New Architecture Movement (NAM) Receives Digital Project Grant

In 2020 the New Architecture Movement (NAM) received a Digital Project Grant to preserve, collate and provide web-based digital access to the extensive archive of papers, reports and other documents (including the seventeen surviving issues of its self-published newspaper SLATE) that were produced by the NAM over its intensive period of activity from 1975–1980.

Below is an excerpt from the project’s final report:

In the early 1970s many architects, working in both public and private sector offices, were also providing free design advice to tenants and residents groups as an extra-mural pro bono activity. Both sides being increasingly dissatisfied with the conventional means of building commissioning and procurement, which seemed to divorce designers from the actual users of buildings, these unofficial working practices revealed the benefits of having a more accountable professional design service. It was in this context that the New Architecture Movement (NAM) was founded in November 1975 at a National Congress in Harrogate with the purpose of exploring a more progressive culture for accountability and democracy in architecture.

The NAM groups, which were largely autonomous, were based in several local centres to develop their ideas including central and north London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Cheltenham, and Birmingham. They arranged their own colloquiums, reported progress through the NAM magazine SLATE and presented their work at the NAM Congresses which were held in different UK venues annually. Over a period of some five to six years from 1975 NAM pursued a series of campaigns, as detailed below, and produced a considerable literature covering all aspects of its work. It is this collection of documents, reports and correspondence that forms the NAM archive.

The extensive range of material surviving from the years of NAM’s activity has been held by former members of the Movement who over a period of several years have reconvened in order to assemble a systematic archive. The material exists in a wide range of forms – reports, letters and press cuttings, posters, notes of meetings, research essays and the complete collection of the Movement’s self-published journal called SLATE.

The first task in creating the archive was to identify and organise all this material, numbering several hundred items, and sort it into a series of subject areas or themes that reflected the range of NAM’s activities. These in turn have established the structure of the archive, which has been defined under the following categories or campaigns: Alternative Practice, Architectural Education, Women in Architecture, Professional Issues, Public Design Service, Trade Unions and Architecture and SLATE.

The above narrative outlines the establishment of NAM’s physical archive. But it was the further objective of former NAM members to convert the material into a digital resource that could be accessed more widely. This project has accordingly sought to re-present the collected works of the New Architecture Movement, through a publicly accessible digital archive serving as both an historical record and also as an active educational resource for the encouragement of new critical initiatives going forward.

The digital archive project was initiated by a number of former NAM members who formed a ‘steering group’ in order to progress the work systematically. To this group were recruited two independent peer reviewers who have provided invaluable support and advice over the development of the project. A professional website designer has also been engaged to undertake the technical task of creating the website from the digitised material. This group has been meeting monthly over a period of nearly two years to discuss and manage the work.

The question obviously arose as to where to place the physical archive material and base the digital website, and it was decided that MayDay Rooms, based in Fleet Street, London, would be a most appropriate location. MayDay Rooms is an educational charity, formed in 2014 and supported by an annual grant from the Glass House Trust. The organisation has the necessary facilities to house archives, hold meetings and provide public access. MayDay Rooms describes itself as ‘an archive, resource space and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories. All material uploaded onto the MayDay Rooms site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International License. This policy is ideally compatible with the objectives of the New Architecture Movement.

The website contents and structure are derived directly from the range of NAM’s original campaigns, as summarised above. These are prefaced by Home and About pages which introduce the Movement and explain how to navigate the site. Under the Campaigns heading there are then individual tabs to call up the various campaign workstreams, where each archival item is represented by an icon of the front cover of the document concerned, which is opened at reading scale by double clicking on the icon. Details of author and date are recorded where known. The number of items in each campaign collection is also noted. As well as being included under the Campaigns page, SLATE is given its own header page in order to facilitate access by those wishing to consult the publication directly. An index for all items in the collection is included under a separate Index tab. This will enable enquirers to search individual documents by title, in whichever campaign they are located.

Many of the themes that NAM explored over forty years ago resonate strongly with some of today's concerns in the politics of the built environment - the demise of the public sector profession, the crisis of council and social housing, the fragmentation of responsibility within the building process, the use of hazardous cladding materials, the relentless pressure on living space standards, the continuing gender inequality within the construction industry, neglect of crucial issues of embodied energy in the stewardship of existing construction, and of sustainability in the design and specification of new development. The ongoing task of understanding the causes of these and other such problems, and of formulating potential strategies in response, is one that requires critical analysis, discourse and commitment by those directly affected, and NAM's contribution can offer a powerful example from recent history to inform and inspire the generation of today. It is intended that the promulgation of NAM's archive in digital form will now provide a powerful vehicle to do this.

You can explore the NAM digital archive online here: https://newarchitecturemovement.org/