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Lecture
Open Ends: the social visions of 1960�s non-planning - Simon Sadler
date: Wednesday 15 March
time: 7pm
venue: Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Currently lecturing in the Department of the History of Art, Trinity College Dublin, Simon Sadler is co-editor with Jonathan Hughes of �Non-Plan: Essays on freedom, participation and change in modernarchitecture and urbanism�, recently published by Architectural Press. �Non-Plan� traces an unwritten history of modern architecture, and explores the ways in which people have sought to regain control over the built environment. From free-market enterprise zones to self-build housing, from squatting and riot to sophisticated technologies of pre-fabrication, non-plan strategies have targeted architectural inertia on many fronts. This lecture draws on material from Sadler�s essay �Open Ends�, ranging from Archigram to the Metabolists, Cedric Price, Christopher Alexander, Buckminster Fuller, Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Situationists, Charles Jencks, Haus-Rucker-Co, Coop Himmelblau.
�The impact of �non-planning� upon mainstream construction in the 1960s, an era of high-rises and city-centre reconstruction, was marginal at best. But in experimental work, non-planning was played out in the studio and upon the printed page with a fervency unmatched before or since, spurred on by the social and cultural debates about the nature of freedom that characterised the period... Modernism, it would be fair to say, was always a cult of the new, but lying at its heart was a conundrum, between the will to manage the new and the belief that spontaneity must be permitted in order to guarantee renewal, in an ongoing dialogue between �closed� and �open� systems.� |
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