Architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina has suggested that it was its engagement with the machinery of mass media that distinguished Modernist architecture as such. But it wasn’t just iconic buildings that made up this network. Modernist architecture was celebrated on a more modest scale in numerous reports and advertisements that appeared in the architectural press. Photographic essays and articles on New Towns and Post-War overspill developments like Harlow, Hatfield, Stevenage, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Northampton, Luton, Corby, and Basildon appeared frequently in sister journals The Architectural Review and The Architect’s Journal from the late 1940s through the 1960s. The newly constructed factories, municipal buildings, and housing estates (often shot before they were fully tenanted) shared the geometric, gridded articulation and strong horizontals of more acclaimed buildings in the International Style.

The design of planned communities such as these was based loosely on the theories of social reformers like Ebenezer Howard – founder of the Garden City movement – and the American sociologist and philosopher Lewis Mumford, who envisioned a modern city made up of individual ‘neighbourhood units’ created to nurture health and wellbeing, cultural growth and social integration. For Mumford, ‘a habitat planned so as to form a continuous background to a delicately graded scale of human feelings and values is the prime requisite of a cultivated life’. Architecture played a key part in this utopian vision, in which modern rational planning and an aesthetically pleasing townscape collaborated to encourage modern, rational ways of living.

James Smith’s photographs show us the landscape of Post-War development years after the cycle of aspiration and decline has run its course. The Modernist vision has had decades to bed in. Weather and wear and time have had their way with the materials; the buildings and the surrounding environments have mellowed and transformed with age. Very few of these places have survived without at least minimal alteration. Some original features have vanished and new ones have been introduced. Such transformations speak of lives lived outside the parameters of utopia.

‘The Complex Business of Living: Photography, Modernism, and the Landscape of Overspill’, in James Smith: London Overspill
Softcover, 116 pages
Published by Relief Press (17 May 2018).
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1911549014
ISBN-13: 978-1911549017