Thinking about themes

At this very early stage in my reading I am starting to try and sort out some of the mechanics of note keeping, what do I need to read first, how to remember to go back to something I saw in passing and so on. At the moment its all a bit scattergun but a few things seem to come regularly to the fore and may end up being areas for more investigation:

Concrete and Prefabs - John Laing did a lot of development work on concrete and how it could be used as part of house building systems (which might be considered prefabs depending on your definition of that term) - this led to commercial products such as Lytag. Concrete has a vast history but seems to have been reborn in the post WWII period - Jones suggests that 'As the modern world rose from the rubble of Second World War, it was shaped by one material above all others.' ¹ and that material was concrete.
Coventry Cathedral - This might provide a focus based on the design work, the documentation of the building and of course the importance to John Laing's of religion.
Motorways - John Laing was responsible for the construction of the M1 and its hardly news that such roads have radically altered our social world.
The Atomic Age - John Laing was responsible for work on some of the earliest nuclear plants and its hard to think of something that does not embody the idea of a modern world than nuclear power in the 1950s.
National Identity - All of the above might be considered as mechanisms for (re)creating a national identity following WWII.

1) Jones, N. (2017). The world recast : 70 buildings from 70 years of Concrete Quarterly / Nick Jones: London : Artifice books on architecture : The Concrete Centre.

Comments

The Mystery L

Clapham Wind Tunnel One area where being able to talk to the people who worked for John Laing is really helpful is unravelling the odd mystery. I have noticed that in a number of photographs from the 1950s there is one or two individuals who had a large L on their jacket. I speculated on what this might be and thought that most likely it was to designate the leader of a team of workers. I was able to put a short piece in John Laing's Retired Employees' News asking for any information on the mystery L and several people kindly wrote to explain the mystery - which was no real mystery at all. The L simply stood for Laing but only new employees would be given a jacket with the logotype and so this took a long time to permeate through the organisation. A case of applying Occam's razor and not overthinking things for me.

PHRC 2019

The PHRC conference at De Montfort was tremendous and provided a lot of insights for me to go away and think about. In particular there was a lot of discussion about what is missing from an archive and what that tells us - sometimes as much as the extant material. Things for me to think about include: How colour photography creates a new sensory experience - maybe tying this into the work that Lynda Nead has done Who are the keepers of corporate memory - the business or the people who work in it? How posed are the images - are they pictures of work in progress or staged Do the images sanction and "testify" to a particular (curated?) history I was also pointed at other work that I need to read - the pile keeps getting higher!

PhD Introductions

So 2 months into the degree it is time to talk about my research ideas to a wider audience. On 4th Dec the School will be running a session titled PhD Introductions. The purpose of the event is to introduce the students' previous work and research interests, to discuss their current research ideas, developments and experiments and to generate a lively discussion about research in architecture. I get to do a 10 minute presentation followed by comments/questions/discussion. It has been a useful exercise so far - thinking about how to condense a somewhat sprawling thought process into a short piece and to make sure that it is accessible in the sense of providing enough of the background and context to allow the audience to make some sense of everything.

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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