Figurations and Offer

I attended the Figurations Conference at the Bartlett on 25th April. The range of discussion was very wide and quite esoteric. One presentation which I found particularly useful was Carlo Menon's discussion of "minor to major". For me this offered up the idea that while much of John Laing's photographic imagery might be considered "minor" in that they show vernacular housing, construction workers going about their jobs and so on , in reality this work should be considered "major" because of the aggregated impact that it created over time. Some of the work, such as Coventry Cathedral and the M1 falls immediately into the "major" but I think a lot of other material is just as important in the story that it tells.

The 4th of May has been a red letter day for me, firstly I got to meet the people at John Laing and its Charitable Trust in person and had a really great conversation and then when I got home and checked I had my formal offer letter from the Bartlett - its all very real now!

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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 Building of Coventry Cathedral

The building of Coventry Cathedral after the previous incarnation was all but destroyed in a German air raid was one of the "power and glory" contracts that John Laing won in 1956 and one that John Laing felt particularly strongly about 1 . The John Laing Collection has a number of albums which depict the development from many angles and includes both construction work and more presentational aspects such as the recording of visiting dignitaries and in particular members of the Royal Family. The images for the latter are often taken from newspapers such as the Coventry Evening Telegraph. One such image from the Leicester Evening Mail shows Sir Basil Spence showing Queen Elizabeth II a model of the new Cathedral in the grounds (it is assumed) of the ruins of the old Cathedral. Basil Spence explaining the site of the new Cathedral to Her Majesty The Queen Photograph by Leicester Evening Mail 23rd March, 1956. © Historic England 2018 - The John Laing Collection The fact...

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.

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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