxury squatters as cranks, people unable to accept the parameters of making do in getting by. Both cartoons are by someone called SB and I haven't been able to identify who that is. The first presents the squats as a perfectly ordinary, if not perfect, domestic scene. In the second, two neighbours exchanged views about the odd one out in their street. Possibly a spinster, late of Duchess of Bedford's mansions. So there are issues here that I want to return to later in Harrison's very complicated and problematic linking of the squats to his service experience. For now I want simply to note the recurrence of the spatial figure of inversion described by Harrison and Bollheim. Of the crossing of thresholds of an unknown and yet strangely familiar outside, an outside marked by its easiness and the wonderful relief it provides. Which somehow re-infiltrates the inside occupying the homely space in that same movement in the same movement that is alienated from it. So this photographic double spread is from the illustrated London Muse. And it shows the first building to be occupied, Duchess of Bedford House in Kensington. And the images, I think what's interesting about the images is they direct our attention to the thronging of people around the buildings, thresholds, surfaces and spaces. The dark piercings of unlit windows interrupting the bright horizontal bands of ashlar rendered facades and the bright faces within. A stuttering seven-story facade that seems even more fortress-like thanks to the bricked-up intermediate levels. People climbing through the lower windows, a baby being passed through another window, a sympathiser throwing up a package. People milling around the railings surrounding another nearby smaller building. These are, in a way, undistinguished images. Their grid format presentation is designed to hurry along the reader's comprehension, giving an impression of directionless commotion that confirms the heading. Lawless measures which endanger the rights of law-abiding citizens. But the very obliqueness or cursoriness of the images, the way our eyes bounce off their surfaces, also testifies to an interaction between reporter and squatter that shouldn't be taken for granted. The technique was common currency. If the illustrated London Muse offered a smorgasbord of newsworthiness, picture posts deployed a modernistically stripped-down version of the same underlying principles to create this didactic split screen, the squatters and the squattered against. Both are deserving, but one hurts the chances of the other seems to be the message. The people who are once the discrete and obliging objects of social investigation from booths to the compendious and inquiry into people's homes produced by mass observation in 1943 are now the people deciding quite vocally who to include and who to exclude from their adopted homes. The eyes of the poor to recall Baudelaire's poem gaze across at the viewer, but only now from within the hallowed spaces of the rich. So there's a way in which I think this remaining on the outside testifies to a certain relationship, a certain inversion, the way these photographs don't penetrate the building and the interior. The photographs in the illustrated London Muse and other papers testify to this crossing of thresholds and turning of tables. While the written text of newspaper reports essentially regurgitates the standard attack lines, cue jumping, upsetting the fair administration of needs and so on, we can look to another source for insights that begin to widen the crack opened up by these images. The mass observation collections at Sussex include a stack of handwritten reports by three mass observers, which I found incredibly interesting. One of these, by an observer who identifies himself as JPS, describes his experience at the Philomore Gardens in Kensington. He inquires of an ATS officer at their billet, whether she knows of any squatters that have moved in and the ATS officer suggests two nearby houses. The first, a four story house, empty in appearance, whose, quote, steps lead up to a shabby front door, a dirty white card with an E boldly printed on it, is nailed to the linsle. I think we recognize here the familiar tropes of social investigators venturing into the slums, the mood of trepidation and secrecy, as well as telltale signs of dilapidation in an otherwise salubrious area. JPS rings the doorbell. There is no answer so he rings again. Fc30, meaning a skilled worker around 30 years old, appears at the closed ground floor window, tries to speak through window. MC25 appears, he attempts to open window. Here steps approaching front door, which opens a few inches on a chain. The interviewer states his business. The squatter at the door MC25 replies, that's what you all say. Look what they print. The interviewer explains that he is not a reporter, and in his own words, urges him that if people are to know the truth, they must have the personal stories of the squatters. This exchange at the chain door displays all the tension and classroom anxiety that is usually suppressed in reports on London's working class housing. Eventually JPS is admitted into the building and the man at the door does supply with this personal story, only to declare, I know it's not much good telling you this, it's been said before. Numerous other incidents in mass observation reports mirror this doorstep inquiry, and this is another one. I'm going to rush through some of this, but these descriptions indicate the suspicion surrounding reporters in the sheer disregard paid off an absent authorities. There's a wonderful incident at the Fountain Court Square in Victoria, where two children are playing on the entrance steps and a police officer says, what are you doing here? And they say, we live here. And he says, no you don't. Get off and they just carry on and ignore him. But as well as indicating this kind of suspicion, they present the threshold of the building as a staging post for a fragmentary discourse on the plight of the homeless, the authority of government, the responsibility for children, the role of women and other issues. And you can see in this quote here how that kind of staging of dialogue around these threshold spaces that the reporter can't enter into mostly works, the kind of arguments that happen. This pattern of overheard conversation continues over the course of the morning, and you have these wonderful incidents of people passing by as a blackboard with a petition set up outside and different remarks from people. MB50, middle class man of around 50, according to the reporter, says, it's anarchy. We never did anything like this after the last war, a group of MDs. I expect they're all sitting down to their steak and onions. A soldier, MC30, working class soldier of about 30. I felt like doing that myself three years ago. This quietly bubbling cacophony of voices fails to entirely displace the position of the reporter, observer. Instead it seems to nag away at the fundamental question raised by Harrison's reaction. What is that something outside ourselves, and who in any case is us? Who are the squatters in what zone of society or popular consciousness, as well as physical space, do they occupy? With this in mind, we can return to some of the photos from the Illustrated London News. Don't they, like mass observations snippets of conversation and repetitious stuttering class codifications, ask the same question? Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, they seem to say. Smiling faces and babies on knees and pipes hanging out of mouths in one window frame, and glowering faces in the next, as if the two windows offered, like picture posts, split screen, but somehow more menacing, two images of the people, respectable and unrespectable, C-class and D-class, amiable and abominable, the happy poor and the frightening poor. Where might we look to escape these split screen stereotypes? The sociologist and novelist Diana Murray Hill, a self previously a mass observer, asked the same fundamental question. Who are the squatters in an article of that title published in pilot papers? The journal founded in 1945 by Harrison's former collaborator Charles Madge. Without fully abandoning mass observations style of conversational montage, Murray Hill's article offers a series of sketches drawn from inside the squatters, following her subjects over several days. These are sketches rather than snapshots, in that no automatic coherence is given to them. What coherence they have is patched together, beginning with the first chance he gestures thrown down onto the blank page. This is what Murray Hill has to say about the squatters of Duchess of Bedford House. I won't read it all, but she describes in a much more fully narrativised way than the mass observation reports, a movement through space with these little portraits of individuals who are shown to be taking charge of the situation and running it in an organised way and transforming it. Murray Hill, who wrote a fictionalised account of her days working in a munitions factory, creates a series of thumbnail portraits that are really renderings of ensembles of characters moving in space. I would go further. Following Lefeb, these novelistic sketches show space being forged through the passage of the social and the bodily. The lift lobby is transformed into a children's play area. A barrier is erected to keep reporters out. The cindillard dug with trenches becomes a kitchen. Large single flats are doubled up and a shed hosts a performance by the Unity Theatre. Searching for a visual analogue, I cannot help thinking of this. Another double page spread in the Illustrated London News. The artist is Brian DeGrino, known for his earlier work for the motoring press and employed by the Illustrated London News as a World War II correspondent in France. He uses the same comic strip technique perfected in his wartime correspondence. This is just one example of hundreds. DeGrino presents an unfolding picture book story of the squats that, in its seeming innocuousness, feels strikingly at odds with the headline The Dupes of Communist Promises and the Cat's Poor of the Party's Tactics. As in Murray Hill's writing, there is the same lively sense of material incident. A baby carried in a drawer. You can see that just about. A baby carried in a drawer, electrical wires trailing from the ceiling, a cat in the newly christened nursery. The same sense too of hub hub and human activity. The same swift fullness of character, not the same as death and a similar hint of sentimentality. These last two aspects appear related. It is the refusal to be disturbed by the unknowable depths of subjectivity, the willingness to accept a certain dumbness, as Harrison put it, that both secures the image, its humanity, and seems to give the lie to that assurance. Working quickly in charcoal. I've got a message, a pop-up. DeGrino often reverts to types. The women sitting on the low wall in the foreground resembles the working class matriarch at the centre of that image of community developed later by Wilma and Young, Richard Hoggart and others. In Hoggart's words, she appears in the natural environment of home and family, splendidly there, and despite all the troubles within her, is ultimately content. What Hoggart's image excludes, of course, and I would say deGrino's, is all those working class women who were not attached to male heads of household, as well as those who were not or who refused to be content. In some of the panels, we even seem to get flashbacks to the bustling streetlight of 19th century London. This is Gustaf Dore's engraving, the organ in the court from his London epilgrimage. There's a similar sense of teaming humanity cut through with a sentimentality that attempts to individualise each figure. And yet deGrino's drawings possess very little of the morbid fascination with the slums, that not only attracted Dore, but had a whole 70 years later on reporters and artists who ventured into London's public shelters during the Blitz. And this is what had built Bran's famous photos of Liverpool Street. Of course, Bran's emerged as a photographer in a world that was still largely defined by 19th century traditions. And one of Bran's photo stories on the eve of the war was actually a direct homage to Dore. But there's a paradox here, because it is Bran's Victorian investigator's attraction to the dire and the ghoulish, the sense of his figures inhabiting a world between life and death that redeems these images from being mere illustrations of an already mythologised notion of collective resilience, the idea that London, unified beyond class divisions, could take it. And yet it is deGrino's unabashedly illustrative drawings that recall the real history of the chief shelters and the acts of collective initiative. In response to the inequalities of different types of shelter, ranging from the basement of the Hungaria restaurant in Lower Regent Street where people could book a breakfast table in the morning after their shelter at night, to the infamous Tilbury shelter in Stepney, the communist councillor Phil Piratyn led 70 Stepney residents into the Savoy and an invasion of the hotel's basement. In the same month, the communist activists broke open the gates of a tube station with a crowbar and got on a megaphone to call people in. More spontaneously and despite official protest about the risks of shelter mentality, people in East London bought half penny tickets and simply refused to leave till morning. We could then read these drawings as images of the communist family, the kind of all embracing world of clubs and literature and daily rituals and manners of speech that Raphael Samuel records in a posthumously published book, The Lost World of British Communism. That should be a question, could we? But if that reading has any truth to it, it is surely because an even larger mood wraps itself around this already complete and apparently self-enclosed world as Samuel writes. And I'm coming to the end now. Our anxiety about deviation, this is Samuel, in others and repression of it in ourselves, had evident homologies with and may have drawn invisible support from the behavioural norms of the time. We were not the only people to hide our doubts, even ourselves, to repress feelings of incipient guilt, to keep a close watch on the tongue. In all sectors of British life, a conformity to rules went far beyond mere mechanical obedience. It structured public speech, where solicism betrayed a humble origin and where the word spoken out of place invited ostracism. It had its obvious sartorial analogs in a society where for a woman to ladder her stockings was a social disaster, and where men hitched their trouser cruises for fear of baggy knees. The same affect of collectivity, which reached its zenith in the 1950s, according to Samuel, structured the Labour Party as well as the Communist Party, and even to some extent the Conservative Party, it reached deep into the institutions of working life and leisure. The same affect, it seems to me, enshrows degrino's drawings, but it is a myth, as much as the myth of the Blitz, and the brittleness of degrino's typification gives that away much more than Samuel's vivid prose. Something like a true image of the squats is absent. We find only a shadow of it in the dissonance generated at the edges of images such as this one, between the boy with slouched shoulders and his hands in his pockets and the women and sunglasses. The rest of the figures are official, then entering the building. In the two boys, peering so casually over a wall, as prams and furniture are handed over railings, or in the smile of a woman carrying a bed frame up the stairs, something is happening, but you don't know what it is. So now we'll go on to Matthew Wells and bring the site, come from the 40s to the 60s and 70s, and a more specific form of organisation. Don't trust my pointing. I brought a pointer. Ah, these are your glasses. Yeah, sorry. It's fine. Okay, all right. Thank you so much for the introduction. Thank you so much, Sharia and Shawna for inviting and organising all of this. Super. I'm very glad to be here. Ah, so we don't need that slide. Um, in 1964, Francis Duffy published an essay in the architectural review on office design. He declared, I quote, architecture is an image of society. Office layout of organisational form. Duffy was a young British architect. He trained on the other side of the square at the architectural association before going on to Princeton to write a PhD about systems theory and its relationship to architecture, its potential application to architecture. And what he was describing was kind of shorthand for the changes occurring in post-war British society, where the service industries were expanding and becoming to stand for the economy as a whole. By 1965, some 3 million, some 3 million people in the UK were employed in office settings, including almost 1.8 million women who were employed as typists and secretaries, amongst other roles. And this total number, this 3 million, was an increase of 50% on the census of 1951, some 14 years earlier. And as a result, well over 100 million square metres of office space was constructed in the post-war period from 1945 to 1965. Oh, no. Returning to Duffy's essay for a moment, he didn't really discuss Britain in this essay. Rather, his essay from 1964 that I quoted from earlier focused on a new type of office that was being pioneered in West Germany. A pair of management consultants, Erpart and Wolfgang Schneller, founded QuickBorner team in 1956. QuickBorner would go on to develop a new approach to corporate architecture known as Bureau Landschaft. Initially known as organizations cybernetic, the principles of Bureau Landschaft are based around the flow of information in a corporation. These flows were designed to optimise the administration and communication of office work, and this new approach was comprehensive. It took into account the operations of individual workers, teams and departments in relationship, in relation to companies as a whole. Crucially, it also considered non-human agents, such as office equipment, house plants and partitions as a part of this organism. As a part of a design process, management, workers and QuickBorner would all collaborate together to identify organisational units known as departments and identify their role within a company as a whole. These units would be linked together in a networked web where their communications identified first through abstract diagrams and these networks would become spatialised through plan drawings and later large scale models. The ultimate concept, or the aim, was an open plan arrangement with a lucid distribution of departments across a large floor plate. Each department would be defined by clusters of flexible partitions and furniture, office equipment and plants. Each of these clusters were connected to questions regarding acoustics. Noise and its sources had to be identified and resolved in the design stage of office space. We see this here in a plan of an office building in West Germany from the end of the 1960s designed with the Bureau Landschaft approach. I just need to explain the rotation of this drawing. This is a kind of a diagram that should be overlaid on the top of here that they've rotated by 90 degrees. So this toilet block is this toilet block and this is these offices here. So just rotate it in your minds. This zoning diagram shows us how these different organisational departments and the main conduits of communications between them worked. These are indicated with arrows on the outlines of a department and then this arrow that connects between them showing these different interrelationships in a corporation. The furniture in the diagram is absent but we see the structural grid of the building, the columns that hold the building up. And we also see meeting points which are marked in these dark, these black circles. These are potential meeting points where different departments could come together to discuss the work that they're engaging in. But also, loud printers, photocopiers, card machines, sorting machines, card indexing machines were all pushed to the perimeter of the office of the plan. They would have less effect and they would be enveloped in a ring of house plants to dampen the noise. Why was this approach taken? Well, quick bonus studies noted how visible noise had double the physiological effect and the psychological effect of invisible noise sources on the workforce. All sources of noise in the office like telephones and doorbells as we're hearing and fax machines needed to be made invisible. This matters because Bureau Lanshaft was intended to be a physiologically optimal environment for work. Nothing could reduce the effectiveness of the corporate machine. Any sort of disturbance was understood to be damaging for well-being and ultimately for productivity. Zoning the space could only achieve so much in the eyes of quick-burner. Carpet was the answer. Architects and critics described how the carpet not only deadened sound by stopping it, reverberating, but it also changed people's behaviour in a space. Workers would move about more slowly. Workers would speak more quietly aware of their actions on the ambient sound levels in a room and quick-burner would analyse these studies through in plan and also kind of reverberation times in section using sound engineers. Quick-burner also had their own brochure on carpets to be used in offices. This brochure contained invaluable advice on how to source and to use carpets within the most important environment. The tagline of the brochure was blibonzi aftentepic stick with carpet. It described a variety of different types of carpet each with different production techniques and material characteristics and the back of the brochure contained a selection of carpet samples as we see here on the right-hand part of the slide. Normally I don't make aesthetic judgments but really these are extraordinarily bad carpets. But the aim of the publication was not to directly sell carpets but to convince architects and designers and companies of their use. Ultimately the brochure argued that carpets were not only for domestic interiors but could provide comfort in the corporate environment as well. This physical well-being it claimed was a prerequisite for maintaining and increasing performance in the office too. In a British context Bureau Landschaft became combined with approaches from East Coast America. Francis Duffy, studying from Princeton coming back to the United Kingdom translated the different aspects of collaboration from Bureau Landschaft for an English-speaking audience offering a new method for designers and started his own consultancy. It was Duffy too who identified the acoustic issues noting how carpet changed people's behaviour in a space. Architectural journals began to carry supplements on carpet specifications and the RABA, the Royal Institute of British Architects based on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road had their own carpet design library as a part of their materials library where architects could go and choose and touch the carpets they were specifying. While Norman Foster an architect who after studying at Manchester went and studied at Yale and again a different application of more systems-based theory he described in various lectures at the time how Foster associates were operating with methods from cybernetics systems theory as well as organisational studies very closely related to Bureau Landschaft and these diagrams that he showed in a lecture at the RABA at the end of the 1960s emphasised ideas such as group participation, teamwork and quality as a means to increase productivity both within the buildings he was designing and overseeing the construction but also within the practice of the architect pits themselves and at the Greenbridge Industrial Estate in Swindon we see a major we see a major example of this type of development in the Reliance Controls building this was a manufacturer of precision electronic instruments very small scale precision electronic instruments it's a building designed by Team 4 a practice formed from Sue Rogers Wendy Cheeseman, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster and the building was planned around the linear relationships of mass production management and production processes were located in essentially the same space the only hierarchy was that of the production and development line for the objects produced machine rooms, design offices and assembly lines could all be seen in a single view from a single point in the building smell and noise were problems that the architects did not address however communication between the different departments within an organisation rather than locating them in different buildings were all improved and in part this was because of the building's mechanical and environmental servicing what we have is a concrete slab on the floor with a central trench running down the middle of it for services perpendicular to this are so running perpendicular either side to this are electrical services and telephone connections and these connections would sprout off at graded intervals so 1, 2, 3, 4 etc this allows any area of the building to be used for any part of the company's industrial activity and allows for the possibility of expansion, change, contraction etc these ideas were also explored on a conceptual level at the end of the 1960s Foster edited the third edition of MANPLAN an experimental issue of the architectural review his editorial direction focused on the modern workplace and how it could be produced organised and integrated better within wider infrastructural developments in the United Kingdom one intention was to create new spheres that allowed for the reorganisation of work within society and in that study of communications infrastructure MANPLAN predicted that the future working spaces of Britain would be controlled environments ceilings and floors the magazine claimed would be set to a common module thereby I quote, concealing a network of wires and pipes and quietly unifying the complex computer world this is because these new environments were part of the uptake of computers in the UK computers began to order electoral roles they began to control the production of goods and factories, they would record land transfers for local governments, national governments everything from ballet tickets to the energy network was computerised and new data centres new control centres were designed and constructed to enable this systemic change in Britain with this in mind in March 1970 foster associates were asked to design a new head offices for IBM UK at Cosham near Portsmouth the company wanted to relocate from their headquarters in Chiswick and be closer to the nearby production facility at Havent Havent is just here and Cosham is just here and is obviously the Solent the building would also be located on a site adjacent to the new M27 motorway opened slightly later in the 1970s and IBM's brief to the architects was that their office should be high spec in order to both show the company's ethos forward thinking technological organisation but also attract workers relocating from London a firm of Dutch engineers began the process of reclaiming land from the sea for the new site while existing IBM employees and their families were bust in or out from London from Chiswick to South Coast to enjoy day trips to their new home and to see what their new life would be like when they relocated at Cosham foster designed foster associates designed a single level deep plan building full environmental controls it's one of the first buildings that uses a lightweight steel frame known as Metsec which was laid out in a sequence of 7m by 7m structural bays and then wrapped in this fabulous brown bronze glass curtain wall the steel frame system gave the building several benefits it could be very quickly constructed above a concrete raft foundation a very quick foundation and it was a flexible space initially the building the pilot office could house 750 workers but could be expanded and extended indefinitely in any direction doubled tripled with an amoeba-like expansion and the large open plan office adopts certain aspects of the bureau landscape approach the core is pushed to the perimeter of the building to leave the majority of the floor plan or potentially open within this core is a pause realm a kind of 24 hour open kind of breakout space as opposed to a kind of sequenced cafeteria that was very typical in British offices at that time there's blocks of toilets and there is a computer room which we will return to later and this core is the only fixed element in the building other than the structural columns within the open plan office a thick carpet is used to regulate the acoustic environment for staff it's a brownish pink carpet it was specially designed by the architects and its appearance was tested under mercury vapor recessed light fittings which we can see above in here it was glued directly onto the concrete slab to dampen the sound and a post occupancy survey by IBM discovered that only 1% of the workforce complained or found the general noise level to be high in the offices and respondents identified the carpet in overcoming the noise problems associated with the open plan organisation however the organisation of the building resisted taking a total bureau lunch approach because of the provision of energy and power in the building on the roof of the building were air conditioning units the main service pipe work was located underneath these within the envelope of the building but above a suspended ceiling and the kind of occupied realm of the offices each column as I was talking about these steel columns had a structural role and a communications role each column was of course a load bearing column made of a folded steel plate this folded steel plate meant that it was hollow and pipes and wires could run down from the surface zone down to the world of the offices below and then spread out to the desks around them as we saw earlier in the bureau lunch after approach the open plan office was about flexibility and interdepartmental organisation but caution however IBM wanted architecture wanted the architecture itself to operate as a coherent system like the data processing machines that it sold and this manifested itself in a pure and ordered geometry a pure and ordered interiority that IBM sought to offer through its products an award ceremony in 1972 the IBM UK managing director described how the open plan interior was an experiment in the rearrangement of IBM's working structure previous departments in the headquarters in Chiswick had operated autonomously with secretaries responsible for many tasks but the organisation of the new building replaced this with a new system based around modules for what they termed modules IBM believed that this new approach would bring increased efficiency through the subdivision of secretarial work into groups each group would be formed from a series of individuals within a new system of these modules and each individual would have a series of very specific tasks so in the foreground here is Margaret Selvridge a secretarial assistant who answered the telephone and covered reception on the right is Lorna Rust a secretarial personal assistant who organised the departmental research and finances on the left is Ursula Arnold a unit manager responsible for the organisation of the unit the module as a whole as IBM described it I quote it is a chance for the girls to be mistress of one trade rather than of necessity the gil of all however all the girls at Cosham are trained to have general knowledge of each other's operations I quote each group would be based in a particular area in the office formed from an indefinite number of workstations able to expand and contract where required as a whole series of studies that foster undertake where they design the furniture they design these different types of modular organisation through desks, partitions, chairs etc that can come together in different settings and also be taken apart again individual workers their tasks and their desks were all modular completely ordered within this logic of IBM's corporate environment there was also another aspect to the modularity of the IBM office and as the computer and the telephone began to dominate the office space these cables and conduits were not only in the way of users they also limited change and movement to seatings, desks and organisational groups but the solution to making communications infrastructure more flexible was already in the building within one large room in the core as I pointed out earlier were the massive computer terminals that IBM were developing and selling this area was 600 millimetres higher than the floor level in the main offices thanks to a raised access floor which concealed the conduits beneath these conduits provided the data the power and the cooling for the computer systems and because of the gridded nature of the floor as we see here cabling was flexible and the computer terminals could be positioned anywhere as well as moved around and changed when obsolete in turn the carpet of the office essential for its acoustic role adapted to this new modular reality we might argue that the corporate environment was an ever expanding range of modules from the computer chip to the storage devices the computer room to the building that houses the room to the production and logistics networks of the corporation modular systems in architecture coincided with the development of early computing systems and automation technologies architects and engineers proposed systems of standardised modules at every scale of the building this modular architecture was open-ended with its most important relationship being the next module that was connected to it within a larger system or a sequence in the 1960s we see that these developments affect the carpet it changes from a surface material a fabric cut to measure and fitted to a geometric space to an individual unit we know this is a carpet tile often 450mm square in size this was a unit synchronised with the overall organisation of a building and a company that is to say the organisation of the building structure its furniture planning its environmental services in 1965 the glue down installation method was first developed in America and then adopted in British carpet factories especially in the United States rare shout out for Kidderminster at the Paul Mellon Centre the tile allowed for quicker installation it improved maintenance as individual tiles could be replaced independent of one another in the system and the carpet now a tiled module adapted to the changing nature of construction this is not construction as a singular element but a series of layers that provide and perform very different functions within the building this is not a construction this is not a construction and perform very different functions within a building as the computer reduced in size and became more prevalent in work the design spaces the design briefs for office spaces began to demand more power and better data and communications we can see a development of this approach in an office for the insurance brokers Willis Faber Dumas in Ipswich based around open plant office floors departments could be expanded or contracted at Will with communication between the different working groups simplified the extra cables required for telephones electricity and data processing moved into the floor void new products were developed to house and ultimately conceal these services the carpet tile as well as offering an acoustic damper became fitted to panels so it could be lifted and removed at Will to access the services beneath something that was very difficult and required a ladder or scaffolding when these services were in the ceiling void and crucially this combination of carpet tile and access floor allows for both the acoustic performance as well as the flexibility as the workstations of individuals groups and companies could be rearranged around the floor plate of the office as things changed as desks and people could be reconfigured the carpet itself could easily be replaced and repaired new technologies, ethernet cables and eventually wifi boxes would replace obsolete cables within so to conclude I would argue that the working environment of modern Britain space became something universal and flexibility was its main concern not just within buildings but also territorially as companies began to leave or left in a city London it was defined only by an applied grid of performance structural, environmental managerial becoming both the appearance and instrument of changing social economic conditions at the time in the late 1960s the architectural review claimed that the buildings designed by foster associates had reduced architectural expression to its absolute minimum these buildings were nothing more than a prop for an enclosing membrane they are not an architectural setting but an environment and we have seen how the carpet made this environment possible first to solve an acoustic issue then adapting to the changing technological nature of work in post war Britain thank you very much which one is yours? I have no idea, I think blue so we need Alice to back should I sit in the middle of the political shows doesn't it how society moved between the end of the 40s and the mid 60s they were really different but the one and it was interesting good thing that you were ending with what is favour when I was writing the space hope and brutalism book and went there they still operate in that way and so except that they don't need the cables anymore you know and how did you get Bureau of Landschaft when you got a straight row of plugs that was brilliant but it brought out that the one thing I was scribbling that sort of came together was it was both about how these spaces were used inside and how people connected there you had that incredibly nuclear family in their hope bomb hot from Burma and then the mass of people in the flats and I wondered how if you knew how much they were socially organised inside within the flats yeah I mean there was an incredible level of organisation there were committees established and everything from crushes to the supply of milk people had to re-register for their milk ration was organised theatre performances were put on and I think a very interesting thing about the adaptation of the space is I didn't really go into the architectural side of it but I have looked at the plans of Duchess of Bedford House and these were upper middle class service flats with a traditional very trad kind of skin taking incorporating all of the at the time latest services built in 1937 I believe but at the same time those very large flats included servants quarters so they have this relic of a much older traditional form of upper class life but each flat was taken over by families so during the squats there must have been an interesting reoccupation of that space but in short there was an incredible degree of organisation inside I think I wanted to do I need this super thank you and what happened when it finished did these organisations carry on did communities develop with relationships it was a really good question that I can't answer the squatting of the camps and Don Watson has kind of written the book on this whole history and anyone who wants to know about it should read that that book shows how they were a lot of them became semi permanent councils provided services to them but the flats they were evicted after I can't remember something like 10 days and the government became very worried about this situation as he can imagine because it was an infringement on private property but yeah I don't know if any organisation kind of lingered on most people were rehoused quite quickly as a result of the pressure that was brought to bear and there were various other consequences was this connected to a real estate was this sorry no no no go for it because was there now it would be if the council tax doesn't get paid you would get thrown out but I wondered if there was how this worked in terms of ground rents the lease hold free hold system important thing I didn't say I should have said at the beginning is that these buildings most of the buildings they squatted positions flats that were standing empty and Duchess of Bedford House was due to be handed back to designers the prudential assurance society level of companies and we'll then lease it out but he's in this kind of liminal state it's held by government under water emergency which will then extend it so that's the opportunity Do we have questions from the floor after trying to throw this open yes do you've got a microphone I'm just worried about the online people who are going to chip in with questions too that's an interesting question I mean in I mean in the broadest possible sense they are they are an experiment in commoning I think in creating an occupying communal space whether there's an actual when there was any kind of invoking of the memory of the diggers or stuff like that or anti enclosure movements I don't know we're talking about a very different period here yeah another question for you Alistair about that final double page spread that you talked about is it de Gwynio I was very struck by that fight that an image that you shared in detail with the family gathered around the table with the and I saw that in the two page spread that was very much the kind of final image in the bottom right hand it was a kind of conclusion of the day's activities and the whole moment although as you said the title of the article seemed very condonnaturally critical that final image to which he puts his name is a very reassuring synthetic one and one in which the squatters is a very interesting transition that happens between this kind of mass movement or the collective and then you finally end up with this image of the family that kind of ideal ideal working or middle class family gathered around the table the other side of which you sit as either the viewer or the artist you're part of seems to be a very reassuring domestic one that suggests danger and I think that's spot on and it's really interesting to notice that it is the final panel in the sequence of images I hadn't thought about that that's what I was trying to get at with this final quote from Raphael Samuel where he discusses the communist family he talks a lot about communist party families Labour party families and the the richness of life involved in that but also potentially blinkered aspects but it's for him it's part of a larger kind of collective moment or something the era of mass society of big corporations and institutions and dancing in step and going to holiday camps and what have you how a way in which he's suggesting that that communist family is in which those traditions are passed on and so on it exists within this somehow within this larger collectivity I don't know how better to put it than that but I think it's a really interesting observation what you said about the image specifically it's really interesting isn't it how that image is exactly the sort of forming of the way that the family is going from I mean it's Ratrae Taylor and then it's Wilmot and Young coming down through the 50s but the family is getting ever more nuclear and I wondered how your experience of this the big the parties was the sort of last gasp against that and the big organisation just as your work is getting down from the big corporation down to the little team in very much the same kind of way so I wondered if I have but you could comment in turn maybe I can put it on to Matthew at this point there's a social shift here which maybe you want to comment on or a perceived social shift of atomisation and the growth of radical individuality in the 60s and what have you and I think there's also not I mean IBM aren't building port sunlight for instance but there is very much an idea of the individual worker but also families there are all sorts of not just pool groups but sports teams they can join things you can collect they want to they have various articles in their newsletters about it's totally fine for married women to come and work for them it's something that they are quite clearly not a chance in the civil service meanwhile this is quite clearly the kind of ethos they're trying to and I suspect this is because they can have workers in a certain way they can probably pay them less there is I don't see any good ethics in what they're doing necessarily it's interesting that kind of persistence of some I don't know kind of binding like familial corporate kind of structures or like a kind of innovation in that way at the same time that those environments seem so redolent of individual kind of competition atomisation and so on I think the British environment is an experiment for the American I think this is also the impact of American culture Europe is very well it's been discussed quite a lot especially in post war Italy more recently by American scholars but I think this impact of these American corporations changing British society I think basically what they're creating is a mini version of the Aris Aranen campus architecture of the late 1950s in upstate New York but in Portsmouth and you see that in Foster's own office I think it too and the way Foster sort of tries and embraces sort of a lot of social ethics but in a very sort of corporate kind of way gentlemen in the way, nice waistcoat had a question well thank you very much both of you I really enjoyed your talks and learned quite a lot on the carpet I got really interested in that and I have just a few queries so first of all is there a sense of like kind of equalization if you like of society through kind of this measure it's like you know when with the advent of genes as trousers that sense of like kind of differences in class and all sorts of other structures of society appeared to be like kind of equalizing bit do you think that had a resonance in the development of carpet I have another question as well so the second question that I have is is the advent of wheeled chairs I didn't see any wheeled chairs in these pictures presumably they hadn't actually developed by them but I would be interested to hear more about that as well thank you great questions I think certainly that they the modular furniture of the caution is definitely using wheeled chairs and I'm not certain whether it's Helen Miller or someone that they're adopting and the kind of action office developed in the United States or if these are local UK manufacturers I think this is a part of this modularity the kind of classic movie scene where someone wheels in from one cubicle to another I think this is certainly a part of it I know there is a little bit more work for me to do to go to the Foster Foundation and have a look at these chairs because this is like you say this flexibility becomes the body is able to move differently in space the first question about genes this is very interesting I hadn't thought about it like this I think the uniformity is yeah, liberation is perhaps a part of it I think it's certainly it's this it's this desire for this design problem to be addressed it also I think is about providing an element of comfort and almost domesticity you're within a group, they're not calling them families but there is one of the IBM acronyms which is IBM for these secretarial groups and then it's they say no we can't use mum as an acronym because it's far too kind of maternal and I think perhaps the carpet is a part of this domestic space that's brought slightly into the corporate world but genes this is very interesting I should go back and look at genes in society Anything online? A comment is in response to your paper Matthew IBM closed their HQ in Edinburgh about 2017 ironically it was in five Georgian houses not together with some facade retention in St Andrew's Square on the other side of the square the Scottish provident concrete brutalist but beautiful office building was demolished because it allegedly wasn't adaptable to modern computer use so Matthew maybe Elaine you have I was going to say it sounds like a good excuse doesn't it but on that all that talk about you couldn't adapt officers because of the ceiling height because you've got to get your floors in that seems to have gone there's no reason really for that anymore but it's still if you can't convert to residential these days then down it comes and you get these battles about embodied energy as a result I heard a good story today if I can digress one of my colleagues who joined what was the royal commission for historical monuments in England in 1985 is retiring went into the York office and set to work it was trying to document the chapter house at York and their office had a canteen he went to talk to the photographers oh no you've got to sit with the other investigators the investigators had carpets in their section the photographers had lino and you know that thing starting in the civil service in 1980 as I did if you were grade clerical grade no arms on your chairs executive officers armrests so it resonates with wheels it makes the idea of total carpet actually quite symbolic of something that is attempting to be more democratic from Rosamond West and it's for you Alistair Rosamond says the press articles and photo journalism of the squats are so interesting however is there much visual slash documentary evidence from the squatters themselves do we know of any photographs that they took of themselves in their new but temporary homes that would be fascinating to if there was I haven't come across anything like that I mean I guess portable cameras weren't that available at this time but I mean one interesting thing is that although they were very wary of reporters coming in and you can see that from those mass observers interaction they did do their own recordings there's an incident where this is talked about in one of the mass observation reports that some of the squatters are talking about recording themselves and I don't know where those recordings have gone and there are some fascinating oral histories from the time from the squats but not photographs and really to both of you in the sense of I wondered how much this particular very short very short but very sort of intense movement that caused so much attention what impact it had on sort of future of sort of small scale or larger scale squatting movements and I think similarly I was really curious because I was looking while I was looking at your images and trying to think of how Bureau Lanshaft was sort of taken up in future use and also if you're thinking about large scale corporate offices now being such a big big thing and all these questions around communication play like how do you make work more fun and all of these sorts of questions and I'm curious as to how many things were carried forward what was left behind yeah continuity and afterlife it's really interesting because in a way what I'm trying to what I'm interested in is resonances across time and precisely those continuities what happens to something when it ends it's the kind of the kind of mould of history isn't it where does it go where does that consciousness go and the Wolleheim quote at the beginning he's talking about this suddenly seeing this new generation of teenagers and in a way he kind of de-classes them and Tom Crowe in his wonderful mobilisation of that passage in his book on the mods and what not similarly he kind of puts class to one side but I think class is still there and really this is about young a lot of young people from working class or low middle class backgrounds getting jobs with decent pay packages and being able to go out and sawn to around the town and create these new clubs and of course then the other aspect the other kind of key force is Commonwealth immigration and the creation of those network of blues clubs North Kensington in particular but elsewhere famously in Mangrove which becomes centres of resistance so there's a kind of there's a different there's a moment there, a different moment in the kind of late 50s onwards that has echoes and it would be interesting to see if there are continuities of individual personnel or of awareness of this earlier moment I don't know and then later of course there's lots of squatting in the 60s and 70s that people like Christine Wall have written about when you look at the visual culture surrounding the documentation it looks very different it looks like it has traces of the hippie movement it looks it has a different feel and there's different people involved and there's less sense of the involvement of the Labour Party and the Communist Party and of a kind of cater of people who had a certain experience so yeah there's continuities and discontinuities but there's still to be investigated almost as if that generation that were young parents in the late 40s early 50s get left behind by their kids who's come up and use up and take away that that sort of family ethic and reverse back to associations and camarades now it's interesting because that is something that continues and is documented isn't it shall we attack soil it's warm in here your side of the office question and how where the Bureau of Landschaft is today really and then actually I might circle back but the absolute, I think this question of afterlife and to some extent obsolescence technological obsolescence being built into it so at some point there is an awareness that things will change and Duffy, Francis Duffy developed around the layers of the building having different life cycles so furniture and a carpet might last for eight years the primary structure might last for 80 and these things will be changed I think I didn't go on to it but Willis Faber Dumas I was worried about pushing too much into the 1970s I thought I might get into trouble but Willis Faber Dumas leisure is a huge part of this building so the carpet extends up onto the roof and there is a very famous roof terrace and these amazing views of Ipswich and it's the well-being of workers keeping them in the office is very important the building the building has a funny relationship with energy it has its own incredible plant room which also heats a swimming pool that the workers can use and there's some very famous Ben what's his surname, the painter anyway, there's a painter who makes some amazing reflective images of this swimming pool but also the building is built during the first parts of the oil crisis and during the three-day week so construction can only happen on the project during three days of the week and then if I circle back to the class question I think also maybe we are at this this is slightly biographical for me but this moment where we're almost at the norm the norm for work in this country becomes the service industry I think it's moving in that direction at least and I say biographical because it's funny you talk about the civil service because this is exactly in the 1970 is when my father is one of seven in Birmingham joins the post office and he's the first member of his family he's a white collar job and he's given a bar of soap and a towel and a cloth to dry his hands with and a pencil and when each of these things runs out he has to go back to the office and get a new one of a quarter master and he's exactly this moment this generational shift where people are known his family at least and not working in manual employment but are working in offices and I think this is kind of an interest so the gentleman in the middle there had a question just a couple of things very cause and effect the railings in London were being torn down during the war to help the war effort and they've all been replaced and you can see their old sockets and where the new ones are all in did that possibly have something to do when they put them all back in reintroducing those restrictions limiting the amount of squatting later on maybe they didn't seem like people had that much trouble getting over the railings but I do love this thing I think you're so right to look closely at the railings cos no great photo is the photo I had at the beginning of this woman jumping over which is in midday I think it's one of the best photos it has a kind of trace it's like something of a Cartier press on it makes me think of like it's not a particularly great photograph but it has something of like the railings I think people swarming over the railings to help with the railings but I don't know cos they couldn't take the railings out for the war effort where there was a basement cos you'd have walked in the blackout you'd have fallen in so that's why they survived for his lot to climb over that's interesting I think that are we there are we there from the online people so if I come back here thank you online people thank all this gentleman at the back are you are you your signalling sir does that mean you have a quick last question squatting has always been a challenge to bourgeois property values could you explain the reason why there's been much more hostility from Labour party to squatting than from any other party consistently in the 40s and in the 60s and in the 70s it was always Labour politicians squatting could you just comment on that and giving the left a bad name kind of thing it's probably one for discussion amongst ourselves I know we must call this to an end I'm very grateful to you all for coming and I think we get a refreshment now so that would be the place to continue this discussion cos we'd welcome your thinking on the history of Labour politics and individual activism is a really good topic thank you everybody online thank you Paul Mellon for your hosting generosity in perfect IT above all thank you all here and particularly that you join with me in thanking our speakers tonight wonderful presentations very beautifully presented thank you both so much