This book is about a lost world; albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall; Londonrsquo;s historic government district; and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell; Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilsonrsquo;s Labour government; for the wholesale reconstruction of Londonrsquo;s rsquo;Government Centrersquo;. Still reeling from war damage; its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martinrsquo;s plan - by no means modest in conception; scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square; reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates; although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented. But the un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history; when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent; apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the rsquo;white heat of technologyrsquo;. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future; an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors; it represented a tussle between government departments; between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of rsquo;professionalizationrsquo; and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history; science and art; socialism and el
#2968987 in eBooks 2016-12-08 2016-12-08File Name: B01N7G6JU4
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