DEMOLISHING WHITEHALL by Adam Sharr, Stephen Thornton ( 9781409423874 )

Item Details

Title:

DEMOLISHING WHITEHALL
LESLIE MARTIN, HAROLD WILSON AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF WHITE HEAT

By:

Adam Sharr, Stephen Thornton

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£145.00

Our price:

£130.50

Discount:

10% off

You save:

£14.50

ISBN 10:

1409423875

ISBN 13:

9781409423874

Availability:

Usually dispatched within 1-3 weeks.

Delivery rates

Stock:

Currently 0 available

Publisher:

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

Pub. date:

18 October, 2013

Pages:

324

Description:

This book is about a lost world - albeit one less than 50 years old. In the era of Harold Wilson's 'white heat', architect Sir Leslie Martin proposed a grand plan to demolish and rebuild a swathe of historic Whitehall, London's government district. At once optimistic and paternalistic.

Synopsis:

This book is about a lost world, albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall, London's historic government district, and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilson's Labour government, for the wholesale reconstruction of London's 'Government Centre'. Still reeling from war damage, its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martin's plan - by no means modest in conception, scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square, reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates, although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented.But the un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history, when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent, apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the 'white heat of technology'. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future, an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors, it represented a tussle between government departments, between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of 'professionalization' and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism and el

Illustrations:

Includes 135 b&w illustrations

Publication:

Imprint:

Ashgate Publishing Limited

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

CLASSICAL DYNAMICS OF PARTICLES AND SYSTEMS, INTERNATIONAL EDITION (PB)

DANIEL

DANIEL (HB)

DEMOLISHING WHITEHALL