The Commercial Architect in the Development of Postwar London

Home , Bank junction, Candida Lycett Green, Centre Point, County of London Plan, Ian Nairn, Paternoster Square

Map of the City of London show - ing bombed areas proposed for comprehensive redevelopment, 1947. From C.H. Holden and W.G. Holford, The City of London: A Record of Destruction and Survival (1951).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Prejudice and Pragmatism: The Commercial Architect in the Development of Postwar London

AMY THOMAS

There are dozens of architectural practices whose buildings receive neither awards nor reviews. Romantic fiction rather than literature, their work is all perv asive. . . . Here are the architects who talk the developers’ language. —Gillian Darley, Times (London), 1984 1

Much of the history of London’s development in the postwar period has focused on the output of the architectural avant-garde. In particular, historians have examined the influence of European discussions of urban planning, housing, and public building on the reconstruction of the capital, and the extent to which approaches adopted by British architects were commensurate with the postwar ideological formulation of the welfare state. 2 During this period, an extraordinarily high number of architects—roughly half at its peak—worked for the state. 3 The international renown of many of these practitioners has ensured that this state-sponsored work has been well documented. 4 But what of the other half? Unlike the same period in American architectural history, British commercial development remains understudied. 5 This oversight largely stems from intolerance on the part of the architectural community toward developer-led construction during the postwar decades. The journalist Oliver Marriott highlights this tendency in an examination of the growth of London’s property market in 1967, arguing, “commercial property has in the post-war period been an industry in the throes of one of the greatest booms in this country’s history and much in the public eye, but emotion and prejudice have tended to blind many to discussions of the subject.” 6 While almost all architects worked for the private sector at some point, commercial architects were ostracized due to their close rela - tionship with developers and were criticized by the architectural establishment for the very characteristics that made them attractive to their clients: an economical

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 approach; an affinity for using planning loopholes; and, above all, a working method that privileged cost calculations over other ambitions. By contrast, London’s more recent architectural development shows a regulatory convergence within the spheres of architecture, finance, and government. Since the economic reforms of the 1980s and the reorientation of state regulation to incen - tivize private enterprise, the approaches of architects and the planning policies of local authorities have fallen in line with investment structures. The blurring of “state” and “commerce” and the prominence of public-private partnerships have removed the economic and cultural distinctions so prevalent in the postwar decades between commercial and public commissions. 7 Commercial architects are no longer industry pariahs but the norm, and the developer is their main client. 8 Nowhere has this cultural shift been so explicit as in the City of London (the financial center, as distinct from London, the capital), which was at the center of debates around both commercial development and regulatory reform for most of the second half of the twentieth century. With 31 percent of its office floor space destroyed during the Blitz, the City became the site of concentrated commercial development from the 1950s onward. 9 Its reconstruction was positioned as central to the revival of the national economy, and the government and its local authority, the Corporation of London, put in place measures to enable the swift and frictionless rebuilding of offices. The latter gave rise to an insatiable and lucrative property market. Simultaneously, the business-oriented nature of the City rendered it the site of opportunity for devel - opers and architects who capitalized on the increasing internationalization and expansion of the financial services industry. This culminated in the 1980s, as the Thatcher government’s deregulatory policies entirely overhauled the organization of business in the City, causing financial companies to expand and rely increasingly on new forms of information technology. 10 The influx of foreign firms and a dramatic shift in accommodation requirements created an unprecedented demand for new office space. The City became the most important site for innovation in the archi - tecture and construction sectors in Britain from the mid-1980s, as over half of its floor space was rebuilt in little over a decade. 11 Like the commercial architects it hosted, the City is an outcast in architectural histories of London in the postwar period, largely because it ignored the procedures and contravened the ideological stance of the London County Council (LCC). 12 After the war, the City existed in a different regulatory realm from the rest of London due to its long-standing independence as a political constituency: the Corporation was established before the Parliament and, because of its role as the historic center of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 trade (and consequently as a source of financing for the monarchy), it possessed the economic power necessary to retain its independence from the state. 13 The domi - nance of its business population (in 1939 there were approximately 10,000 residents to 500,000 workers) enabled the City to avoid local government reforms and retain electoral rights for businesses. 14 The City’s legislative independence was highly controversial in an era dominated by the centralized state, and consequently the Corporation was under continuous threat of abolition and reform until the 1980s. 15 This regulatory divergence was reinforced by the self-regulatory character of the British finance industry at the time, which was based on nineteenth-century “invented traditions” of gentlemanly capitalism, organized around club-like bodies such as the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s of London, with the Bank of England at the helm. 16 The City’s unique level of independence enabled the Corporation to push its own agenda in planning terms, often slipping through the net cast by London’s centralized rebuilding agencies. 17 For these reasons, the postwar architectural history of the City exposes the chang - ing relationship between architects, the property market, and the state, and the impact of this change on the development of the capital, perhaps more than any other area in London. Complex relationships between architects, financiers, real estate developers, and occupiers irreversibly transformed the standing of architects within the political economy of Britain after 1945. Examining these relationships reveals new narratives. Scrutinizing the practices and tools of the “developer’s architect” expands the definition of architectural labor to include less-celebrated modes of productivity, such as knowledge of planning legislation and accounting, while analyzing mundane objects such as building licenses, development permits, and building codes reveals them to be important architectural instruments in the development of London. 18

Missed Opportunities: The Corporation of London and Postwar Reconstruction In 1957 Nikolaus Pevsner, a frequent detractor of the modernizing financial district, summed up the architectural establishment’s negative feeling toward the City’s reconstruction efforts, commenting that “the building necessities in the City for the next few years are enormous. . . . What is going up now is mostly not promising. Vast opportunities have already been missed. . . . Here the problem exceeds that of better architecture. It becomes one of overall planning.” 19 For Pevsner, the “vast opportunities” had emerged in the late 1940s, when the City had commissioned one of the most progressive planners of the day from the new Ministry of Town and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Country Planning (MTCP), William Holford, in partnership with veteran architect Charles Holden, to plan the reconstruction of the City and take advantage of the unprecedented array of large bombsite building plots. 20 While not as radical as the unsolicited Modern Architecture Research (MARS) group’s proposal that had pre - ceded it, the Holden and Holford plan incorporated “visual planning,” a modernist variant of the picturesque tradition of which Pevsner was an ardent advocate. 21 Their proposal synthesized the historic street patterns and buildings with modernist interventions in the form of pedestrianized “precincts,” the vertical segregation of traffic and pedestrians, a ring road, and a large east-west thoroughfare to ease the flow of traffic. 22 The traditional emphasis on street façades in the City was to be modulated by the introduction of the “plot ratio,” which placed limits on the total area of a building in relation to its site, rather than the traditional “cornice height,” thus enabling more public spaces around the bases of buildings, the possibility of higher densities, and the introduction of modern tower-and-podium typology. 23 The rising investment potential of City land in the 1950s caused the Corporation to all but abandon the Holden and Holford plan shortly after its publication. Some fragments of the proposal were completed, including the two experimental rede - velopments in Paternoster Square and the Barbican that were spearheaded by the LCC’s more radical Architect’s Department; a small fragment of the ring road in the south; and Route 11 (known as London Wall), which was originally conceived as part of a larger northern bypass but realized as a short stretch of road between Moorgate and Aldersgate, condemned by Marriott as “a six lane highway that appears to go from nowhere to nowhere for just over a quarter of a mile.” 24 Whereas the rest of the United Kingdom was focused on the provision of schools, housing, and public amenities, the Corporation’s priority was to secure its position as an international financial center by restoring office accommodation to prewar num - bers. 25 Like many other local authorities during this period, the Corporation therefore enlisted—or in this case enabled—private enterprise to facilitate development. 26 However, whereas housing and schools were publicly debated, office buildings were not subject to the same levels of scrutiny and as such offered a relatively frictionless build - ing opportunity for developers. The first major property companies emerged during this period, founded by a small group of opportunistic men who amassed great fortunes by capitalizing on vacant bombsites

Diagram by the author showing the Corporation of London’s plot ratio policy. Based on material from Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (1967).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 and deficiencies in the postwar office market. 27 These deficiencies took several forms. First, the dramatic imbalance of supply and demand following the Blitz, as well as heavy building regulations, increased rental values and therefore property prices. 28 After the war, the Corporation eventually acquiesced to the government’s recommendation that it should use “compulsory purchase” powers to buy up large tracts of bombed land in the City and sell to developers on long leases in order to assist the provision of office space (the so-called Lessor Scheme). The point was to prevent drastic increases in land values and provide developers with the oppor - tunity to build on sites that would previously have been unavailable or costly due to the complex patchwork of land ownership in London. 29 However, the unintended outcome of this process was to enable developers to rapidly grow their capital base by subletting the land at substantially higher prices. 30 In contrast to the small infill blocks that characterized development before the war, the availability of these large sites, in combination with the introduction of plot ratios, enabled the construction of much larger buildings. Second, the initial proliferation of planning regulations paradoxically enabled developers to take advantage of loopholes in the system, exploiting development charge exemptions on war-damaged buildings and so-called dangerous structures. 31 In addition to the availability of building plots and relaxation of regulations, the credit squeezes of the 1950s and early 1960s meant banks were keen to lend to developers, despite the risks involved with such young companies, thereby ensur - ing sufficient short-term finance. Additionally, the Bank of England’s cheap money policies in the late 1950s caused insurance companies to seek out new repositories for long-term investment, as returns on government stock were low. 32 Commercial property in the City became a secure investment thanks to a surplus of reliable, institutional tenants who were seeking long leases. A thriving office market emerged, bringing a surge in commercial construction. As the Economists Advisory Group stated in 1971, “it was estimated in 1935 that . . . three-quarters of the buildings in the City were over thirty years old. Of the 77 million sq ft of floor-space available in 1968 . . . more than 20 million sq ft had been erected in the previous twenty years.” 33 The high demand and low-risk nature of the market enabled developers to build poor-quality structures at a high profit. New developments were for the most part built to the minimum possible specification, designed by architects working in close partnership with the property companies to design the maximum amount of lettable floor space at the lowest cost. As tenants were desperate for spaces in cen - tral locations, office blocks could command exorbitant rents. Developer Jack Rose

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 subsequently labeled these structures “the essence of attainable maximum rent” that “conformed to a seller’s market,” comprising the minimum floor-to-ceiling heights, no air conditioning, a lack of power outlets, and basic curtain wall construction. 34 The “sellers’ market” continued well into the 1960s, ensuring that prices remained high and quality low, with speculative properties costing up to 60 percent less to build than owner-occupied properties. 35 Among the British architectural establishment, the City developed a reputation for generating poor-caliber commercial architecture and facilitating bad practice within the profession. Characters such as Pevsner, J.M. Richards, and Ian Nairn drew connections between the Corporation’s lack of vision and its paternalistic pol - itics, whereby architectural conservatism was simply another expression of the City’s desire to preserve its independence, both juridical and ideological, from the rest of London. During the postwar debates with the LCC and the MTCP about rebuilding the City, the Corporation was stubbornly resistant to external influence. 36 Prior to consulting Holden and Holford, the Corporation gave the task of drawing up a reconstruction plan to its in-house engineer, F.J. Forty, whose proposal was simply to restore the status quo as quickly as possible by allowing developers and businesses to rebuild according to the existing cornice height regulations rather than offering any positive guidelines. “Can it seriously be thought that we, proud to have been promoting its welfare, are unconscious of the romance and history which the very street names breathe?” Forty wrote. “[W]hatever the surface destruction— the City can in no circumstances be regarded as virgin land, upon a blank plan of which the pencil of a planner, conscious of his responsibilities, can freely or fanci - fully travel.” 37 The proposal conflated a laissez-faire approach to planning with nos - talgia for the historical autonomy of the City and refused compulsory purchase powers for the Corporation, on the basis that the market would regulate itself, as it always had done. 38 Forty justified this approach by reminding the reader that after the Great Fire Christopher Wren’s plan had been rejected by City landowners. This was not a “lost opportunity,” he claimed, because it was no less in the national than in the Citizens’ interest to rebuild as rapidly as possible. The Corporation . . . exerted itself to the utmost and, in the face of truly gigantic difficulties, set about rehabilitation in order that the normal course of life and business could be resumed in the shortest time. 39 The MTCP rejected Forty’s plan because it went against the fundamental aims of Abercrombie’s County of London Plan, which sought to diminish the “vested

Opposite, left: Sir John Burnet, Tait and Partners. 59–67 Gresham Street, London, 1955. From Jones Lang Wootton, Post War Office Buildings in the City of London and Its Environs (1955). Opposite, right: Trehearne Norman Preston and Partners. Clements House, London, 1955. From Jones Lang Wootton, Post War Office Buildings in the City of London and Its Environs (1955).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 interests” of private developers. Abercrombie was well aware of the “problems of local government reform” posed by the City’s independence, and its reliance on private development was viewed as a threat to the efficacy and democratic goals of a London-wide proposal. 40 As E.J. Carter and Erno Goldfinger summarize in their “explanation” of the County of London Plan: The Blitz has cleared some sites and we must clear many more—but for what? . . . have we the imagination and power to realise our hopes, or shall we just return to the old unplanned city blocks, to the same old wild activity of private speculation, to recreate the same old jumble of courtyards and streets and competing facades? The land speculator’s boards are up . . . OR can we plan our London? 41 The Corporation’s outlook represented the antithesis of the welfare state project. In the minds of architecture critics, the Corporation’s reactionary approach was expressed most forcefully by the sheer proliferation of unimaginative developer-led buildings, which, in the first decade after the war, were mostly neo-Georgian or stripped classical, and condemned by Pevsner as “a style of timidity . . . introduc - ing just enough of the twentieth-century to avoid being ridiculous and keeping just enough of . . . the . . . paraphernalia of Empire to stake the claim of remaining a great nation.” 42 Pevsner’s critique of City architecture was double-sided. On the one hand, it was “capitalist” (i.e., classicism was used unabashedly to articulate the desirable virtues of banking: strength, wealth, and prowess). 43 On the other hand, its “timidity” expressed the City’s impotence in a postimperial age. 44 Steel-frame structures clad in cavity-filled Portland stone cladding known as “roach” were initially a cheap and more reliable option than the glass curtain wall for developers, who assumed that the cultural attitudes of City institutions would in turn affect the preferences of investors (who were, for the most part, also City tenants). 45 Schemes such as 59–67 Gresham Street by Sir John Burnet, Tait and Partners (1955), infused the bulky massing, setbacks, and proportions of 1930s office blocks to convey solidity, while others, such as Clements House by Trehearne Norman Preston and Partners (1955) approached the cladding (almost cynically) as a curtain wall, using the thinnest slice possible—though without the wit or ingenuity the Smithsons exhibited nine

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 years later in the roach-clad Economist headquarters. This transformation was compounded by the restrictions imposed on business after WWII by Keynesian regulatory policies, which when coupled with decolo - nization meant the City lost much of the excitement of the former century. As Ranald Michie points out, the unadventurous image of City architecture was reinforced as “British banks withstood successive financial crises in the twentieth century and so established a reputation for stability that was envied the world over.” If anything, Michie argues, “banks and bankers were criticised for their conservative behaviour,” including a reluctance to take risks in financing British industry. 46 The City’s image as an economic powerhouse in British life was replaced by an old-fashioned, yet safe, bureaucratic entity. For Pevsner, then, the commercial, developer-led buildings in the post - war City embodied this duality. They were not simply unenlightened but submissive, embody - ing an attitude where “enterprise and courage stand for nothing.” 47 Following the abolition of building controls in the mid-1950s, developers looked to American glass curtain wall buildings and their modular techniques as models of cost- and time-efficiency. The City of London Real Property Company, which employed in-house architects, started to produce buildings around this period that mimicked Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s (SOM’s) buildings in New York, including Fountain House (by W.H. Rogers and consulting architect Howard Robertson, 1954–1958) and Gordon Bunschaft’s design for Lever House (completed 1954), whose modular systems and shell-and-core structure enabled economies of scale. 48 The anonymity per - mitted by the rationalized grid also added value, as demonstrated by one of the biggest Lessor Scheme developments in the City, London Wall (1960–1964), planned by City architect Anthony Mealand in collaboration with the LCC, and conceived as the commercial counterpart to the

Top: W.H. Rogers for the City of London Real Property Company. Fountain House, London, 1957. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of the City of London, London Metropolitan Archives. Bottom: London Wall or “Route XI” office developments con - structed via the Lessor Scheme, London, 1960 –1965. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of the City of London, London Metropolitan Archives.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Barbican residential development to the north. Compulsory purchase powers enabled the Corporation to utilize a strict set of building regulations based around a modular curtain wall system to produce five eighteen-story blocks standing obliquely to a six-lane highway. The result was total visual uniformity despite being designed by five architects, each working with one to five developers. 49 This scheme won the Corporation high praise, likely because of its association with the LCC and its status as one of the few “planned” schemes in the financial district. Ian Nairn celebrated the development as “the only consistently modern part of the City” with “moments of brittle magnificence,” while Pevsner agreed it was of “high aesthetic value and London’s most advanced concept of central area develop - ment.” 50 Over the next decade the glass curtain wall became more widespread as the language of commercial architecture in London. Modular and systems building was advocated by the government for use by local authorities, particularly under the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s, as part of an enthusiasm for technological and scientific innovation as a path for bolstering Britain’s position on the global stage. As Powers notes, “images of modern architecture formed a natural backdrop for his vision of Britain’s future,” an opinion also voiced by the City Corporation, which introduced a “High Buildings Policy” in 1962 advocating for “clusters” of “well-related and well-designed” towers, provided they were “designed to a common idiom”: the curtain wall tower. 51 The new policy gave rise to several high-rise buildings in the financial center, including Gollins Melvin & Ward’s (GMW’s) Commercial Union development, and even a proposal by Mies van der Rohe for developer Peter Palumbo’s doomed Mansion House Square scheme. 52 However, as the glass curtain wall became more commonly used among developers over the next decade, critics found fault with its derivative style. As former practi - tioner of the LCC Architects’ Department, Rodney Gordon, later commented: [T]o us at the LCC the private commercial sector . . . represented the antithesis of creative architecture. . . . They were bastardising the Miesian philosophy . . . producing–crude, ill-proportioned, naive, matchbox buildings, taking the elevations and whatever else that was pre-designed by manufacturers straight from their catalogues. 53

COMPLETION BUILDING DATE ARCHITECT DEVELOPER(S)

Moor House 1960 Lewis Solomon, Charles Clore Kaye and Partners St Alphage House 1962 Maurice Sanders Associates Maurice Wingate, Neil Westbrook, McAlpine, and Gerald Glover Lee House 1963 Bernard Cole and Partners Joe Gold, Felix Fenston, Jack Rose, and Prince Radziwill Royex House 1963 Richard Seifert and Partners Oldham Estates (Harry Hyams) Gillett House 1964 Sir John Burnet, Leased to former Lord Tait and Partners Mayor Sir Harold Gillett via private negotiations Later Addition: Bastion House 1976 Powell and Moya Corporation of London (part of the Museum of London development)

Architects and developers of London Wall towers, 1960–1976. Sources: Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (London: Hamilton, 1967); and Richard Barras, The Development Cycle in the City of London (London: Centre for Environmental Studies, 1979).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 This qualitative distinction between the Miesian original and the “bastardized” copy was a common view among critics of postwar commercial architecture, despite the fact that, as Martin notes, “the status as a singular artwork generally attributed to Mies’s Seagram Building, for example (as distinct from its many ‘copies’), is rendered obsolete by the very idea of the curtain wall as a generalized technologi - cal system.” 54 What Gordon and his LCC colleagues were lamenting was the lack of an “idea” in the production process and the privileging of noncerebral skills—such as valuation—over the academic and “creative” processes typically associated with the profession.

The Developer’s Architects: Prejudice and Pragmatism, 1947–1960 Underlying the architectural establishment’s prejudice against the City was a more generalized disdain for developers and their influence on the intellectual world of architecture. Among the high-profile individuals to speak out on the subject was Lionel Brett (Lord Esher), president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) from 1965 to 1967. Lord Esher described the developer as the “middle man” who, he argued, had historically been hated for intervening between “the makers and users, between the respected world of imagination, enterprise, skill and sweat and the great body of consumers.” 55 For Esher, the property company hindered “good” architecture by placing economic restrictions in the way of the design process, bringing architects in too late in the process to have any technical or artistic input. The reality was somewhat different: the firms working for developers were not those stifled by pragmatic considerations but established firms with commercial motives from the outset. Ten of these firms received the bulk of the commissions in the City in the two decades after the War: GMW, T.P. Bennett & Son, C.H. Elsom & Partners, Newman Levinson and Partners, Fitzroy Robinson & Partners, Richard Seifert & Partners, Lewis Solomon Kaye & Partners, Stone, Toms & Partners, Trehearne Norman Preston & Partners, and Roland Ward & Partners. 56 Marriott claims these architects were successful for the simple reason that they “were in every case directed by one or two men who were businessmen as well as architects.” 57 Rather than being brought in at the end of the process, the architect often did initial work for the developer on the basis that they would be paid only if the job went ahead. As Marriott explains, “this was against the rules of the RIBA. The architects were needed at that stage to perform one of their most vital functions as far as the developer was concerned: obtain planning permission.” 58 These firms became indis -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 pensable to developers as negotiators of the increasingly complex planning system that had emerged with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and was further complicated by stringent building regulations connected to decentralization policies in the 1960s. Because the visual character of the building was of so little importance to the developer, it would often strike a deal to hand over some aesthetic control to local authorities in return for efficient treatment of the planning applica - tion. Thus, for the most part, “imagination” was low on the list of desirable attrib - utes for a developer’s architect. In some of these firms the founding partners were not always fully qualified architects, having completed only part of their qualification before deviating into business, or holding only RIBA licentiate status (membership without examination that required ten years of practicing or studying the profes - sion, a policy that was abolished in 1956). Additionally, some of the firms had begun life as developers, only to see their architecture departments grow to become the main line of work. 59 Critics such as Brett were disdainful of commercial architects because they worked so closely with developers and, in doing so, undermined the nineteenth-century distinction of architecture as an academic pursuit. This distinction was evident in the categorization of “acceptable” commercial work by the British architectural establishment. For example, firms such as Easton and Robertson, YRM, and Chamberlain Powell and Bon were classified as working within the “private sector” and were readily appointed by local authorities in the postwar decades to help build new university campuses and city center retail spaces. Labeled “design-led” firms, their work was admitted into the canon of British architecture, including large exhibitions at the Royal Academy and RIBA, because it was seen to retain intellectual content. 60 For architects working for local authorities such as the LCC Architects’ Department to take on a commercial project was also perfectly acceptable if creative freedom was permitted. “Commercial firms” or “developers’ architects,” worked from the cost calculation outward. They relied on offering competitive rates to be successful, and therefore a good knowledge of accounting, surveying, and planning law was the most important dimension of their practice. For them, processes associated with business acumen took precedence over artis - tic invention. These categories, however, were a matter of emphasis. Local authorities employed rafts of ordinary architects whose main activities were cost evaluation and effi - ciency planning. 61 Conversely, many commercial practices used for their office buildings and shopping centers the same techniques of modular construction and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 systems building being explored by state-funded projects for schools, hospitals, and housing. 62 Esher and his colleagues’ antipathy toward the developer-architect relationship, an articulation of the long-established feeling among the British intel - ligentsia that one should stay well away from “trade,” was also underpinned by anti- Semitism and classist attitudes, as a high proportion of developers and commercial architects were Jewish. 63 Underlying the transformation of commercial architects into industry exiles, then, were more profound discrepancies about the classifica - tion of architectural labor and social structures in Britain.

Seifert: Businessman, Lawyer, and Accountant in the City, 1960–1980 Despite their cultural status, commercial architects embraced an expanded defini - tion of architectural labor and professionalism in order to meet the demands of their clients. In postwar London, planning expertise was arguably the most important skill an architect could have, due to the ever-changing and increasingly complex set of restrictions confronting developers. Richard Seifert and Partners, described by Powers as “the developer’s architect par excellence ,” became the most successful (and most vilified) commercial practice of this period due to Seifert’s exceptional aptitude in this area. 64 As the architect later remarked in a speech at RIBA, The introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 caused archi - tects for the first time to apply their minds to complex and essential rules which penetrated every facet of the profession. Satisfied clients who were seeking to cut through red tape obstructions, new approaches to architectural design . . . and the speedy completion of the building contract which has always been the keynote of my practice, led to renewed and growing interest. 65 This knowledge rendered Seifert particularly attractive to the property compa - nies operating in the City of London, where office space was at a premium but land scarce, and his practice expanded rapidly, from twelve employees in 1955 to 240 in 1967. 66 Seifert built his partnership on the basis of close relationships with devel - opers, in particular Harry Hyams (founder of Oldham Estates), with whom he col - laborated on several speculative London projects, including Centre Point (1963– 1966), Drapers’ Gardens (1962–1967), and Royex House (1963). They become noto - rious among planners for their manipulation of plot ratio regulations (which had survived from Holden and Holford’s proposals) and for taking advantage of planning loopholes. As one member of the LCC’s Town Planning Committee later commented, “the trouble with Seifert was that he knew some of the regulations far

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 better than the LCC itself. Every now and then we had to bring in clauses to stop up the loopholes exposed by Seifert. We called them ‘Seifert Clauses.’” 67 One such clause was the “Third Schedule.” Set out in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, the legislation allowed an existing building to be expanded by 10 percent of its volume (rather than floor space) without a development charge. The clause was initially written so war-damaged buildings could be restored without penalty. 68 However, the legislation was never amended when the develop - ment charge was abolished in 1953 and thus was often exploited by developers when working on sites where existing Victorian premises were being demolished. For example, after acquiring a site called “Drapers’ Gardens” from the Drapers’ Company (a City livery), comprising several smaller nineteenth-century buildings, Seifert used the loophole to increase the plot ratio from 4:1 to the limit of 5:1, thus adding forty thousand square feet of floor space. Seifert’s practice proposed a single twenty-six-story block, for which Hyams was able to charge an unprecedented rate of £5 per square foot to tenants National Provincial Bank, bringing in profit of £7.3 million. 69 The success of this project was dependent on the close working relationship of Hyams and Seifert and their combined ability to see the legislation as a productive opportunity rather than a restriction. The large profit was in part dependent on the developer’s strategic timing of the cost valuation. Charging such a high price was feasible due to the recent implementation of a ban on new commercial develop - ments as part of the Labour government’s decentralization policy intended to curb congestion in city centers—a policy on which Hyams had been an influential consultant. 70 This ruling was cemented by the introduction of Office Development Permits (ODPs), which were required to secure plan - ning permission for office buildings of over three thousand square feet that were prelet to a named tenant who could prove that having an office located in London was essential to its operations. 71 While on the surface these restrictions were detrimental to devel - opers, stifling the real estate market in

Richard Seifert and Partners. Drapers’ Gardens, 1967. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc © (1967).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 London, they had the reverse effect of driving up demand and thereby raising the value of office stock, which was ultimately of great benefit to Hyams and other developers. In the specific case of Drapers’ Gardens, the ban on development had caused National Provincial to fail to obtain planning permission on a scheme for their new headquarters in Bishopsgate, forcing them to find alternative office space, the urgent need for which made them susceptible to higher rents. 72 The design, credited to partner Len Watson, was sensitive to the complex nature of demand in the City, whereby tenant preferences were intimately connected to changes in financial markets. 73 Whereas the initial proposal accepted by the Drapers’ Company had taken the form of four low-rise blocks (by architect Milton Cashmore), Seifert, through his manipulation of the plot ratio, was able to recom - mend a singular and imposing glass tower. The building projected high above the cornice line in between the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange, clad with curved precast concrete horizontal fins (actually projecting air-conditioning ducts) and displaying a rhythmic horizontality, and a “pop” edge, tiled in lustrous white mosaic. At ground level, the entrance was approached via a sunken courtyard garden, with steps leading up to a podium level, soon to be connected to the City’s anticipated raised “pedway” scheme, so that the building would hover above the dense streets below. The tower appealed to a changing demographic in the City. 74 The development of the Euromarket, followed by the emergence of a highly lucra - tive Eurobond market in the 1960s, resulted in a dramatic influx of international business, with the number of foreign banks in the City doubling from seventy-seven in 1960 to 159 in 1970. 75 American banks were the biggest participants, arriving in droves in anticipation of the imposition of new controls on foreign exchange on the U.S. economy in 1963 and bringing with them expectations of modern accom - modation that exceeded the City’s predominantly (Victorian and Edwardian) neoclassical stock. 76 Meanwhile, the rise of “consumer” banking demanded a public relations strategy from banks. The progressive relaxation of wartime economic controls insti - gated mergers, expansion, and the formation of international banking consortiums, which, alongside advances in computing, enabled banks to offer a more diverse array of services for customers and to capitalize on the newly available surplus cash of the aspiring working and middle classes. As the commercial operations of British banks became more publicity focused, many began to reconsider their built appear - ance as part of a bigger public relations policy. 77 The goal was to attract the new, wealthier demographic, “whose understanding of money was transitioning from a

Page views from National Provincial’s publicity brochure for Drapers’ Gardens, A New London Landmark , 1967. Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc © (1967).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 physical/passive possession to be hidden away and hoarded, to a notational/active commodity to be invested and grown.” 78 By the 1960s, banks had recognized that their Victorian and interwar banking halls were an insufficient architectural tool for engaging its new public, and they thus sought more open models that replaced Portland stone with glass curtain walls “to communicate the message that banks were deserving of a different form of trust—one based on their personnel assets (their people) rather than their physical assets (their vaults).” 79 National Provincial, which had expanded substantially in the five years prior to moving into Drapers’ Gardens, went through a substantial rebranding process within which the building featured prominently, with graphics and publications aligning Watson’s use of futuristic curves and stark lines with the bank’s forward-looking, fast-paced business ethic. 80 Seifert and Partners was the first British commercial practice to experiment with reinforced concrete for office buildings in the 1960s. 81 Like the steel frame, precast concrete was a relatively cheap material that could be systematized, yet it also allowed for surface variety with a conventional slab skeleton. Critics frequently lambasted the firm’s emphasis on the exterior shell as a form of “façadism” and a poor mimic—aesthetic and not ethic—of the socially conscious new brutalism. “The correct attitude in London is to ignore Seifert buildings, which run to circles, lozenges, zippy curves, sweeping angles and zigzag precast frames that make them look wrapped in rickrack, knitted on giant needles or baked in piecrusts,” Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1971. “Seifert is an expert packager of commercial space.” 82 Yet Seifert was openly in the game of “packaging.” Prefiguring the land - mark buildings that would proliferate in the 1980s and after, the sculptural façade was designed to be an independent icon that might easily be reproduced in the media or the minds of the public. 83 However, these were subject to a formula of repeatability. Seifert himself was responsible for little of the design work, delegat - ing most of this to an army of architects who often had no knowledge of the client or other details of the projects they were working on. 84

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Seifert understood the branding potential of the corporate tower, but this was a small part of his practice. He worked directly with every client and operated as a mediator between occupiers, developers, and local authorities, viewing himself as a problem solver who used economic restrictions and planning regulations as the design framework. As Seifert noted, “the chemistry of the architect is creative—he is a natural artist. He rarely has the calibre of a businessman, lawyer or accountant, but the successful practitioner of today has to be all these things.” 85 Whereas Lord Esher had perceived commercial architects to be experiencing “crises of conscience” for their lack of artistic honesty, Seifert believed his straightforward businesslike approach was the most ethical mode of working with a client. 86 Transparent com - munication was particularly important to Seifert, who prided himself on adhering to the cost specified in the initial contract. 87 One fundamental instrument in the firm’s process was a written predesign brief that would be circulated to clients and contractors, detailing “the functions and design intent of the building with sug - gested forms and materials . . . as well as the organization and inter-relationship of component parts, costs and finishes, forms of construction, systems and timing,” ensuring that the writing was “in a form which others are able to understand.” 88 Seifert believed this written format enabled the design process to be open rather than hidden behind “mystifying layers of verbiage and the dazzle of beautifully finished perspective drawings which are dramatically presented after the architect emerges from his studio following a suitably long delay, while his unrevealed research is subjected to the marvellous alchemy of the creative art.” 89 While the architecture establishment labeled Seifert a philistine, the firm’s pragmatic approach was popular with corporate clients and developers. After their experience at Drapers’ Gardens, National Provincial (later National Westminster) selected Seifert to build their City headquarters on the basis that “he knew his way through the legislation.” 90 The British government’s adoption of monetarism in the 1970s gave rise to a second building boom in the City that, unlike the immediate postwar market, was carried by investor demand due to the growth of the secondary financial sector .91

Richard Seifert and Partners. NatWest Tower, later renamed Tower 42, completed 1986. Photo © Danielle Willkens, 2013.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Described by Owen Luder in 1970 as “the most powerful architect in England,” Seifert secured prestigious commissions throughout the decade, including the London Press Centre on Shoe Lane (completed 1973), Blackfriars Station redevel - opment (completed 1977), and National Westminster Bank’s new headquarters (completed 1986). 92 The architect attributed his success to the freedom provided by the growing private sector, offering the architect “a completely new role as a financial wizard capable of getting the most out of the development, the client, and the authorities whilst producing an economically viable project.” 93 Financial insti - tutions became heavily involved in property development, not only offering loans and mortgages but owning equity in (ever-expanding) property companies. Simultaneously, the persistence of government controls on development and the gradual influx of international firms meant that prime rents increased at unforeseen rates, from £5 per square foot in 1968 to £20 per square foot in 1973, which in turn triggered an increase in demand for office stock. 94 At the same time, planning regulations posed even more of a challenge for devel - opers in the 1970s as ODPs became more stringent and the conservation movement grew increasingly vocal in its protests against the Corporation’s heavy-handed road-widening and demolition practices. 95 Planning expertise became so important that Seifert began to offer it to clients as a service, independently of design work. 96 Seifert managed these extra tasks by keeping the practice streamlined and out - sourcing all activities that were extraneous to the fundamental (including research, photography, and model making) and bringing in other professionals where neces - sary, including “social scientists, cost estimators, consultant structural and mechan - ical and electrical engineers, building managers and professional programmers.” 97 The practice was set up as a specialist consultancy in commercial architecture within the wider construction industry.

Rogers, Foster, Arup: Regulatory Convergence in the 1980s and Beyond In the next decade, the Thatcher government’s withdrawal of public funding for housing and other public services caused huge numbers of state-employed archi - tects to lose their salaried positions and commissions. The free-market approach was also imposed on the architecture industry as the Monopolies and Mergers Commission abolished architects’ fee scales. Firms looked to the private sector for work, forced to lower their rates to remain competitive and to seek out areas of specialization within commercial architecture that became increasingly more com - plex with the introduction of information technologies and the changing nature of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 organizations. 98 As the process of financial deregulation that had been taking place since the late 1950s reached its zenith in 1986 with the so-called Big Bang, the UK stock market was opened up to the global market, thus breaking down traditional divisions of labor in investment and trading sectors and giving rise to the new leviathan investment banks. 99 The legislation abolished face-to-face trading on the London Stock Exchange’s centralized trading floor and dispersed trading activities to in-house dealing floors. 100 These dramatic changes demanded bigger “ground - scraper” buildings with large column-free floor plates to accommodate dealing floors and greater floor-to-ceiling heights to house cavities for air-conditioning duct - ing and computer cabling. The technological complications of these buildings, in addition to the increased organizational volatility of financial companies, demanded a reimagining of the office building from a static object to a series of temporally defined layers (what the firm DEGW labeled “shell, services, scenery and sets”), each with varying life- spans that could be updated and maintained accordingly. 101 This fragmentation led to a commensurate fragmentation of the architecture and construction industries. The roles of the architect, developer, and engineer were transformed and subdivided into a spectrum of specialist professions dedicated to each part of the building, ranging from mechanical and electrical, telecommunications, and infrastructure experts, to space planners, interior designers, and facilities managers. 102 This was reflected within commercial architecture practices too. As practices expanded and internationalized, they also became internally subdivided, with different depart - ments responsible for different parts of the building and different stages of the building process. 103 During this period the status of commercial architects and the City began to be reconfigured in tandem. So was the relationship between quality and cost. Led by firms such as Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Arup Associates, and DEGW, more high-profile architects began working in the private sector, dissolving the negative reputation that had tainted commercial practice for more than three decades. The improvement in architectural quality was also connected to changes in the property markets and in the Corporation’s planning approach. Inflation, unemployment, and rising interest rates at the beginning of the 1980s resulted in a slowdown in the growth of rents and low returns for property, effectively producing a buyer’s market. 104 Developers moved toward occupier-oriented strategies whereby profit was not purely achieved by minimizing the gap between gross and net floor area but by providing high-quality “landmark” developments to allure tenants. 105 As Francis Duffy of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 DEGW noted at the end of the 1980s, “some developers have learnt that profits are not maximised by minimising standards and costs, but by maximising value to occupiers. Value and profit depend upon how well buildings meet users’ opera - tional needs and enhance their standing.” 106 In addition, the growing competition between global financial centers, triggered by deregulation of financial services in the 1970s, put pressure on the Corporation to reform its internal governance to cater more explicitly to the provision of commercial services. 107 In the realm of planning, this entailed the Corporation adopting an approach labeled “proactive planning,” which aimed to provide “the right business conditions, built environment and infra - structure . . . to compete internationally as a global center of business excellence.” 108 After receiving widespread criticism from the financial City for a heavily conserva - tionist planning proposal (drafted in response to conservation lobbies), in 1985 the Corporation appointed its first chief planning officer, Peter Rees, who redrafted the plan to permit demolition of “listed” historic buildings, increase plot ratios throughout the City, and offer developers “air rights” to build on top of railway tracks, incorporating public spaces, shops, and restaurants. 109 The latter gave rise to large “prestige” developments, spread around the outer edges of the financial center, such as Broadgate (1984–1991, Arup Associates, and SOM). The diffusion of neoliberal practices of governance in Britain brought about a regulatory convergence within the planning, architecture, finance, and real estate industries as the private sphere came to dominate. This is not to say that these industries became “compatible,” which would imply a historic incompatibility, but rather to say that the methods and practices of each profession became more intel - ligible to one another due to the construction of a specific regulatory framework. During the postwar decades, the presence of different supervisory regimes between the state and the commercial sector and between Greater London and the City made translation difficult. The City’s his - torical independence and its func - tional specificity created conditions whereby developer-led, cost-driven architecture was not only valued but dominant and was facilitated by a light-touch municipal body. While local authorities often worked with, and consulted, developers, the processes of procurement, cost man -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 agement, and design were more heavily monitored. 110 Not until the political trans - formations in the 1980s did the state’s and the architect’s deep involvement with the property market become publicly acceptable, indeed necessary. The point of this analysis is not to suggest a moral or qualitative equivalence between public-sector architects and developer-led practices but to argue that qual - itative comparisons should be abandoned. Although both facets of the industry were entangled by the very nature of the political-economic and social systems from which they emerged (i.e., the politics of postwar planning and architectural debates), they thrived under unique and different conditions of patronage and regulation, for which architects developed specific tools, techniques, and networks. In the same way that a closer reading of the work of commercial architects in the City gives rise to an expanded definition of architectural practice in postwar Britain, it also illuminates an alternative architectural history of London and beyond. Seen through this lens, legal objects like ODPs, investment vehicles like compulsory purchase powers, and policy documents like the TCP Act emerge not simply as instruments of state control but as catalysts for new forms of economic and profes - sional relationships between architects, developers, and local authorities.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Notes 1. Charles Knevitt and Gillian Darley, “Brickbats and Mortar,” Times (London), 21 November 1984. 2. In these important accounts, London is the testing ground for movements such as new empiri - cism, Townscape, and new brutalism, which exemplify changing relationships between architectural and political ideals. See, for example, Adrian Forty, “Being or Nothingness: Private Experience and Public Architecture in Postwar Britain,” Architectural History 38 (1995): 25–35; Timothy Hyde, “Piles, Puddles, and Other Architectural Irritants,” Log , no. 27 (2013): 67–79; Elain Harwood and Alan Powers, eds., Festival of Britain (London: Twentieth Century Society, 2001); and Elain Harwood, Space, Hope, and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945–1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 3. Murray Fraser, Architecture and the “Special Relationship”: The American Influence on Post-war British Architecture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 29. 4. Historians have begun to look more broadly toward the practices of less famous salaried archi - tects and the construction industry, which were so essential to the welfare state project. See, for exam - ple, Christine Wall, An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940 –1970 (London: Routledge, 2013); and Nick Beech, “Humdrum Tasks of the Salaried Men: Edwin Williams, a London County Council Architect at War,” FOOTPRINT 9, no. 2 (20 December 2015): 9–26, https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.9.2.864. 5. For American architecture, see Meredith Clausen, The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). In the case of British architecture, important contri - butions on this subject appear in books dealing with the wider architectural history of the period. See, for example, Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World (New York: Routledge, 2002); Barnabas Calder, Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (London: William Heinemann, 2016); Fraser; Rodney Gordon, “Modern Architecture for the Masses: The Owen Luder Partnership 1960–67,” in The Sixties: Life, Style, Architecture , ed. Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (London: Twentieth Century Society, 2002), 72–80; and Alan Powers, Britain , Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2007). 6. Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (London: Hamilton, 1967), 9. 7. Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (London: IBTauris, 2013); and Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (New York: Verso, 2011). 8. Royal Institute of British Architects, The Future for Architects (London: RIBA, 2009), 25; and Department for Architecture, Media and Sport, Creative Industries Mapping Documents 2001: Architecture (London: HM Government, 9 April 2001), 3. 9. City of London Department of Architecture and Planning, City of London Development Plan: Background Study Summary: Economic Activity (London: Corporation of London, 1976). See, espe - cially, the section titled “Background of City Planning Policies.” 10. The most well-known and influential studies of this phenomenon are Duffy Eley Giffone Worthington (DEGW) and Eosys Ltd., The ORBIT Study: Information Technology and Office Design

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 (London: DEGW and Eosys, 1983); and Francis Duffy, The Changing City (London: Bulstrode Press, 1989). 11. Duffy, The Changing City , 56–57. 12. My Ph.D. thesis, currently being revised for publication, offers the first postwar architectural history of the City of London. Amy Thomas, “A Material History City of London, 1945–1993: Architecture, Planning, Finance” (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, 2015). 13. In the postwar decades, as today, the Corporation operated on an ancient nonparty political sys - tem of governance involving a court of elected common councilmen, aldermen, and sheriffs, headed by the Lord Mayor, and held the only unelected parliamentary representative, charged with protecting the City’s rights and privileges. The Corporation claims to be “the oldest continuous municipal democ - racy in the world,” with “its constitution . . . rooted in the ancient right and privileges enjoyed by citizens before the Norman Conquest in 1066.” City of London Corporation, “History of the Government of the City of London,” City of London website, 18 June 2015, http://www.cityof london.gov.uk/about-the-city/about-us/Pages/history-of-the-government-of-the-city-of-london.aspx. 14. In 2011 the daytime population was 370,000, with a residential population of 7,400. City of London Corporation Department of the Built Environment, City of London Resident Population Census 2011: Introduction (London: City of London Corporation, November 2012). 15. Quoted in the report of the Policy and Parliamentary Committee on Public Relations Activities for the year 1973. 16. Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688 – 1914 (London: Longman, 1993), 31; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Michael Moran, The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-innovation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52. 17. See Peter J. Larkham and David Adams, “The Post-war Reconstruction Planning of London: A Wider Perspective,” Birmingham City University Centre for Environment and Society Research, Working Paper Series no. 8, 2011. 18. Tilo Amhoff, Nicholas Beech, and Katie Lloyd Thomas, “Further Reading Required,” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 16, no. 03 (2012): 197–199, https://doi.org/10.1017/S135913551 300002X. 19. “Introduction to the 1957 Edition,” in Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, London 1: The Cities of London and Westminster , vol. 1, Buildings of England (London: Penguin, 1978), 109. 20. Their final revised plan was printed in 1951 as Charles Holden and William Holford, The City of London: A Record of Destruction and Survival; The Proposals for Reconstruction as Presented, in 1947, to the Court of Common Council (London: Architectural Press for the Corporation of London, 1951). 21. Nikolaus Pevsner, “Visual Planning and the City of London,” in Visual Planning and the Picturesque , ed. Mathew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 187–192. Under the leadership of Arthur Ling (a modernist who had worked with Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry before the war and headed the town planning division of the LCC Architects’ Department), MARS—an affil - iate of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne —had produced a radical modernist grid plan for the City in response to the uninspiring initial plan put forward by the Corporation’s engineer. John R. Gold, “The MARS Plans for London, 1933–1942: Plurality and Experimentation in the City

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Plans of the Early British Modern Movement,” Town Planning Review 66, no. 3 (1 July 1995): 243–267. 22. This marked the beginning of the City’s experiment with raised walkways. See Michael Hebbert, “The City of London Walkway Experiment,” Journal of the American Planning Association 59, no. 4 (1993): 433–450. 23. Holden and Holford, 256. 24. Marriott, 70. For accounts of the Barbican, see Calder, 85–120; David Heathcote, Barbican: Penthouse over the City (Hoboken, NJ: Academy Press, 2004); Elain Harwood, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (London: English Heritage, 2011); and Christine Wall et al., Building the Barbican, 1962–1982: Taking the Industry out of the Dark Ages (London: University of Westminster, 2014). 25. Before the war approximately 40 percent of floor space was occupied by industrial buildings. Not until the postwar decades did the city become a specialist financial center as high demand for office space and increasing rents caused businesses not reliant on the financial sector to move to cheaper locations. Ranald Michie, “The Emergence and Survival of a Financial Cluster in Britain,” in Learning from Some of Britain’s Successful Sectors: An Historical Analysis of the Role of Government , Bank for International Settlements Economics Paper 6 (Basel: BIS Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 2010), 87–108. 26. Bullock, 245–276. 27. Peter Scott, The Property Masters: A History of the British Commercial Property Sector (London: E & FN Spon, 1996), 119; and Marriott, 2. 28. Regulations included a 100 percent development charge on new schemes and building license enforcement. Richard Barras, The Development Cycle in the City of London (London: Centre for Environmental Studies, 1979), 26. 29. Barras, 58. The Stock Exchange, for example, took approximately 150 years to accrue sufficient title rights to be able to build bigger premises. See Amy Thomas, “‘Mart of the World’: An Architectural and Geographical History of the London Stock Exchange,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 6 (2012): 1009–1048. 30. For example, after buying the leasehold for the site of Lee House, an office block on London Wall, developer Joe Gold sublet the land for £67,538 a year more than he was paying the corporation, making a profit of approximately £1 million for almost no expenditure. Marriott, 70. 31. Scott, 119. 32. Marriott, 38. 33. Economists Advisory Group, An Economic Study of the City of London (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 31. 34. Jack Rose, The Dynamics of Urban Property Development (London: Spon, 1985), 153. 35. Marriott, 29. 36. This complex series of events is described in detail in Larkham and Adams. 37. Corporation of London Improvements and Town Planning Committee, Report of the Improvements and Town Planning Committee on the Preliminary Draft Proposals for Post-war Reconstruction in the City of London (London: Corporation of London, 1944), 2. 38. Larkham and Adams, 19–20.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 39. Corporation of London Improvements and Town Planning Committee, i. 40. Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Edward J. Carter, and Erno Goldfinger, The County of London Plan, Explained by E.J. Carter and Erno Goldfinger (London: Penguin Books, 1945), 10. 41. Abercrombie, Carter, and Goldfinger, 13. 42. Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 1: The City of London , Buildings of England (London: Penguin, 1997), 127. 43. For more discussion of this topic, see Daniel M. Abramson, Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694–1942 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Iain S. Black, “Rebuilding ‘The Heart of the Empire’: Bank Headquarters in the City of London, 1919–1939,” Art History 22, no. 4 (1999): 593–618; Iain S. Black, “Spaces of Capital: Bank Office Building in the City of London, 1830–1870,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (2000): 351–375; John Booker, The Face of Banking (London: Lloyds Bank Ltd., 1979); John Booker, Temples of Mammon: The Architecture of Banking (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990); Charles Belfoure, Monuments to Money: The Architecture of American Banks (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005); and Parnassus Foundation and Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Money Matters: A Critical Look at Bank Architecture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990). 44. The prominent status of the city during the Victorian period—what Summerson refers to as “much remarkable architecture, most of it absurdly ornate for its function and situation”—was lost to New York during the interwar years. John Summerson, Georgian London (London: Penguin, 1962), 292. 45. Marriott, 92. The buildings commissioned by some of the most important City institutions during this period attested to this assumption, including Victor Heal’s neo-Georgian designs for the Bank of England’s accountancy department at New Change (1953–1960) and Terrance Heysham’s neo - classical scheme for Lloyd’s insurance market (completed 1957). 46. Ranald Michie, “The City of London in Literature: Place, People and Pursuits” (lecture, Gresham College, 16 May 2013), https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-city-of-london- in-literature-place-people-and-pursuits. 47. Pevsner and Cherry, 1:111. 48. Fraser, 195. 49. Ten years later Powell and Moya built a sixth tower for the Corporation on the Museum of London site. 50. Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 40; and Pevsner and Cherry, 1:111. 51. Powers, 127; and City of London Planning and Communications Committee, 1962 High Buildings Policy: Appendix to Report of the Planning and Communications Committee Relative to Mansion House Square, Presented to Common Council (London: Corporation of London, 22 May 1969), London Metropolitan Archives, COL/CC/PTC/01/001. 52. For a close reading of the Mies saga, see Jane M. Jacobs “The Battle of Bank Junction: The Contested Iconography of Capital,” in Money, Power and Space , ed. M. Corbridge, N. Thrift, and M. Martin (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994). 53. Gordon, “Modern Architecture for the Masses,” 74–75.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 54. Martin, 82. 55. Lionel Brett, “The Developers,” Architectural Review 140, no. 823 (September 1965): 165. 56. This information comes from my own inventory of architectural developments from 1945 to 1993 in the City. This is the only comprehensive postwar register, taken from the Corporation’s devel - opment schedules, which themselves were filed in various committee archives under multiple (incon - sistent) titles. The inventory details around 840 projects with architects and floor-space figures for most of the buildings. Despite searching through archives, contacting planners, and seeking advice from LMA archivists, the District Surveyor, and the Survey of London team, I have been unable to locate all data for the years 1963–1973 (inclusive). As such, this remains an incomplete project. See also Marriott, 39. 57. Marriott, 27–28. 58. Marriott, 29. 59. Marriott, 46. 60. Bullock, 247–251. 61. Beech. 62. Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 67–78. 63. Scott, 118. Calder points out that this was also made apparent in John Betjeman’s reference to Richard Seifert as “the Colonel” (a jibe at Seifert for using his wartime rank in civilian life) in his satirical column in Private Eye . Seifert also changed his name from Rubin to Richard. Calder, 229. The constructed intellectual distinctions that led some to avoid “trade” had emerged from the historical class-based antagonisms between the landed gentry and the new industrialists. See Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1993); and Hobsbawm and Ranger. This hostility to entrepreneurship would have been far more present among the postwar British architectural avant-garde than it is today, as most prominent architects were privately educated members of the liberal elite. I owe this observation to Adrian Forty, who writes extensively on the relationship between class construction and design in Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society, 1750–1980 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). 64. Powers, 145. 65. Richard Seifert, “An Architect’s Approach to Architecture: Richard Seifert,” RIBA Transactions 4, no. 1 (7) (1985): 55. 66. Mary Haddock, “Architects and Their Offices: Influence of the Management Handbook Surveyed: R. Seifert and Partners,” Building , 10 February 1967, 94. 67. Marriott, 45. 68. Great Britain, “Town and County Planning Act” (1947); Barras, 34; and Marriott, 170. 69. Marriott, 142. 70. This important link was discovered by Ewan Harrison, who explores this relationship in greater depth in his Ph.D. research on Richard Seifert. Harrison notes that Hyams was a consultant on the committee responsible for the development of the Brown Ban. Ewan Harrison and Richard Seifert, interview by author, teleconference, 12 June 2017.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 71. Over the next decade, the ODP threshold steadily increased, reaching thirty thousand square feet in 1977. Barras, 27. 72. Stephen Wood, “The NatWest Tower Went Up . . . and Up,” Sunday Times Colour Supplement , 17 March 1980, press cutting in Royal Bank of Scotland Archive, NWB/2311. 73. “Drapers Gardens, London, EC2,” Building , 16 August 1968, 67–74. 74. Marriott, 117. 75. David Kynaston, The City of London: The History (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), 501. 76. Kynaston, 501. 77. Booker, Temples of Mammon , 259. 78. Ann-Christine Frandsen et al., “From Money Storage to Money Store: Openness and Transparency in Bank Architecture,” Business History 55, no. 5 (2013): 701. 79. Frandsen et al., 704. 80. The bank acquired North Central Finance (1958–1959), Isle of Man Bank (1961), and District Bank (1962). National Provincial Bank, A New London Landmark: Illustrated Brochure Produced to Mark the Opening of Drapers Gardens (London: National Provincial Bank, 1967), 8. 81. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 113. 82. Ada Louise Huxtable, “London’s New Buildings Are Closer to Miami,” New York Times , 12 June 1971, 31. 83. See Arindam Dutta, “Marginality and Metaengineering: Keynes and Arup,” in Aggregate, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Maria Kaika, “Architecture and Crisis: Re-inventing the Icon, Re-imag(in)ing London and Re-branding the City,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 4 (2010): 453–474. 84. Ewan Harrison, interview by the author, teleconference, 12 June 2017. 85. “Architect, Businessman, Accountant . . . ,” Building , 17 October 1969, 42. 86. Brett, 167. 87. Godfrey Golzen, How Architects Get Work: Interviews with Architects, Clients and Intermediaries (London: Architecture and Building Practice Guides, 1984), 142. 88. Seifert, 57. 89. Seifert, 57. 90. Brian Burns, chief architect of National Westminster, quoted in Wood. In another interview Seifert claims he won the commission from a line-up of high-profile architects, including Basil Spence, Hugh Casson, and Frederick Gibberd. However, I have not been able to verify this. Richard Seifert, interview by Louise Brodie, 1996, pt. 1, available in British Library, National Life Stories Collections Online Archive: Architects’ Lives, https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Architects-Lives/ 021M- C0467X0005XX-0100V0. 91. Barras, 34. 92. Martin Pawley, “Seifert—The ‘Financial Wizard’ of the Seventies?” Building Design , 27 February 1970, 6. 93. Pawley, 6. Other practices that flourished under these conditions included Ley Colbeck and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00243 by guest on 25 September 2021 Partners, Sheppard Robson, Elsom Pack & Roberts, GMW, and, the most prolific of all firms, Fitzroy Robinson, which completed fifty-five projects in the city from 1975 to 1993, totaling over 670,000 square meters of floor space. 94. Barras, 25. 95. See, for example, Christopher Booker and Candida Lycett Green, Goodbye London: An Illustrated Guide to Threatened Buildings (London: Collins, 1973); and D. Lloyd, ed., Save the City: A Conservation Study of the City of London (London: Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, London, 1976). 96. Golzen, 141. 97. Haddock, 95. 98. Les Hutton, “The Profession in the Marketplace,” in Architectural Knowledge: The Idea of a Profession , ed. Francis Duffy and Les Hutton (London: E & FN Spon, 1998), 75. 99. P.W. Daniels and J.M. Bobe, “Office Building in the City of London: A Decade of Change,” Area 24, no. 3 (1992): 253–258; Duffy, The Changing City ; and Barnaby Lenon, “The Geography of the ‘Big Bang’: London’s Office Building Boom,” Geography 72, no. 1 (1 January 1987): 56–59. 100. Thomas, “‘Mart of the World.’” 101. Duffy, The Changing City , 61. I develop this idea, and the connection between architectural flexibility and neoliberal forms of governmentality, in a book chapter, which might be seen as a com - panion piece to this article. Amy Thomas, “The Political Economy of Flexibility: Deregulation and the Transformation of Corporate Space in the Post-war City of London,” in Neoliberalism: An Architectural Project , ed. Kenny Cupers, Helena Mattsson, and Catharina Gabrielsson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming). 102. Francis Duffy, The Changing Workplace (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 232. 103. Golzen, 151. 104. Scott, 214. 105. See Graham Ive, “Commercial Architecture,” in Architecture and the Sites of History: Inter - pretations of Buildings and Cities , ed. Iain Borden and David Dunster (New York: Whitney Library of Design; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1996), 375–382. 106. Duffy, The Changing City , 23. 107. Corporation of London Policy and Resources Committee, Policy and Resources Committee Report: Public Relations—Committee Control (London: Corporation of London, 3 April 1986), in London Metropolitan Archives, COL/CC/PRC/01/002; and City of London Department of Architecture and Planning, Draft Local Plan: Analysis of Comments Received between November 1984 and August 1985 (London: Corporation of London, 1985). 108. Peter Wynne Rees, Core Strategy Development Plan Document: Delivering a World Class City , City of London Local Development Framework (London: City of London Department of Planning and Transportation, 2011), 16. 109. City of London Planning and Communications Committee, City of London Local Plan: Modifications to the Revised Plan (London: Corporation of London, 4 December 1986). 110. See Calder, 203–235.

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