Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect reconstructs the intellectual and social vision of one of British housing's most consequential figures — the RIBA Gold Medal 2017 winner whose Camden Council projects redefined what urban housing could be.
About This Book
When Neave Brown accepted the RIBA Gold Medal in 2017, he framed his life's work not as housing design but as city-making. That distinction is the animating principle of this book. Edited by Patrick and Claudia Lynch and David Porter, it assembles Brown's own writing alongside documentation of his large-scale urban housing projects for Camden Council and his later work in Italy and The Netherlands. What makes this volume essential is the layering of critical voices: original essays from the 1960s and 1970s by Reyner Banham, Bob Maxwell, Christopher Woodward, and Ed Jones sit alongside new contributions from Kenneth Frampton, Simon Henley, Paul Karakusevic, and Peter Barber. The result is both a monograph and a cultural history of a period when social housing was understood as architecture.
Key Features
- 416 pages of project documentation, original essays, and new critical writing spanning six decades of architectural discourse
- Edited by Patrick and Claudia Lynch and David Porter; contributions from Kenneth Frampton, Reyner Banham, Bob Maxwell, Christopher Woodward, Ed Jones, Jonathan Sergison, Simon Henley, Paul Karakusevic, and Peter Barber
- Covers Brown's celebrated Camden Council housing projects and later work in Italy and The Netherlands undertaken with David Porter
- Published by Canalside Press, 2020
What You'll Discover
- How Brown's refusal to separate housing design from urban design produced some of the most architecturally ambitious social housing of the twentieth century
- The intellectual climate of 1960s and 1970s British architecture through contemporary criticism by Banham, Maxwell, and Woodward — presented here alongside the projects they originally assessed
- The continuity between Brown's Camden work and his later private-practice projects in Europe, traced through built work and documentary material
- Why Brown's ethos — that housing is the fabric of the city, not a problem to be solved separately from it — remains urgently relevant to contemporary housing and ecological debates
About the Author
Neave Brown (1929–2018) was an Anglo-American architect whose large-scale housing schemes for Camden Council earned him recognition as one of the most significant social housing architects of his generation. He was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 2017. This volume is edited by Patrick and Claudia Lynch and David Porter, Brown's collaborator on his later projects in Italy and The Netherlands.
Specifications
- Format: Clothbound Hardcover
- Pages: 416
- Dimensions: 223 x 182 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781399937436
- Publisher: Canalside Press
- Publication Date: 2020
Perfect For: Architects and students with an interest in social housing, urban housing policy, twentieth-century British modernism, and the intersection of architecture and civic life.