BD Online reports today the death of British architect and critic Alan Colquhoun at the age of 91 (free registration required).
While known in the US mainly as a critic -he taught at Princeton in
the 1970's and published in
Oppositions- in Britain he is also known
for his architecture, as Owen Hatherley recounted in the same magazine last
November:
"As a historian and theorist of architecture, Colquhoun’s rigorous and often harsh, pessimistic writing put him closer to the neo-Marxist history of Manfredo Tafuri than the alternately guilt-ridden or coldly technocratic literature of British post-modernism."
"As an architect ... Colquhoun was behind some of
the most interesting housing in post-war Britain, favouring an austere
idiom equally hostile to the picturesque, tamed modernism of the
Festival of Britain as it was to the concrete gymnastics of much
Brutalism."
All this means he tilted horns with the New Brutalists, Reynar Banham, Rogers, Foster, and his pet peeves, Buckminster Fuller and the Pompidou Center. In the United States, Hatherley maintains,
"It could be argued that the neo-avant-garde formalism of Eisenman and the
New York Five, and their pessimistic assessment of any possibility of
“political” architecture, owed much to Colquhoun."
And in his last book, a history of modern architecture, Hatherley reports,
"....Colquhoun wrote a final, darkly funny attack on the Fun Palaces
and New Babylons of the 1968 generation, seeing the end result as
little more than “boredom and claustrophobia”. And looking at much 21st
century architecture, who could disagree?"
Not much fun is he, not much fun at all.
Update
December 21, 2012
DD Online has now published testimonials to Colquhoun by
several colleagues, as well as
Kenneth Frampton's tribute , which puts into sharper focus his work as an architect and thinker than the comments cited above.
My favorite testimonial is by Robert Maxwell, former Dean of the Princeton architectural department and another expat Brit in the States, who first met Colquhoun "
in 1946 when we were both in the Bengal Sappers and Miners, at
Roorkee, India."
His report includes these gems:
"Alan enjoyed a large bungalow with high clerestory windows, and my
memory is of us lying on camp beds a few inches off the ground listening
to Mozart’s piano quartet while a grave old gentleman called a
punkah-wallah pulled a hanging sail to and fro to make a draught."
"At Rookee, after dinner in the mess we would lie on low wooden chairs
waiting for sunset. As soon as the sun went down a beautiful fragrance
from the flowering shrubs wafted over us, renewing our hopes for
tomorrow. But by then Colquhoun had already left."
Frampton praises Colquhoun's work and nuanced thinking, but nevertheless ruefully notes his rough spots:
"Considerate, gracious and gallant, Alan as a lifelong bachelor was a
romantic who remained categorically anti-romantic. He was unfailingly an
outspoken critic who did not suffer fools gladly, which no doubt
accounts for our occasional exchanges as to merits and demerits of
regionalism, critical or otherwise."
No folks, I am not making this up, this is not a Monty Python skit: Colquhoun knew very well how not to have a good time.
In the sharper focus department, Frampton is worth quoting at length:
"Trained in Edinburgh and the AA, Alan would remain as removed from
the technocratic euphoria of Banham and the British hi-tech movement, as
from the neo-vernacular Swedish welfare state style adopted by the
left-wing architects of the LCC ([London County Council]. Within this line-up his affinities lay
with his Corbusian colleagues at the LCC, as we may judge from his
contribution to what was then a typical LCC unité duplex block, completed in the London borough of Hackney around 1958."
"Influenced
by the Warburg generation of Germanic émigré intellectuals, by
Gombrich, Cassirer, Wittkower et al, Alan was committed to continuing
the rational humanism of the pre-war Modern Movement, to which the early
work of Colquhoun and Miller bears ample testament; above all their
Stratford Secondary School in the East End of London of 1962 and the
chemistry laboratories that they designed and realized for the Royal
Holloway College, Egham in 1970."
"Alan’s subsequent involvement with the School of Architecture,
Princeton University at the end of the 60’s brought him into contact
with Tomas Maldonado who, along with the Spanish aesthetician Tomas
Llorens exiled in Portsmouth, would have introduced him to the
Neo-Marxist thought of the Frankfurt School with which his writing was
subtly infused throughout the remainder of his career."
Note the link to
Tomás Llorens: the point man it would seem for
Rafael Moneo's entry into the
Oppositions circle; the two were colleagues at the Barcelona journal
Arquitectura Bis.
Bibliography
Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change
Oppositions Books, 1981.
Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980-1987
The MIT Press, 1991. Spanish edition available.
Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism
Black Dog Publishing, 2008.
Modern Architecture (Oxford History of Art)
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Available in Spanish as:
La arquitectura moderna: Una historia desapasionada
Gustavo GIli, 2005
Oase 87 - Alan Colquhoun. Architect, Historian, Critic
Articles by Tom Avermaete, Kenneth Frampton, Francoise Fromonot, Christoph Grafe, Owen Hatherley, Christian Kieckens
NAI, 2012
