‘How can an entity with no discernible beginning or end be a place?”

Fumihiko Maki

Architecture has long provided concrete expression for ideals such as home, nation, justice, democracy and spirituality. In so doing, it has helped to place them within society. The placing of these ideals has been an important aspect of both ancient and modern cultures, helping to focus, gather and structure many aspects of daily life, to mesh practices and customs with the assets of particular locales, and provide grounding for human existence.

I cannot recall when and how I first heard of Ralph Erskine, but by 1975 I was well aware of his work and included Byker in an article on architecture for the Chambers Encyclopaedia Yearbook, setting it among the most significant British architectural events of the year.

This is an extract from the daybook kept by the architects working in the on-site project office which Ralph Erskine and his partner Vernon Gracie established in a former shop during the redevelopment of the Byker area of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1970s [2]. About the office, Erskine wrote:

In his influential review of the redevelopment in Byker, Peter Malpass claimed that ‘the office represented an unusually thorough attempt by architects to immerse themselves in the culture of a particular set of clients’.

In the 1960s and '70s Ralph Erskine wrote a number of articles where he manifested and developed his view on architecture and its role in society. These articles are important to understand his oeuvre, but have not received the same attention as his built work. This essay aims at explicating the central themes as well as tracing changes and recurrences in the articles during the most important decades of his lifelong career.

The articles were published in a range of different magazines, some in rather marginal ones with a limited distribution, others only in the Swedish language. This accounts in part for the reason his thoughts are primarily known through secondary sources. Nonetheless, his writings present significant and sometimes even original thoughts on architecture.

A current issue in architectural scholarship is the rethinking of the origins of Modernism. As a formative exemplar of early architectural Modernism, Bruno Taut's seminal exhibition pavilion, the Glashaus (1914) [1] is understandably part of this debate. In 1959, Reyner Banham in his article, ‘The Glass Paradise’ suggested that it would be appropriate to investigate the origins of the Glashaus, as it was both vastly dissimilar to and exceeded any of Taut's previous designs. In an effort to answer this question, Banham subsequently introduced the unique role played by the Bohemian poet Paul Scheerbart in the design of the Glashaus. As a result of Banham's inference, Rosemarie Haag Bletter systematically explored the Taut/Scheerbart relationship in ‘Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart's Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture’ in 1973.

Why should architects be involved in humanitarian work and the often-complex projects needed to deal with the recovery of post-disaster emergencies? How can the design profession contribute to the longterm reconstruction processes needed to ensure the effective rebuilding of vulnerable communities after disaster?

The first chapter of Nikolaus Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art is entitled ‘The Geography of Art’. In this he presents a reflection on the validity of geography as a means of interpreting art and architecture and in it he proposes that, ‘there is a whole string of facts from art and literature [that are] tentatively derived from climate’. The instrumental connection of architecture and climate is widely accepted in the literature of socalled ‘architectural science’. But the influence of geography and the specific conditions of climate may be shown to have a more fundamental influence on architecture than simple pragmatism.