Liquid Crystal Concrete:
Environmental Surrounds

The third in a series of summer research seminars on The Arts of Postwar Britain 1945–1965 with Alistair Cartwright and Matthew Wells.

Matthew Wells – The Carpet, the Office, an Environment

Influenced by wider social and economic concerns in postwar Britain, the office was reconfigured around ideas of flexibility and communication, ideas derived from the German movement known as Bürolandschaft. Led by management consultants who advocated for open-plan spaces to emphasise group participation and teamwork, these reconfigurations to the office required new acoustic solutions to provide environments for optimal working conditions.

In order to address the new office environment, architects and designers turned to the mass use of carpets to absorb and counteract background noise. Weight, thickness and colour became important design criteria. Examination of the work of individual actors (e.g. Foster Associates) or the material agency of specific products (e.g. high-pile Perlon velour textiles), can show us the impact of carpeted floors on lighting, acoustics and comfort.

These new environments were connected to the inclusion of computers in the organisational infrastructure of bureaucratic tasks. Computers began to order electoral rolls, control the production of goods in factories and record land transfers. Initially delegated to isolated rooms, by the 1960s and led by companies like IBM, new communications systems, services and data conduits entered the open-place office. In turn the carpet shifted from a surface to a module; not just planar but a three-dimensional grid, enabling new types of economic activity and reconfiguring working life for those inside the office.

Alistair Cartwright – The World Turned Outside-In: Luxury Squats and Liberty Villas, 1946

Writing in 1962, Richard Wollheim compared the transformation of postwar London to Paris’s experience of “Haussmannisation”. But if the latter involved a “turning inside-out” of the habits of the private bourgeois citizen, postwar London’s great inversion tended to move in the opposite direction, and involved a very different section of society: from a “non-conformist chapel [...] turned into an all-night cafe” to “back-bedrooms in W11 or N4” metamorphosed into gambling dens, Wollheim proposed the image of the city turned outside-in as the spatial rubric of the period.

This talk sets out to trace that image back to a decisive but overlooked moment in postwar history. By investigating the visual representation of the 1946 squatting movement – a movement that re-christened disused army camps as “Liberty Villas” and took over luxury flats as communal housing blocks – the paper grounds Wollheim’s image in the politics of class and empire. While photography and newsreel multiplied the viral spread of the movement, illustrations and cartoons offered a more intimate view, recalling the experiences of returning ex-servicemen in far-flung theatres of war, and the role of women on the home front. Through the visual culture of a mass movement and its historical echoes/ripple-effects, the talk seeks out the deep roots of the postwar city’s great inversion, considering work by Bill Brandt, Bryan de Grineau, Muriel Box, Carl Giles, James Boswell and others.