Barnabas Calder

If you'd be interested in doing a (potentially funded) PhD project on the architectural, urban and environmental history of @livuni , please get in touch. Or do spread the word to others who might be. And sorry to soundtrack a Liverpool pic with the Beatles. 🫣 #architecturalhistory #urbanhistory #environmentalhistory #phdopportunity

🔥 Book Launch of 'Form Follows Fuel' 🔥at the Bartlett, with Florian Urban and Barnabas Calder. Architecture through the lens of embodied energy – 14 case studies across geographical contexts, construction period, political and social paradigms. Drawings and calculations by Joseph Burns @john_joseph_burns Florian Urban is Professor of Architectural History, and Head of History of Architectural and Urban Studies at Glasgow School of Art @glasgowschoolart . He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Berlin, an MA in Urban Planning from UCLA and a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from MIT. He was born and raised in Munich and spent most of his adult life in Berlin before moving to Glasgow in 2010. Before joining the Mackintosh School of Architecture he taught at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin TU and worked for the German Federal Institute for Research on Construction, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR). Since 2009 he has been the Book Reviews Editor-in-Chief for the journal @planningperspectives . He is the Secretary of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) @eahn_org Barnabas Calder is head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster at the University of Liverpool @livuniarch - the largest architectural history research grouping in the UK. Barnabas's research focuses on the relationship between energy and human culture throughout history. He also works on British architecture since 1945. Barnabas is working on a complete works of Denys Lasdun, funded by the Graham Foundation and in collaboration with the RIBA British Architectural Library Special Collections. Professor Adrian Forty wrote of Calder's book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (William Heinemann, 2016), 'like Ruskin, the intensity of his observation can be startling. Calder has looked longer and harder at the buildings he writes about than most other people, and this makes for compelling reading.' The session was chaired by Edward Denison, and is co-hosted by Architecture MSci @bartlettmsci , MAHUE and Cluster 4 (MAAH @bartlettarchitecturalhistory , Space Syntax @space_syntax , Situated Practice @uclsitprac ).

There are times when a loft extension detrimentally alters the architectural effect of the facade. Not this one, though. The subdued palette makes it blend in with the sky and allows the original building its full impact.

Florian and I have this newly out in AJ. Do have a read if you're interested and have access to it. If you don't have access, the punchline is that it's still worth counting carbon, but counting embodied energy is a more powerful (and easier) tool for understanding how much real improvement there is in how we're building.

St Agnes and St Pancras Toxteth Park. Open today for #heritageopendays. An interesting enough brick church from outside, inside it unfolds into the Victorian church restorer and architect John Loughborough Pearson playing with all his gothic preoccupations. The organ loft is a shrine base, the corbels in the transept are all different as if they were spolia, the vaults meet jaggedly in the English fashion rather than resolving like French ones, the sanctuary floors are reminiscent of Cosmati, and there are seven sanctuary lamps and a whiff of incense hanging in the air. I even enjoyed the gentle Anglican clutter of the catering, filing cabinet and retrofitted heating. For years after a medieval architecture MA I resented Pearson for removing the last medieval stonework from the outside of Westminster Abbey and replacing it with something arbitrarily different. Today I feel it's time I moved on. A very happy visit.

Florian Urban and I have a new book out shortly, with superb drawings and calculations by @john_joseph_burns . Launches in Edinburgh (24 Sept) and Glasgow (25 Sept). Available online in the usual places for £35.99/€39.50/USD39.50. It's really good - Florian has done some heroic digging for amazing historical data, and John and Florian have crunched a huge amount of numbers to get the best figures we could.

On our lovely family holiday in the Lake District last week we walked through a fine oak wood near Seatoller. I was saddened to see significant numbers of dead and seriously ill oaks on the east-facing slope. Those on the north slope seemed much happier. An article by the Woodland Trust (thanks to The Past And Other Places over on BlueSky for sending me the link) indicates that bouts of unexplained oak dieback have happened periodically over the centuries, but raises a likely link to heat and drought caused by climate change. Certainly to me it felt like a horrible glimpse into the near future, with a landscape so carefully preserved from direct human interventions suffering heavily from the wider human impacts of global carbon emissions. I dreamed about it repeatedly over the following nights.

If you have the money and vision, please buy and restore the Bernat Klein Studio, Galashiels. It's for auction by Savilles, guide price £18,000. It would make an absolutely stunning writer's retreat, holiday home or Air BnB. @landmarktrust - one for you guys?

Do you think this kind of column-stuffer is produced by an AI kneejerk LLM, or are humans still involved? Keep ranting at long-dead architects, right-wing press. It is, after all, a great deal comfier than facing up to the realities of the ecological devastation wrought by today's architecture.

The wonderful @john_joseph_burns at @royal_scottish_academy with the drawings he's done for Florian Urban's and my next book, on historic #embodiedenergy in #architecture. These aren't just illustrations, they're at the heart of the research, providing the quantities of materials from which Florian then calculated embodied energy, using the latest research on historic material production. The book comes out in September, but meanwhile if you can get to the RSA you can see John's wonderful images in advance. It was a complete joy working with him.

ON SALE NOW! Provision, Architecture of the Post-war Consensus by Robert Clayton (Official launch March 27th in association with the Twentieth Century Society) Brand new 320 page photo book with 162 images a monograph and architecture book with a difference! With written contributions from Catherine Croft @C20Society , @owenthomashatherley and @barnabascalder Available to buy now at: £45 “Provision - Architecture of the Post-War Consensus” is a collection of beautiful, carefully observed colour images that present buildings in their best possible light, perhaps how they might have been first viewed on completion, when a bold new vision of modernity was being rapidly created in the post-war era. The architecture provided housing, education, leisure, health benefits in parallel with shared prosperity for all. Examining this architectural revolution, Clayton reminds us that a different, more equal, era did exist when the built environment attempted to provide for us all and even attempted Utopia. Catherine Croft, Director C20 Society, “Pure geometry, perfect symmetry, crisp lines, blue skies, awe-inspiring angles. These are expansive images which draw us into a sense of unfolding possibility, of joy and energy” John Grindrod, author ‘Concretopia’, “The beloved icons, the brutalist landmarks and the forgotten concrete gems, Robert Clayton has captured the epic sweep of British post-war architecture through his immaculate lens. A delight for fans of modernist utopias and twentieth century design.” #brutalism #modernism #photobook #mid-century #midcenturyarchitecture #post-war #modernity #Provision #Architecture #utopia

I'm speaking at this, along with a fantastically interesting group of speakers (two of us from @livuni ). You can come to it digitally or in person. Spoiler alert: I'll be arguing essentially that the foreground of the poster image has more to teach us about #sustainablearchitecture than the back.