I wrote this essay earlier this year as a contribution to a celebration of the life and work of Peter Blundell Jones (PBJ).
I last saw PBJ at 3.32pm (or thereabouts) on Monday, 1 February 2016 at Park Hill in Sheffield. We were both at an RIBA ‘thing’ and were taken around a tour of the refurbished flats and proposed art space. He was his usual self with his man-bag slung over his shoulder, ruffled hair, wry half-smile, and twinkle in his eye. He had just written a reference for my latest unsuccessful bid for project funding and said some unrepeatably nice things to me about my PhD which I had finished four years earlier under his supervision at Sheffield University. Spending some normal time with him that day, talking about architecture and stuff, was what made it memorable for me and I was shocked to hear of his premature passing a few months later.
This essay is a personal reflection on PBJ and is as much about me as it is about him because I only really knew him through my PhD, which I did quite late in life. I didn’t know him when I did my BA at Sheffield – he arrived the academic year immediately after I graduated in 1994. And our paths didn’t cross when I returned in the early 2000s to complete my Part 2. So when I approached him at the 2007 architecture show, which was being held at the old Law School on Conduit Road where the School of Architecture was about to be decanted while the Arts Tower was being refurbished, he was very unsure about me. I had no funding (story of my life) and for him I must have appeared as just another wannabe PhD student escaping practice that he had to try and cope with. I still remember his resigned ‘oh, alright then’, which was in effect my acceptance letter. I had become disillusioned with practice and fascinated with the media’s influence on architecture – Colomina’s exhibition Clip Stamp Fold had just been launched, and I had been blogging for a while about problems in the profession while doing my Part 3. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to research, other than this intersection of media and architecture. I was looking for a research topic somewhere between Andrew Higgott’s Mediating Modernism, which had just been published, and the energy of Clip Stamp Fold. PBJ had written a review of Higgott’s book where he wrote that ‘each chapter could grow into a book’ and so early on suggested I took one of Higgott’s chapters to expand into my PhD. Archigram and the Architectural Review (AR) had been studied many times (I was particularly impressed with Erdem Erten’s PhD, one of the few recent studies on an architecture magazine I could find) so I decided to look at AD instead – covered in a mere 14 pages in Higgott’s book and also included in Clip Stamp Fold during its ‘little’ years (Higgott ended up being the external examiner for my PhD).
It turned out that PBJ and I had more in common than I originally imagined. I think I had known that he had done some journalism, but hadn’t really appreciated the extent of his involvement at the AR. But our entry points into writing for th1e architecture press were completely independent and my involvement had already started before I met PBJ. The abovementioned blog became quite popular, and the editor of the Architects’ Journal, Kieran Long, invited me to write a column about the research I was doing. This was a terrific opportunity not only to earn a little money (did I mention I didn’t get funding?) and get some exposure for my research, but also to spend time in Sheffield University Library’s stacks amongst their excellent collection of architecture magazines. The smell of the stacks is something else. I got literally and figuratively lost for hours in the miles of underground shelves of bounded volumes from the early 19th century to the present day, and from all over the world. This opportunity forced me to learn how to distil and communicate a key idea in 300 words every two weeks. I randomly selected a volume and page and it wouldn’t be long before I was following an interesting trail. It was fantastic discipline and I learned so much about a whole range of architecture magazines throughout history, as well as teaching myself some architecture history in the process which I then was almost completely ignorant of, and to be honest, had little interest in when I started. I was an architect, interested in buildings with a desire to get to the bottom of why my profession was the way it was and a suspicion that the media was more influential and instrumental than people were aware. I started writing regularly for various architecture magazines, learning how the architecture media – the very subject of my PhD – worked from the inside. When Kieran became editor of the AR, he also invited me to write longer pieces there too, and I will be forever grateful to him for his belief in me at that early stage (later, when I’d just finished the PhD, he invited me to contribute an exhibit to the 13th Venice Architectural Biennale on architecture magazines and when I told PBJ about this unbelievable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he just said, very nonplussed, ‘yes, that’s a good idea’ as if I had just got up that morning and decided it might be something worth doing while having my toast). So PBJ and I bonded over our involvement with writing for magazines. He enjoyed telling me what it used to be like and understood perfectly how much power the press had. He won the International Building Press’s Architectural Journalist of the Year in 1992, an award that I could only come runner-up in twenty years later.
Supervisions with PBJ could be quite frustrating. We kind of communicated through the press – he would comment on my latest column and then go on to talk about something it reminded him of, or whatever was on his mind at the time, some of which was occasionally related to my interests. They were often lectures with an audience of one where he tested out chapters of his last book, Architecture and Ritual. However, the odd comment could send me on a completely new thought trajectory which would permanently change my worldview. For example, he made me realise how nothing is natural, but how everything is a construct or a representation, whether social or technical. This was foundational for my PhD methodology.
He loved buildings and would never write about one he hadn’t seen, or at least he’d acknowledge that he hadn’t visited it if he did talk about it. The personal reaction to the IRL experience of a building was very much his approach and if you read his criticism or listen to one of his lectures, he talks about the ‘promenade architecturale’ or route through a building, as well as its planning and layout and the experience of views and light and so on. Through writing and talking about buildings so much, PBJ very much understood the difference of the architecture (which, for him, meant the building and spaces around) and its mediation. Besides the written word, photography was a big part of this mediation. He was keen to use his own photographs for his books, and he forced another penny drop when he explained how not only the photography was a construct (obvious, right?!), but so was perspectival drawing, and even our very own vision (duh!). As well as loving buildings, he was also always fascinated with people – both the users and designers – and ever amused by the gossip and anecdotes about the architects behind the buildings, especially if celebrated. I went on to take this more seriously and the biographical approach has continued to be very much part of my approach to architecture history today.
He had no time for ‘starchitects’ and would always support the underdog, which explains his choice of subject with books on people like Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, and Peter Hübner, and advocacy of alternative histories and organic and participative architecture. He was always keen to discuss how the press was and is a very powerful king-maker and how foundational this machine was to the construction of myths (a word he was always at pains to point out meant ‘collective belief’ rather than ‘mistruth’) and ultimately architecture. By way of an experiment to see if he could elevate an ordinary ‘building’ to ‘architecture’, he got his own house that he had renovated at Padley Gorge in the Peak District, published in the AR and in the academic journal ARQ in 2001. It is a traditional mill with modern interventions and cosy corners – ‘cosy’ was not an insult for PBJ. I took these discussions and applied the ideas to the role that magazines had in constructing architecture history and I remember the moment this light bulb pinged above my head. We had coincidentally attended something at the AA and walked back to St Pancras at an alarming rate – he knew exactly how long the walk would take. We sat next to each other on the train to Sheffield and I explained how the PhD was going, how the argument developing, and he just kept asking ‘which means that…’ questions until I couldn’t answer any more. I was planning on fudging that bit, but he just smiled and left me to figure out what it was really all about. He didn’t have the answer himself, but trusted that by asking the right probing questions, I would figure it out.
One thing we never agreed on was what architecture actually is or could be – besides the profession, PBJ insisted it to mean the physical construction of place and space and hated terms like ‘writing architecture’. ‘You write ABOUT architecture, you don’t “write architecture”!’ he would exclaim in frustration. This was his literalness peeping through again. I’m sure we’d agree that ‘architecture’ would mean the bigger field of discourse, the profession and so on, but to call the actual writing, drawing, or photograph ‘architecture’ was too big a leap for him. This has become quite accepted now, and I still imagine him frothing at the mouth when I come across the expression or idea.
It is fair to say that PBJ was not a fan of theory. His books and articles do not contain any theoretical basis or methodological struggles. His writing is straightforward: descriptive, factual, analytical, outlining a personal encounter and locating it in history and context. When I started my PhD, I had no idea how to go about researching architecture magazines, and there was precious little previous work. Clip Stamp Fold was great fun, but little help in the way of methodology. I was left to essentially make it up and didn’t find any work on this until I discovered Hélène Janniere and France Vanlaethem’s seminal book once it was too late. PBJ’s advice was to ‘just get on with it’ by which I think he meant, read the magazines, and write what you think of them. One of the reasons I wanted to do the PhD in the first place was because I wanted to read the books that I’d always heard mentioned in lectures and other writings – books by Continental thinkers like Foucault and Tafuri. PBJ was reluctant to discuss these, however, although he came around to Bourdieu probably because it aligned with his belief in social constructs. I had been introduced to Bourdieu through Garry Stevens’s The Favored Circle which was the book that made scales fall from my eyes and want to research the sociological side of architecture in more depth. PBJ and I never discussed Bourdieu, but he embraced my ‘methodology’ chapter when I tentatively submitted it for his inspection (my wife – then a Senior Lecturer in the school, but on the social science rather than humanities side – told me a PhD should have a methodology and a literature review. I’ve since discovered that these are not so important in history – in fact sometimes frowned upon – but the year I spent making them up introduced me to the fascinating world of historiography and at least I now know the difference between metanarrative and micro-history). I suspect PBJ had become suspicious of ‘theory’ during its heyday of 1990s American discourse. I once sent him a call for papers that I thought sounded impressive and might be a good and relevant ‘thing to do’, asking if he thought I should submit an abstract and he simply replied, ‘what on earth are they on about?’ This puncturing of pompous preconceptions was simultaneously empowering – if somebody as respected and intelligent as PBJ could call it out as hot air, then it was ok to do so. I am less sceptical than PBJ of theory today, but still hear his voice in my head asking, ‘what on earth are they on about?’ He pretty much left me to ‘get on with it’ and I think enjoyed what I came back with from the stacks and archives. He often had personal experience and knew the people I was writing about, but the only direct interjection he made was to give me Monica Pidgeon’s phone number so I could request an interview with her. I had emailed her a couple of times, but I was not on her ‘trusted’ list so she had declined a meeting. However, as soon as I called and shouted down the phone that I was PBJ’s student, she was happy to meet me and I was the last person to interview her before she died later that year.
As a person, PBJ was always supportive, generous, and loyal. He always made time for me. We happened to be at a conference once, where of course, he knew everyone of importance, and everyone of importance knew him. Yet he chose to sit next to me, his unknown PhD student. A simple act of loyalty and friendship I will never forget. He seemed to have no hierarchy and treat everyone the same, which could be as annoying as it could be amazing. He would mark an undergraduate’s essay with the same strictness as a PhD student’s. He was fond of telling me that he was a lecturer at Cambridge when he was younger than I was then – as a matter of fact rather than one-upmanship – but equally, he urged me to apply for the editorship of the AR when it was advertised – it was beyond my comprehension that I could ever do such a job, but he just thought, ‘why not?’ And when he gave my wife – then an undergraduate – a piece of German text to read, and she explained she didn’t read German, his response was, ‘but it’s only simple German!’ Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this innocence of hierarchy, he loved to pop inflated egos and prick pomposity. He understood all too well how power worked in architecture and was always keen to point it out. This led to a tendency to be antagonistic, championing the real and the ordinary, as well as architects like Giancarlo de Carlo and Walter Segal, always looking for the non-conformist angle.
Like that line in ‘Withnail and I’ where Withnail (Richard E. Grant) explains to the farmer in the pouring rain that they’d ‘gone on holiday by mistake’, both PBJ and I became architecture historians ‘by mistake’: we both found more success in writing than we would have as practising architects (he more than me, of course). There’s an online recording of PBJ lecturing at the AA in 1997 on Scharoun and the Organic tradition where he introduces himself almost apologetically by saying that he had studied there himself and intended to be an architect but got side-tracked into academia and found more success as a writer. It’s completely typical that he’s quite self-effacing and rambling in the preamble, but when, at 4 minutes, the lights go out and the projectors start projecting, he explodes with enthusiasm into his subject matter. While he would disagree that we both ‘wrote architecture’, we would at least be united on the demise of printed magazines which we both love(d). As a response to this, I have set up a ‘MagSpace’ at the Newcastle University school of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, where I give a home to old architecture magazines that retired and expired architects donate. Chrissie Poulson, the art historian-turned-crime-writer and PBJ’s partner, kindly donated his considerable collection of architecture magazines to start off the collection and they are now installed as a learning resource that students can use to learn how architecture history is constructed.
