Moving between architectural history, oral history and the history of construction this talk will examine the tools, techniques and social organization of two building sites in 1960s London. The Barbican and the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank are renowned examples of Brutalist architecture but are rarely investigated at the point of production: the building site. Oral histories are used here to examine the production processes of these complex, architectural masterpieces but also to shift analysis away from the notion of purely architect-authored schemes to include a wider, and diverse, cast of co-producers. These personal narratives from the building site enable us to arrive at new, and hopefully enriched, understandings of these buildings and their wider social, political and architectural importance.
Christine Wall is Professor of Architectural History, at the University of Westminster and founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Research into the Production of the Built Environment. She has published widely on architecture and the construction industry in the twentieth century, including the role of women as designers and builders, and recently led the Leverhulme Trust funded oral history project, Constructing Post-War Britain: building workers’ stories 1950-1970. She is a Trustee of the Construction History Society, Co-Editor of the Construction History Journal and a member of the Editorial Board of the Oral History Journal. Publications include; An architecture of parts: architects, building workers and industrialisation in Britain 1940-1970. Routledge, 2013 and ‘It was a totally different approach to building’ in Speaking of Buildings: oral history in architectural research, eds. Gosseye et.al. Princeton, 2019. She is currently a member of the judging panel of the RIBA Research Awards 2020.
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