Category Archives: Posts … words

Segal 67: Walter Segal – William Morris – Colin Ward

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Quinlan Terry addresses the Regency Society

Quinlan Terry has now given the Annual Anthony Dale Lecture to The Regency Society of Brighton & Hove for 2016.

I was reminded of my review in the Architects’ Journal of almost exactly the same lecture (but without carps at Hadid et al) thirty years ago when he delivered it at the RIBA.

But in this scrap I’ve just found here, only a quarter of a century ago, I was talking about his charming Riverside development in Richmond:

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Segal part 66: Assembling Segal at the AA

assemble-segal tweeFinal preparations for the Walter Segal exhibition at the Architectural Association which opened with a packed party last night. In the foreground, a “Segal” pavilion by Assemble – winners of the latest Turner Prize – which now replaces the ‘temporary little house’ Segal built in his Highgate garden.

Beyond the model, to the left, are John Frazer and his wife, who built an interactive computer model of Segal’s system in 1980s to aid clients in designing themselves; to the right of the column are Jon Broome, Segal’s partner and successor with self-build; Nicholas Taylor, author of The Village in the City and, as Lewisham housing chair, the key enabler of the Segal method being taken up by a public housing authority; and John Segal, the architect’s son (seen again below portrait of Walter Segal by his father, Arthur Segal).

Five minutes after this picture was taken, there was barely room to move.

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Segal, part 65 : Architecture Today – Open Agenda around Walter Segal and others

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(This is published today, 11 January 2016, in Architecture Today and is not yet on their website. Scroll down for previous post on Walter Segal, exhibition, and links to texts)

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Segal, part 64: Walter Segal exhibition and debate

A Walter Segal exhibition is at The Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square London, from 16th January until 13th February – more details here.

I have only just learned the details myself, from this tweet.Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 23.37.41

As part of that event, there is a panel discussion on Walter Segal and the Future of Self-Build, with Jon Broome (Segal’s collaborator years ago, and today a leading exemplar of timber-frame, self-build and low-energy buildings), Charlie Luxton (architect well known from regular television appearances) and Alice Graham (exhibition promoter, journalist and inhabitant of a Segal-Broome house at Walter’s Way).

It will be at the Architectural Association on 26th January at 6.00 pm.

I have written much about Walter Segal, including but not only his pioneering of self-built timber-frame affordable houses for those on local authory lists as being in housing need.

The only book on Segal is my Learning from Segal (Birkhaueser, 1989) now long out of print.  But various other writings on Segal are now available here.

Walter Segal photographed by John McKean

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Segal, part 63 : Walter Segal Open Houses 2015

The Open Houses Walter Segal Day on Saturday, 19 September 2015,  was great fun

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(The Architects’ Journal issue on Segal with my photograph of his shadow on its cover)

Alice Grahame has got a great website started at http://www.waltersegal.org

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Segal, part 62 : Walter Segal will be back soon

Currently there is simply a cupboard not properly cleared out and sorted on this website of Walter Segal stuff here.

However, impetus is returning and soon I hope it will be stacked with loads of accessible goodies.

Meanwhile, anyone further interested – not least interested in the developing notion of using crowd funding to produce a much revised and updated version of my book on Segal which is over 25 years old – do please get in touch by email (click on ‘do contact John’ in menu on the left). Thanks to all who have already been in touch.

 

 

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Zoom….

Currently everything zooms – and by currently, well OK maybe it’s just that the hands on the clock spin ever faster the older you get, and I find that difficult to accept.

Anyway, I plan to return here one day… soon?  Meanwhile Cognoscenti seems to fill it all, and my blogs seen here offer glancing record of how these months speed by, planning tours, leading tours, preparing tours.

No sooner was our Edge of Empire tour successfully run for the first time last month but we were off researching and outlining our The World Piero Knew (at another, smaller, three way edge – for his home town was and is at the junction of the Marche, Toscana and Umbria), and now having stopped for a couple of breaths, this week we are off west into the Veneto foothills to put last details in place for our Terraferma tour.  Then August is free and empty – to be filled with everything left over for the past half year – before our Renaissance City tour goes south to Ferrara and Cesena and Rimini and Urbino in September. (And that publicity in May – below – was really generous of Dennis Aubrey – the creator, with his partner, of the beautifilled and thoughtfilled Via Lucis website.  Thank you.).

Excuse the rush.  Speak to you later.

Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 21.52.59

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Adding a new tour

We are off to Padova tomorrow to finalise details of our new tour to the west and north of Venice…

For a new vision of a tour, what about this – “the knight’s tour” ; is it not a most wonderful image:

Knight's_tour.svg

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Great art and great architecture: a symbiosis

On April 1st, Keys to a passion, a landmark exhibition opened at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.  We were the first people in as the doors opened at 10.00, that bitingly cold morning.

‘The world’s greatest architecture reflecting the world’s greatest art’ – they say; not advertising handbags but promoting their wildly hyped and discussed new building by Frank Gehry in the Bois de Boulogne.

Two images,  taken that morning, perhaps illustrate that motto to perfection.

Fondation Louis Vuitton 1 April 2015 - a

Fondation Louis Vuitton 1 April 2015 – a

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Fondation Louis Vuitton 1 April 2015 – b

 

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