Modernist Architecture (Transcript)

Featuring: Richard Brook and Janneke Geene on their recent Special Collections exhibition featuring the work of Gordon Hodkinson; Hannah Neate and Steve Millington on modernist architecture in Manchester and the Manchester Modernists Society; and Johnathan Djabarouti on intangible heritage and the significance we attach to buildings.

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

Rah! Podcast Episode 03 - Modernist Architecture 

Rah! Opening Jingle 

Julian Holloway: Hello and welcome to the podcast from Manchester Met. My name is Julian Holloway and I'm a lecturer in Human Geography here at the university. The podcast is, you know, showcases some of the excellent work being done by students and staff within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Met, we will produce a themed episode each month with topics ranging across the faculty. So today's episode will focus on Modernist Architecture with a particular Manchester focus, we'll be looking at the current special collection that focuses on modernist architecture. Specifically, the work of the post-war architect Gordon Hodkinson, and more generally we will be looking at the appeal of modernist architecture, 20th-century buildings and post-war redevelopment. Don’t forget to join in the conversation by using the hashtag RAH_Podcast on Twitter.  

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Julian: Okay, so now we're joined in the studio by Dr. Richard Brook. Richard is a reader and architecture Manchester School of Architecture here at Manchester Met and he's the curator of the draw in the modern exhibition, currently in the special collections at Manchester Metropolitan University Library. So hello, Richard. 

Richard Brook: Hi. 

Julian: How you doing? 

Richard: Good, thanks.  

Julian: Excellent. And we're also joined today by Janneke Geene. She's worked for 16 years at the People's History Museum before joining MMU, and she now heads up the special collections at Manchester Met. So how did your collaboration come about then, particularly with this focus in terms of the Gordon Hodkinson draw in the modern exhibition? 

Richard: I've just finished last February, my PhD. And my PhD was looking at the work of Cruickshank and Seward, for whom Gordon worked for all of his career. And I was using the work of Cruickshank and Seward as a means of looking at the relationship between the government, the state and architectural production in the post-war period. And Gordon was the oldest surviving member of that firm the messrs Cruickshank and Seward. Both passed away they were they came together just after World War One. Gordon got an introduction to HT Seward through his father, Gordon's father was a contractor who worked around the Stratford area, and in 1938, had built a gas showroom in Stratford, designed by Cruikshank and Seward. And so, Gordon's father had a relationship with HT Seward. I think he built other buildings for him. And Gordon, as a young man must have been fairly handy at drawing, and he went to see HT Seward thinking that he was going to get a job as a draughtsman. And when Gordon went into HT's office sat with HT was Douglas Jones, who was the head of the School of Architecture at the time. And HT pretty much opened the door for Gordon to go and study architecture to become an architect. And I think Gordon, when he was a young man never thought that he would have that opportunity. And so through my PhD, I interviewed Gordon, about four or five times at his home in Hale, I went down there to meet him, he was well into his 80s by then, and after I finished speaking with him, I got a phone call from another director, Amin O'Neill, who said that Gordon had been in touch with him, he'd lost my phone number, but he had some drawings for me. I fully anticipated that I would be going to get some drawings of Cruickshank and Seward, material that I was interested in the buildings I've been researching in the post war. And it transpired that in actual fact, what Gordon wanted to gift me was all of his student work that he'd kept since the early 50s. Which was a very, very emotional meeting insofar as in the time I'd known him, Gordon himself had become more infirm, his wife had passed away  and we went to his house, Amin and I and Gordon was there. By that time, he had a carer and he had a stair lift. And so he said, I've got the drawings upstairs. And so we all moved upstairs very, very slowly. And he had all this work in a pile on his bed. And it had been it come from underneath his bed, quite literally. And I flicked through some of the drawings and was absolutely blown away by the quality of the work, the sketches, the, the rendering the, the sort of use of gouache paint the way that he'd done the lettering, you could tell immediately that this was really good quality stuff and almost a complete set of work from his student years. And that's very, very rare. And also amongst the material were project briefs, which definitely don't survive really, you know, ephemeral kind of pieces of material. And I pretty much literally phoned Jeremy, the archivist at Special Collections, said, I'm coming to see you put all the work into my boot, drove to university and deposited the material immediately with Jeremy and it was really really, really good quality. He was a great draughtsman Gordon and so, immediately, my opinion was, it needed to be on a wall at some point  

Julian: And is that where you came in? Sort of thing, in that sense? 

Janneke: We've got a wonderful team at Special Collections. And one of the models we use when we put on exhibitions is co-curation. So the vast majority of the exhibitions that we put on, are co-curated with either external people, but also very often internal people, academics, and this one co-curated with architecture. So that's a model we use all the time, because it adds huge value for us, and for the public and the resultant exhibition. And it means that we have a real diversity of views, a real depth of knowledge, and it adds that academic knowledge. So Richard's been working with Jeremy our archivist on the exhibition for quite some time, isn't it? 

Richard: Yeah, it's about a year, probably all told, leading into the exhibition. Obviously, we've got the drawn material. But the question is, what is that drawn material about? What's it going to tell the public if we put it on display, what new knowledge is it going to generate for me in my research as well, alongside the material that Gordon had given us Cruickshank and Seward had been bought out by another architectural firm in 2008, called Fairhurst to a very well established Manchester firm. And their archive, up to that point, had been in a room in Barclay House on Whitworth street full of drawings, micro films, all sorts of stuff. And then when Fairhurst were bought out, unfortunately, two directors without my knowledge sifted, the archive and so a considerable amount, not necessarily really valuable material, but again, I never looked at all of it. So I don't really know what was lost but a considerable amount was, was disposed of and some was kept and that that was kept was put by Fairhurst into packing crates in a warehouse in Trafford Park. And so, midway through my PhD, I negotiated with Fairhurst because they had to pay to get these crates out of storage. And there were eight packing crates, in one of which or two of which might be the eight boxes of archive material. 

Julian: Right. 

Richard: That I'm looking for. And so I went with the director down there and we spent the whole afternoon emptying and all these boxes and we found the eight boxes of Cruickshank and Seward material, which again, I brought back to Special Collections. So with Jeremy, we then had Gordon’s student work, and a really good representation of the work that he went on to produce as an architect and the projects that he directed. And so with Jeremy and through discussion, we were able to think about how those two parts of the collection came together. And so we decided that what was quite unique was that the Manchester School of Architecture had begun teaching Modern Architecture and Modern Design quite early. It wasn't the first school to teach modernism and the transition in British architectural culture from neoclassicism through to modern, it was about a 30 year kind of slow change at some point in the late 50s, everything became modern, no one can quite put a date on that. And so this idea of what it was like to be taught Modern Architecture and what that meant to architectural production became part of the the kind of narrative of the exhibition. And obviously, we've also got a really, really fantastic library collection. And so the exhibition itself draws not just on the two archive collections, but also we've got books from the shelves of the library, from the 1940s and 1950s books and journals that Gordon and his peers would have had access to, whilst they were studying here, and they tell a particular narrative. For example, there's not much German material in the journals and the books and Britain drew understandably, on Scandinavian and North American precedents after the war in terms of the way that they developed their modern architecture. 

Julian: The geopolitical architecture of, 

Richard: Absolutely so despite the fact that, you know, the Bauhaus existed and had masses of influence, we were more interested in the Bauhaus emigres and what they were doing in America, rather than ideas that were coming from Germany. And that's, that's obvious in there.  

Julian: So how does Hodkinson sort of fit into this story of modernism then, in terms of modernist architecture? What sort of buildings was he designing, for example? 

Richard: In his career, he was project architect for the Renold building that you missed, which is probably the finest of that group. And that group is probably the finest group of 20th-century buildings in the city. But what's sort of interesting about Gordon himself is that I think he is a regular guy.

Julian: Right?  

Richard: And what's beautiful about the exhibition is that we're able to tell the story of a very ordinary person who had a great opportunity to study architecture, had an extreme amount of talent, produced some fantastic work as a student, and then went on to produce some really fantastic buildings in his career. So being able to tell this story of mainstream modern architecture is really, really important because that's where a lot of my research focus lies, insofar as architectural history understandably, focuses on the firsts, the pioneers and the avant garde. 

Julian: The big names. 

Richard: Exactly. But of course, that only covers a very, very small part of architectural production. It probably 95% of it is of the mainstream. And so how do we find ways of talking about mainstream architecture? How do we use mainstream architecture to talk about the other things that were going on in society around it? And that's what Gordon's work really offers us an insight into as well as all the other things we've spoken about. 

Julian: Because to almost summarise your allowing, the exhibition tells his story, as part of a wider story, as you say this a lot of big names the people that were almost jobbing architects, they were doing everyday architecture, but also allows people to come and bring their own stories into these in a relationship in terms of the Renold building now I walk past every day. And so I probably could come along and bring my story to it, I guess.   

Janneke: Yeah, that's that's very much what happens and it also allows us in Special Collections to showcase different parts of our Special Collections together, the architectural drawings, the books, which is, and of course to the public that we are one whole so yeah it's it's a won- it's a wonderfully personal exhibition that actually through the personal gives gives a particular window onto a world, a time and and quite a wide it's a really interesting wide lens picture onto the world of that time but also today's world and what, how that's reflected.  

Julian: So can you tell us where it is when it's open? How we can get access to this? 

Janneke: Absolutely. So it's, it's on it Special Collections on the third floor of the university library. And if you go in through the main entrance of the university library and say you're there for special collections, you'll get a wonderfully specially produced sticker, saying visitor and it's got one of Gordon's designs on the stickers are much in demand. We're open 10 til 4 and obviously, we're free. It's on until the fifth of April, so there's a little bit more time.  

Julian:  Fantastic. So, Richard, Janneke, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.  

Janneke: Thank you.  

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Julian: So now I'm joined by Steve Millington, Dr. Steve Millington, I should say, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography here at Manchester Met and also a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Place Management. Welcome, Steve. 

Steve Millington: Thank you.  

Julian: And Dr. Hannah Neate, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography as well at Manchester Metropolitan University. How are you doing? 

Hannah Neate: I'm good. Thank you. 

Julian: Excellent. So we're here to talk about modernist architecture in Manchester. So let's start with you, Hannah. What's your interest in modernist architecture in Manchester? 

Hannah: Well, modernist architecture kind of broadly is something I've been doing research on for quite a long time. My interest really is in who is interested in modernist architecture. So while there's a bunch of people out there who look at architectural history who look at, kind of, design history and that aspect of modernist architecture, I'm interested in things like who is it that campaigns for saving modernist architecture? Who is it that is enthusiastic and cares about a type of architecture, which sometimes it's classed as being a bit ugly being something which isn't really widely kind of loved by the wider public? So yeah, a lot of my research is around this idea of architectural enthusiasm. So things like heritage and conservation groups who, for a very long time, actually have been kind of campaigning and trying to save different types of modernist architecture which might be under threat of demolition, but also other types of kind of creative outputs as well. Smaller kind of groupings, which have been growing over the past few years, like the Manchester Modernist Society. 

Julian: Which we shall return to, no doubt, in this conversation.  

Hannah: But also other, you know, different things like photography projects, blogs, kind of all sorts, sorts of kind of expressions of interest in modernist architecture, which has really been growing over the past kind of five to 10 years. And that's really what I focus quite a lot of my research. 

Julian: And Steve, what about yourself? How did you develop a interest in modernist architecture? 

Steve: Well, I'll be honest, it's cool. 

Julian: Okay, to be debated, discuss. 

Steve: And no, I mean, I mean, the aesthetics, you know, it's what kind of drove me, drew, drew me into an interest and of course, then we’ve already mentioned the Manchester Modernists. We kind of have a mutual interest that we started kind of looking at different ideas of like walking tours of the city to revisit this, the city's post war heritage.  I think for a lot of people in Manchester those these buildings are often sometimes as Hannah was saying dismissed as ugly or brutal. Actually, for certainly people of my generation it is doctors, surgeries, school buildings, hospitals, and then universities were of that era. We were brought up, studied, worked in these kind of environments, you know, we worked together on the Mancunian Way. 

Julian: We did indeed. 

Steve: We worked this, kind of, a walking tour of a motorway, which is kind of counter- 

Julian: Counterintuitive, 

Steve: -intuitive, yes. But the interest in that, I mean, I ended up re-running that walking tour maybe for six or seven times and each time 20-30 people would turn up to walk around the concrete motorway. And there was just a real interest, you know, not just within academia, but within the public of Manchester and the people who live and visit the city just generally interested in that period of history. And I think, again working through the modernist that, that kind of developed into walking tours, the magazine, the modernist, various exhibitions, which I’ve worked with Richard Brock on you know, Sci-Eng50 celebration of the John Dalton building. And also the modernists curated the Hollins faculty as well. And there’s an exhibition on that there's been kind of quite fruitful opportunities, you know, to look at creative projects around modernism in Manchester. And there's a real public interest in it. 

Julian: In terms of the sort of identities, the communities that coalesce around modernist architecture that you're very interested in. Hannah, would you say? And this is a more critical question, I guess. Would you say that there's a certain sense of nostalgia to this? 

Hannah: One element, Yes. And that's where it starts to is, it can be problematic actually, if it's an unreflective nostalgia, just kind of celebrating, for instance, the the aesthetics, the design, the look of how things were in the past. But when that becomes decoupled precisely from what Steve was just talking about, before the kind of the wider social, political and economic context and there are really interesting commentators out there, I'm talking here the likes of I mean, half of the Jonathan Meads were very keen, actually, you know, they, they're fans of they support, they celebrate modernist architecture. But it's always in the context of actually not just looking at the, the, the coolness, the design of the know, the, yeah, what the buildings look like, but also what they might embody as well and the types of values. So I think there is still, you know, a great purpose actually and a value in thinking about some, what, what now seems to be maybe some naive, utopian kind of ideals, but not to forget that actually kind of a lot of the likes of kind of university buildings, kind of public libraries, different public spaces that were created in the post war period, was kind of kind of conceived as having kind of a bigger purpose for improving people's everyday lives. And that to be something that was meant to be egalitarian and access for everybody as well. So that's when I think, you know, nostalgia can actually have a purpose. But if it's kind of a very narrowly defined kind of idea of of yet, well look at all these cool buildings that go and buy some posters of it or stick it on a T tail, and I’m not so much a fan of that type of, 

Julian: Oh, I have one of the Manchester Modernist posters in my living room.  

Hannah: Well, me too actually, I have loads.  

Steve: Available from all good book shops (Laughter). 

Julian: So, Steve, is Manchester a significant place for modernist architecture? 

Steve: Yes and no. There are obviously places where modern modernist projects were realised on a grander scale. Manchester’s relationship with modernism is it's an ambivalent relationship. I mean, obviously, you can see the vision as Hannah was just talking about there this egalitarian vision set out in the 1945 Manchester reconstruction plan, which is pure, modernism. You read quotes, look at museums, and there's great modernist architecture and principles. But it was only ever partially realised within the city. Unlike, say what was done in say Plymouth or Coventry, and Birmingham or Sheffield, where I think those cities kind of advanced those schemes much more than Manchester did for all sorts of 

Julian: I mean, is this partly because Manchester wasn't as bombed as much as, you know in the second world war 

Steve: Well, Manchester had two post-war problems there one was the recon- post-war reconstruction after World War Two. The other one was it was the one of the first cities to industrialise and people, you talked about nostalgia, people get nostalgic about all the mass clearances and the demolition of all the terraced houses in the late 50s 60s. But people often forget that housing was a very poor quality, few of those houses had indoor toilets. So Manchester set about reconstructing the city but for all sorts of haphazard random reasons like contestations overland ownership, you might drive down the Hyde road, which was cleared of its houses and shops to make way for a motorway which was never constructed which would have been quite useful for many people it would have gone straight to Sheffield and what you'll find there is isolated buildings and they were they were the pubs, which are still there, the Victorian pubs because they were difficult to buy out in terms of compensation. So they remained. It was never fully realised. And of course, then there was all these delays and then the 1973 oil crisis recession, and that pretty much paid to that vision and then, you know, then the the kind of neoliberal thatcherite era just put the nail in that kind of strategic vision and was replaced by you know, property speculation as a main mode of planning. So all that said Manchester does have these nuggets.  

Julian: What will be the highlights if you're coming from the, outside the city? 

Steve: Well, you miss campus as a a designed landscape, which fits together and is one of the few places within Manchester, where you can walk uninterrupted without being bothered by traffic. And it was designed as a campus within a park to connect into the city centre. So there's concern now about that how that site has been carved up Cruickshank and Seward, across the road, the National Computing Centre, you know, that's another classic and obviously, probably the most iconic one is the Hollins faculty, in terms of its structure. 

Hannah: Also known as the toast rack.  

Steve: The toast rack. Yes, yeah. So it has bits and pieces. 

Hannah: CIS Tower? 

Steve: CIS Tower, although some might argue they ruined it by putting all those solar panels on it. But that's another debate.  

Julian: That's an interesting debate, isn't it? 

Steve: In terms of aesthetics, erm, so it has these bits and pieces but then lots of it have disappeared quite quickly. That's the other issue. Obviously, you know, some won't miss the Arndale the Piccadilly Plaza has been reconstructed or partially demolished and that's, you know, been rethought. And of course, I think they present in lots of people's minds it were the Hulme Crescents, little more forgotten estates like Fort Ardwick and Fort Beswick, where a lot of people have very fond memories of growing up. But then these estates were, you know re-labelled as crisis estates in the 80s. And of course, now, none of those estates are with us, are being completely eradicated and replaced by something else.  

Julian: And this is something we will see as the future develops in terms of you know, how we value our modernist architecture in the city. So I think we shall finish there. So thank you very much, Hannah. 

Hannah: Thank you. 

Julian: And thank you very much, Steve. 

Steve: Cheers. Thank you. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Julian: Okay, so now I'm joined by Jonathan Djabarouti, who's a PhD student here at Manchester Met, particularly in the Manchester School of Architecture. I believe you're only three months into your PhD, Jonathan, is that right? 

Jonathan Djabarouti: That is correct. 

Julian: So these are early days. 

Johnathan: Maybe you can help me work out what, what it is I'm studying. 

Julian: Maybe by the end of this interview, we will work out exactly what it is. 

Johnathan: Absolutely. 

Julian: Broadly, tell us about your PhD. What's the sort of title what you're trying to do with your PhD? 

Johnathan: So in essence, the, the kind of broad theme is architectural heritage. So I'm coming from a background working in architectural practice, I worked a lot with listed buildings. And that's kind of where my interest in architectural heritage kind of began, but from my point of view of professional practice, so not just why we work with listed buildings, but how we engage with them. 

Julian: Right.  

Johnathan: So my, my research in broad terms is looking to kind of unpack that a bit and look at kind of more contemporary scholarly literature in terms of the approach to dealing with list of buildings, how we address them, how we appraise them, assess them, how we say - this building is a listed building and this building is not - where's the line? 

Julian: Right. So you’re interested in research in the actual listing process in the sense of where certain things become deemed valuable enough to be listed and others aren't? Is that something that you're looking into? 

Johnathan: Yeah, that's it. I mean, the way that the listing process works at the minute do you want me to go into that at all?  

Julian: Oh, yeah. Look, I'm fascinated by it myself. So I’m sure our listeners hopefully will be. 

Johnathan: Yeah. So well, you've, a listed building is protected by law. So there's, uh, enhanced protection for buildings that are listed. And it's split into three tiers. Broadly speaking in England, we've got Grade 2 listed buildings. So like the CIS tower in Manchester, you got 2-star listed buildings. An example of that would be London Road fire station.  

Julian: One of my favourite buildings.  

Johnathan: Yeah. I'm currently doing work on that actually.  

Julian: There’s a big controversy, a long running controversy. A long-running campaign to- 

Johnathan: Yeah, yeah,  

Julian: -aim to try and maintain that because it was owned by Britannia Hotels, I believe, wasn't it for a very long time. 

Johnathan: That’s it, and with it being 2-star, they only account for about 6% of listed buildings, quite rare. So that's why they tend to get a bit more attention. And then at the top, you've got Grade 1 listed about 2% two and a half percent of entire listed buildings, so not that many. So Manchester Town Hall, 

Julian: Right  

Johnathan: You know, big public buildings are often your big Grade 1 listed buildings, Harris Museum in Preston. But all that is kind of in this overarching Act of Parliament that talks about architectural in historic interest. 

Julian: Importance, I guess.  

Johnathan: Yeah, yeah. But this idea of architectural and historic is all very, you know, it's very tangible. It's very concrete. It's about the building fabric specifically.  

Julian: So take the fire station, in Piccadilly it would be because of its its sculptures, I mean, over, you know the ports goes over the doors and my architectural work terminology might be a bit off there. But in terms of you know, that was the fire station in its grand isn't it in the in the, in the sort of very Victorian sort of sense? 

Johnathan: Yeah, absolutely.  

Julian: So that's the very tangible element. You can see why it should be in terms of maybe some of the design and the architecture as a physical thing.  

Julian: Yeah, that's it. So because that's coming kind of from the top, shall we say from from that kind of parliamentary Act these ideas of tangible interest, that kind of trickles down into how we list things and how we choose what should be on the list and what shouldn't be on the list. And so historically, we base the listing system on those preferences. 

Julian: Right. 

Johnathan: And that's kind of how how you operate as a professional because that's, that's what dictates as a conservation architect. What buildings you work with the you work with listed buildings. So it's quite interesting. If that model was to shift, then you would shift and change the very essence of what it means to be a conservation architect. And that's that's what I'm looking at, because I'm seeing in the literature and in guidance, particularly historic England's guidance that's kind of been trickling away in the background for some time now, this idea of a more intangible approach to heritage and they call it social value or communal value. 

Julian: Right.  

Johnathan: So it’s- 

Julian: This is your focus is it, on intangible heritage?  

Johnathan: Yeah, so this is where the kind of the research is, I’m starting to narrow it down for you a little bit. 

Julian: No that’s good. 

Johnathan: I'm giving you a little bit of an insight as to where it's going but by its very nature intangible heritage is hard to pin down it's intangible is intangible, its temporal, it's kind of evanescent because it's based on people and cultures and what you deem to be representative of you. If your community, your society, and your ideas and interpretations of that would be very different to say, my ideas, or maybe they wouldn't be maybe we might agree on some things. But as you move from that kind of objective, tangible notion of what heritage is, through into this more intangible idea, it starts to get very subjective very quickly, and you start to realise that this is a bit of a can of worms because it makes life very complicated in in the heritage sector, there's no universal model to apply to all these buildings. Now we've got to kind of take into account subjective notions from specific community groups and specific people.  

Julian: So with the listing process, there are kind of a set tangible criteria then for what would make something you know should be listed.  

Jonathan: Yeah. 

Julian: And what you're saying is that there's almost like a set of an a non-list of criteria that seems. And is this a new phenomenon? Is this something that's coming into the listing process? Or has this always been something that's been part of the listing process? And you're kind of unearthing it now? 

Johnathan: It's a bit of both. There's a lot of contradictory kind of policy and the parliamentary Act, governmental advice, guidance, it's all a bit messed up in a way. Like I say you got the parliamentary Act, which is architectural and historic values that it concentrates on but then the National Planning Policy Framework, which sits underneath that since 2012, that's been talking about ideas relating to enhancing community benefit. So I guess you could say conserving buildings for future generations and for the enjoyment of people. So it's kind of adding that more people focus to it, rather than just saying conserve a building because it should be. 

Julian: Because it looks good. 

Johnathan: Because it looks good. Yeah. You say well, conserve it so people can enjoy it and that’s the National Planning Policy Framework, so that's yeah, 2012 but prior to that 2008 we had the conservation principles document from Historic England, and that sets out both tangible and intangible values and what they are. So yeah, tangible would be aesthetic, historic, architectural, intangible, is more social value. So things like spirituality, symbolism identity, you know, how you draw your sense of identity from a building, and to kind of bring it full circle back to the research. That's partly what I'm interested in. I'm interested in how building adaptation specifically of listed buildings impacts those intangible values. So if we modify a building, yeah, London Road fire station. 

Julian: Yeah, we seem to be talking about that one.  

Johnathan: Yeah. If you modify that, how does that impact the intangible values associated to that building? Is it is it a sliding scale? You know, does the the more we intervene with that building increase the impact on these intangible values or are they completely separate? Could you completely demolish a building and those intangible values still remain intact? Could be memory, you know memory is an intangible value just because you demolish a building doesn't mean you demolish your memories at the same time.  

Julian: Where's the line?  

Johnathan: Where's the line?  

Julian: So if you take a sort of famous landmarks and folly or something in the countryside, everybody knows it's up there on a hill, and then somebody buys it for their private use and wants to stick a contemporary extension on it. That would be that sort of dilemma what how far did the identity of the place kind of be undermined by those adaptations, as you say. 

Johnathan: Yeah, and it's not just the the identity of the place, either. It's the identity of the people who live there. So the people who would identify that folly as being representative of their culture. So in a weird kind of way, you need to identify who those people are first before you can start actually understanding what that building means to them.  

Julian: So Best of luck, Jonathan, for the future. I'm sure it's going to be absolutely fantastic. And thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.  

Johnathan: Thank you very much. Take care.  

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Julian: And that brings us to the end of our Modernist Architecture Rah podcast, thank you very much for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates you can find us @mmu_rah. For more information on the research and events we discussed in the episode, please make sure you go to the Rah website for the full links. Until next time, goodbye. 

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Julian: This episode of the podcast was produced by Lucy Simpson, edited by Ben Stott and mixed and presented by me, Julian Holloway.