Design

During the second world war, when not only food, but paper and artists’ materials were scarce, Peggy Angus made a virtue of necessity. Potatoes were one of the few foods not rationed, so she began cutting them in half, carving designs into the cut side and printing them onto old newspapers in repeated patterns of oak leaves, smiling suns, waves, chevrons and Welsh dragons. It was with these playful, naïve designs — which she later turned into tiles and wallpapers — that she made her name. Angus, like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, her contemporaries at the Royal College of Art, moved easily between media: potato prints, silkscreens, oil paintings,

Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred by debased familiarity. You have been to Catford? You have seen a heroic vision compromised. Modern Architecture is no more threatening than abstract art, although the Swiss-French Le Corbusier retains a heady whiff of the opprobrium which attaches to bogeymen. His rival in stature was the German-American, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a very different designer. With Corb we think of head-butting bravura concrete. With Mies, as he is always known, we think of magnificently refined steel and glass: the beautiful architectural full stop of Hegel’s history. Mies was the

Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some exculpatory, older and wiser material fore and aft). Adhocism (re)captures with magical realism the boldness and silliness of its day.  This was the day when ‘new media’ meant colour television. Younger readers may need more instruction on the nature of this spirit. Students in Paris hurled St Germain cobblestones at gendarmes in clouds of teargas and students at Hornsey College of Art sat in to protest I cannot quite remember what in clouds of pot smoke. The Parisians read Guy Debord on situationism, the Hornseyites drooled over nudes in the

I opened Futurescapes with anticipation, knowing Tim Richardson to be a forceful commentator, and landscape architects to be in dire need of an articulate champion. The mixed marriage of ‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’ has always been an unfortunate union, blessed by the founding of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, whilst Britain followed suit in 1929. Landscape architects found their feet with the 1951 Festival of Britain and the new towns of the Sixties, when they became early converts to ‘globalism’ holding international conferences. They rode the first ecological wave of the Seventies and then followed the money to the Middle and Far East. They are an adaptable profession,

The author of this book and I both visited the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank as schoolboys. The author of this book and I both visited the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank as schoolboys. He was 13, I was 11. We were both old enough to remember the war. We were both enduring the post-war austerity. Much was still rationed. Everywhere there were bombsites. From his generally commendable account, I know we both had a similar reaction to the Dome of Discovery, the Skylon and all the other attractions: there was a sense of renewal, lightness, colour, modernity and excess, in contrast to the