This is Tomorrow: Architecture and Modernity in Britain and its Empire, 1930-1960

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7

The module is concerned with the entanglements of architecture with ideas of modernity and the home in mid-twentieth century Britain, as well as how these issues related to Britain’s place in the world and especially its relation to its empire. The idea of modernity, whether through the arrival of modernism or the development of various forms of state modernisation, has long structured accounts of modern architecture in Britain. Similar accounts have begun to be written of architecture in Britain’s empire (and after empire - the post-colonial or neo-colonial). However, the two have hardly been brought together - that is the task of this module. How did the empire penetrate the home? How was housing influenced by new conceptions and inventions in technology (including the technology of war)? Was the architectural avant-garde critical of imperialism? How did architectural ideas travel between empire and metropolis? There are field trips to relevant architecture in London, including visits to archival material.

Indicative module content

• Anthropology of the by-law street
• The welfare state and housing
• India and Kenya
• Spatial experience of immigrants in London
• The East End street
• The decorative and the ornamental
• Domesticity at the Festival of Britain
• Avant-garde and empire
• The tropical house
• Domesticity at war
• Brutalism
• Anti-Modernism