Research in architecture and urban studies at Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s: what really happened

There has been much recent historical interest in the research that went on in Cambridge (England) from the mid-1960s at the centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies (LUBFS), with articles published by the historians Mary Louise Lobsinger and Sean Keller.1 1. See Mary Louise Lobsinger, ‘Two Cambridges: Models, Methods, Systems, and Expertise’, in, Arindam Dutta, ed., A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2013), pp. 651–685 (the ‘second Cambridge’ here is, of course, Cambridge, Massachusetts); Sean Keller, ‘Fenland Tech: Architectural Science in Postwar Cambridge’, Grey Room, 23 (Spring, 2006), pp. 40–65. (The word ‘Tech’ here does not refer to information technology, but to a visitor’s flippant suggestion in 1961 that the hallowed university, given its growing engineering and mathematical focus, should be reclassified as a technical college.) There is a third account of LUBFS: Altino Joao Magalhaes Rocha, Architecture Theory 1960–1980: Emergence of a Computational Perspective (PhD dissertation, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004). This paints a very interesting picture of the immediate post-War state of British architecture and building research, which created the context for the research at Cambridge. It also describes the influence on Leslie Martin of his friend the scientist J. D. Bernal. In general, the description of LUBFS and its philosophy is more reliable than those of Keller and Lobsinger, in part no doubt because Bill Mitchell, who was closely involved with the Cambridge work in the 1970s, was on Rocha’s doctoral committee. all notes Leslie Martin, former chief architect of the London County Council, became Head of the Cambridge Department of Architecture in 1956. He and Lionel March set up the centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies in 1967. There had been research in building science and architectural history going on at Cambridge before that, but the programme of LUBFS was of a different kind and on a different scale. The centre grew fast and by 1973 had some 18 researchers and an equal number of PhD students. studied architecture at Cambridge from 1960 to 1965 and went immediately into research, working under Martin on university planning. I joined LUBFS on its foundation. In 1974 LUBFS was absorbed, with some other activities, into the Martin Centre, of which I became assistant director. I also became a director of Applied Research of Cambridge (ARC), a commercial company spun off from LUBFS. It is, I suppose, one of the minor penalties of a long life: but I have been surprised to find myself becoming a part of history, and being approached for reminiscences by a series of oral historians (including Lobsinger). One compensatory benefit, however, is that it is still possible for me to write in response to these historical accounts as someone who actually participated in the events in question.