The Architects Who Made London with Maxwell Hutchinson
The second instalment of this popular lecture series is about key architects from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, whose buildings contribute to the London we see today.
Maxwell Hutchinson was President of the Royal Institute of British Architects from 1989 to 1991. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Westminster and previously at the Universities of Nottingham and Queens Belfast. He is a practising architect and contributor to BBC Radio Four, BBC Two’s Newsnight and has a regular radio slot on the Robert Elms show on BBC London 94.9. He presented Channel 4’s Demolition Detectives, wrote and presented No 57, The History of a House, and worked on BBC Two’s First Sight and Restoration Nation. Maxwell is the founder and chairman of Architects for Aid.
This interactive map shows buildings mentioned in the series
Location and times for all lectures:
Geological Society Lecture Theatre
Piccadilly, W1
6.30–7.30pm
In the Architecture Space
This lecture series coincides with a display of drawings, plans and photographs.
Click here for more information
Click here to download the accompanying handout (309 KB)
Sir Aston Webb PRA
Monday 11 February
With Admiralty Arch and the east front of Buckingham Palace, Aston Webb gave central London a grandeur equal to the Edwardian age. His designs for the Victoria and Albert Museum and much of the nearby Imperial College and Royal School of Mines show a great appreciation of architectural tradition. But his restoration of the ruined church of St Bartholomew the Great at Smithfield may be his most personal contribution to London. Ian Dungavell, Director of The Victorian Society, explores the work of this Royal Academician architect.
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48:10 mins (22.1 MB)
Richard Norman Shaw RA
Monday 25 February
Richard Norman Shaw was the most inventive of a group of late nineteenth-century architects who introduced a new freedom of composition which expressed London’s increasing social and physical diversity. His contribution to Bedford Park, London’s first garden suburb, showed how such eclecticism could give identity to the rapidly growing city fringe, while buildings like New Scotland Yard and Albert Hall Mansions indicated a way beyond the dichotomy of classical or gothic architecture for city centre sites. Andrew Saint, general editor of the Survey of London, and author of the most comprehensive book on Shaw, discusses Shaw’s originality and vision as an architect.
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45:27 mins (20.8 MB)
Sir Edwin Lutyens PRA
Monday 10 March
Edwin Lutyens’s London projects range from the great barn-like churches of Hampstead Garden Suburb to commercial buildings, such as the ‘Wrenaissance’ headquarters for Country Life in Covent Garden, or the Baroque grandeur of Britannic House on Finsbury Circus. After World War I he was involved in the creation of monuments to commemorate the fallen, including the powerful and moving Cenotaph in Whitehall and the Tower Hill memorial. Margaret Richardson, Honorary Curator of Architecture at the Royal Academy, discusses how Lutyens’s work imaginatively adapted traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his time.
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01:15:37 hours (34.6 MB)
Charles Holden
Monday 31 March
Schooled in the Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Holden adapted its free composition to large institutional buildings of the 1920s and ’30s. Senate House was London’s tallest building on completion, and heralded as a synthesis of the demands of modernity and obligations to tradition. But it is his work for London Transport, including its headquarters at 55 Broadway and the magnificent series of underground stations from Arnos Grove to Osterley, that mark his greatest contribution to the city. Eitan Karol, author of the first book-length study of Charles Holden and his architecture, presents him as one of the first of the Moderns in Britain.
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01:18:22 hours (35.9 MB)
Tecton and Berthold Lubetkin RA
Monday 14 April
Led by Berthold Lubetkin, the architectural practice Tecton, combined a passion for social reform with a deeper knowledge of European modernism, in the designs for the penguin enclosure at London Zoo, the residential tower block of Highpoint, and the Finsbury Health Centre. The post-war housing schemes of Spa and Priory Greens set a thoughtful precursor to the onslaught of social housing projects which dominated London and set the pattern for other large scale redevelopment by Tecton's successor’s practices. Architect and Lubetkin’s biographer, John Allan, discusses these and other projects, elaborating on how Lubetkin’s continental and Russian background influenced areas of London we see today.
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56:53 mins (26.0 MB)
London County Council (LCC)
Monday 28 April
Each of the stylistic idioms of LCC Architects’ Department made their mark on London, and are apparent across the city. The department distinguished itself before 1900 with two outstanding urban social housing schemes at Millbank and Boundary Road in Shoreditch. Later it added cottage estates to the city fringe and the now ubiquitous brick-clad, walk-up, gallery-access apartment blocks. Their contribution to the Thames River frontage can be seen as clients for the London County Hall and as architects of the Royal Festival Hall. Professor of Architecture at Liverpool University, Simon Pepper, looks at the work of the LCC with his particular knowledge of social and architectural history.
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01:14:28 hours (34.1 MB)
